XIV FAUST—CLEOPATRA

Again I relapsed into my habitual gloom and indolence. Like a dead invisible planet I circled round that radiant sun that alas! was doomed so soon to fade into mournful oblivion.

Estelle, star of my dawn, was eclipsed and lost in the noontide brilliance of her mighty rival—my overwhelming and glorious love.

Although I took care never to pass the theatre, never willingly to look at Othelia’s portraits in the shop windows, yet still I wrote—receiving never a sign in reply. My first letters frightened her, and she bade her maid take her no more.

The company was going to Holland, and its last nights were advertised. Still I kept away; to see her again was more than I could bear.

However, hearing that she was to act two scenes from Romeo and Juliet with Abbott, for the benefit of Huet, the actor, I had a sudden fancy to see my own name on a placard beside that of the great actress.

I might be successful under her very eyes!

Full of this childish notion I got permission from the manager and conductor of the Opéra Comique to add an overture of my own to the programme.

On going to rehearsal I found the English company just finishing; broken-hearted Romeo held Juliet in his arms. At sight of the group I gave a hoarse, despairing cry and wringing my hands wildly, I fled from the theatre. Juliet saw and heard me; terror-stricken she pointed me out to those around, begging them to beware of the gentleman with the wild eyes.

An hour later I went back to an empty theatre. The orchestra assembled and my overture was run through—like a sleep walker I listened, hearing nothing—when the performers applauded me I wondered vaguely whether Miss Smithson would like it too! Fool that I was!!

It seems impossible that I could, even then, have been so ignorant of the world as not to know that, be the overture what it may, at a benefit, no one in the audience listens. Still less the actors, who only arrive in time for their turns and trouble themselves not at all about the music.

My overture was well played, fairly received—but not encored—Miss Smithson heard nothing of it and left next day for Holland.

By a strange chance (I could never get her to believe it was chance) I had taken lodgings at 96 Rue de Richelieu, opposite her house. Worn out, half dead, I lay upon my bed until three the next afternoon; then, rising, I crawled wearily to the window.

Cruel Fate! At that very minute she came out and stepped into her carriage en route for Amsterdam.

Was ever misery like mine?

Oh God! my deadly, awful loneliness; my bleeding heart! Could I bear that leaden weight of anguish, that empty world; that hatred of life; that shuddering shrinking from impossible death?

Even Shakespeare has not described it; he simply counts it, in Hamlet, the cruellest burden left in life.

Could I bear more?

I ceased to write; my brain grew numb as my suffering increased. One power alone was left me—to suffer.

To Humbert Ferrand.

“Grenoble, Sept. 1828.

“Dear Friend,—I cannot go to you; come to me at La Côte! We will read Hamlet and Faust together, Shakespeare and Goethe! Silent friends who know all my misery, who alone can fathom my strange wild life. Come, do come! No one here understands the passion of genius. The sun blinds them, they think it mere extravagance. I have just written a ballad on the King of Thule, you shall have it to put in your Faust—if you have one.

“I am wretched. Do not be so cruel as not to come!”

“Paris, November 1828.[5]

“Forgive me for not writing sooner; I was so ill, so stupid, it was better to wait.

“La Fontaine might well say: ‘Absence is the greatest of ills.’ She is gone; this time to Bordeaux and I live no more; or rather I live too acutely, for I suffer, hourly, the agonies of death. I can hardly drag through my work.

“You know that I am appointed Superintendent of the Gymnase-Lyrique and have to choose or replace the players and to take care of instruments, parts and scores.

“Subscribers are coming in; so are malicious anonymous letters. Cherubini sits on the fence wondering whether to help or to hinder us, and we go calmly on.

“I have not seen Châteaubriand; he is in the country, but I will speak of your piece directly I do.”

“End of 1828.

“Do you know M. d’Eckstein, and can you give me an introduction to him? I hear that he is connected with a new and powerful paper,[6] in which Art is to be given prominence. If I am considered good enough, I should like to be musical correspondent. Help me if you can.”

Another landmark in my life was the reading of Goethe’s Faust; I could not lay it down, but read and read and read—at table, in the streets, in the theatres.

Although a prose translation, songs and rhymed pieces were scattered throughout, and these I set to music, then, without having heard a note of them, was crazy enough to have them engraved. A few copies, under the title of Eight Scenes from Faust were sold in Paris, and one fell into the hands of M. Marx, the great Berlin critic, who wrote most kindly to me about it. This unexpected encouragement from such a source gave me real pleasure, particularly as the writer did not dwell too much on my many and great faults. I know some of the ideas were good, since I afterwards used them for the Damnation de Faust, but I know, also, how hopelessly crude and badly written they were. As soon as I realised this, I collected and burnt all the copies I could lay hands on.

Under Goethe’s influence I wrote my Symphonie Fantastique—very slowly and laboriously in some parts, incredibly quickly and easily in others. The Scène aux Champs worried me for three weeks, over and over again I gave it up, but the Marche au Supplice was dashed off in a single night. Of course they were afterwards touched and retouched.

Bloc, being anxious that my new symphony should be heard, suggested that I should be allowed to give a concert at the Théâtre des Nouveautés.

The directors, attracted by the eccentricity of my work, agreed, and I invited eighty performers to help, in addition to Bloc’s orchestra. On my making enquiries about accommodation for such an army of executants the manager replied, with the calm assurance of ignorance:

“Oh, that’s all right. Our property man knows his business.” The day of rehearsal arrived, and so did my hundred and thirty musicians—with nowhere to put them!

I just managed to squeeze the violins into the orchestra, and then arose an uproar that would have driven a calmer man than myself out of his senses. Cries for chairs, desks, candles, strings, room for the drums, etc., etc. Scene shifters tore up and down improvising desks and seats, Bloc and I worked like sixty—but it was all useless; a regular rout; a passage of the Bérésina.

However Bloc insisted on trying two movements to give the directors some idea of the whole. So, all in a muddle, we struggled through the Ball Scene and the Marche au Supplice, the latter calling forth frantic applause.

But my concert never came off. The directors said that “they had no idea so many arrangements were necessary for a symphony.” Thus my hopes were dashed, and all for want of a few desks. Since then I always look into the smallest details for myself.

Wishing to console me for this disappointment, Girard, conductor of the Théâtre Italien, asked me to write something shorter than my unlucky symphony, that he could have carefully performed at his theatre.

I therefore wrote a dramatic fantasia with choruses on the Tempest, but no sooner did he see it than he said:

“This is too big for us; it must go to the opera.”

Without loss of time I interviewed M. Lubbert, director of the Royal Academy. To my relief and delight, he at once agreed to have it played at a concert for the Artists’ Benevolent Fund that was to take place shortly. My name was known to him through my Conservatoire concert, and he had seen notices of me in the papers. He, therefore, believed in me, put me through no humiliating examination, gave me his word, and kept it religiously.

All went splendidly at rehearsal; Fétis did his best for me, and everything seemed to smile, when, with my usual luck, an hour before the concert there broke over Paris the worst storm that had been known for fifty years. The streets were flooded and practically impassable, and during the first half of the concert, when my Tempest—damned tempest!—was being played, there were not more than three hundred people in the place.

Extracts from Letters to H. Ferrand.

“April 1829.—Here is Faust, dear friend. Could you, without stinting yourself, lend me another hundred francs to pay the printer? I would rather borrow from you than from anyone else; yet had you not offered, I should not have dared to ask. Your opera (Franc-Juges) is splendid. You are indeed a poet! That finale of the Bohemians at the end of the first act is a master stroke. I do not believe anything so original has ever been done in a libretto before. And I repeat, it is magnificent.”

“June.—No word from you for three months. Why is it? Does your father suppress our letters, or can it be that you, at last, believe the slanders you hear of me?

“I got a pupil, so have managed to pay the printer.

“I am very happy, life is charming—no pain, no despair, plenty of day dreams; to crown all, the Francs-Juges has been refused by the Opera Committee! They find it long and obscure, only the Bohemian scene pleases them; but Duval thinks it remarkable and says there is a future for it.

“I am going to make an opera like Freyschütz of it, and if I win the prize perhaps Spohr (who is not jealous, but is most helpful to young musicians) will let me try it at Cassel.

“No word have I had from you since I spoke of my hopeless love. Nothing more has happened. This passion will be my death; how often one hears that hope alone keeps love alive—am I not a living proof of the contrary?

“All the English papers ring with her praises; I am unknown! When I have written something great, something stupendous, I must go to London to have it performed. Oh for success!—success under her very eyes.

“I am writing a life of Beethoven for the Correspondant, and cannot find a minute for composition—the rest of my time I copy out parts. What a life!”

Once more came June, and with it my third attempt on the Prix de Rome. This time I really did hope, for not only had I gained a second prize, but I heard that the musical judges thought well of me.

Being over-confident I reasoned (falsely, as it turned out), “Since they have decided to give me the prize, I need not bother to write exactly in the style that suits them; I will compose a really artistic cantata.”

The subject was Cleopatra after Actium. Dying in convulsions, she invokes the spirits of the Pharaohs, demanding—criminal though she be—whether she dare claim a place beside them in their mighty tombs. It was a magnificent theme, and I had often pondered over Juliet’s—

which is, at least in terror of approaching death, analogous to the appeal of the Egyptian Queen.

I was fool enough to head my score with those very words—the unpardonable sin to my Voltairean judges—and wrote what seemed to me a weird and dramatic piece, well suited to the words. I afterwards used it, unchanged, for the Chorus of Shades in Lelio; I think it deserved the prize. But it did not get it. None of the compositions did. Rather than give it to a “young composer of such revolutionary tendencies” they withheld it altogether.

Next day I met Boïeldieu, who, on seeing me, said:

“My dear boy, what on earth possessed you? The prize was in your hand, and you simply threw it away.”

“But, monsieur, I really did my best.”

“That’s just it! Your best is the opposite of your good. How could I possibly approve? I, who like nice gentle music—cradle-music, one might say.”

“But, monsieur, could an Egyptian queen, passionate, remorseful, and despairing, die in mortal anguish of body and soul to the sound of cradle-music?”

“Oh, come! come! I know you have plenty of excuses, but they go for nothing. You might at least have written gracefully.”

“Gladiators could die gracefully, but not Cleopatra. She had not to die in public.”

“There! you will exaggerate so! No one expects her to dance a quadrille. Why need you introduce such odd, queer harmonies into that invocation? I am not well up in harmony, and I must own that those outlandish chords of yours are beyond me.”

I bit my lip, not daring to make the obvious reply:

“Is it my fault that you know no harmony?”

“And then,” he went on, “why do you introduce a totally new rhythm in your accompaniments? I never heard anything like it.”

“I did not understand, monsieur, that we were not to try new modes if we were fortunate enough to find the right place for them.”

“But, my dear good fellow, Madame Dabadie is a capital musician, yet one could see it took all her care and talent to get her through.”

“Really, monsieur, I have yet to learn that music can be sung without either talent or care.”

“Well, well! you will have the last word. But do be warned for next year. Come and see me and we will talk it over like French gentlemen.”

And, chuckling over the point he had made (for his last words were a quotation from his own Jean de Paris), he walked off.

Yes, Boïeldieu was right. The Parisians liked soothing music, even for the most dramatic and harrowing situations. Pretty, innocent, gentlemanly music, pleasant and making no demand upon one’s deepest feelings.

Later on they wanted something different, and now they do not know what they want, or rather they want nothing at all. Ah me! what was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant land of France?

Yet I love her whenever I can forget her idiotic politics. How gay she is, how dainty in wit, how bright in retort—how she boasts and swaggers and humbugs, royally and republicanly! I am not sure, though, that this last is amusing.