had been composed since the death of
Gluck.[31] But there is no need to be astonished. To hear these works
to-day one must go to Germany. And although the dramatic work of Berlioz
has found its Bayreuth--thanks to Mottl, to Karlsruhe and Munich--and
the marvellous _Benvenuto Cellini_ has been played in twenty German
towns,[32] and regarded as a masterpiece by Weingartner and Richard
Strauss, what manager of a French theatre would think of producing such
works?

But this is not all. What was the bitterness of failure compared with
the great anguish of death? Berlioz saw all those he loved die one after
the other: his father, his mother, Henrietta Smithson, Marie Recio. Then
only his son Louis remained.

[Footnote 31: I shall content myself here with noting a fact, which I
shall deal with more fully in another essay at the end of this book: it
is the decline of musical taste in France--and, I rather think, in all
Europe--since 1835 or 1840. Berlioz says in his _Memoires_: "Since the
first performance of _Romeo et Juliette_ the indifference of the French
public for all that concerns art and literature has grown incredibly"
(_Memoires_, II, 263). Compare the shouts of excitement and the tears
that were drawn from the dilettanti of 1830 (_Memoires_, I, 81), at the
performances of Italian operas or Gluck's works, with the coldness of
the public between 1840 and 1870. A mantle of ice covered art then. How
much Berlioz must have suffered. In Germany the great romantic age was
dead. Only Wagner remained to give life to music; and he drained all
that was left in Europe of love and enthusiasm for music. Berlioz died
truly of asphyxia.]

[Footnote 32: Here is an official list of the towns where _Benvenuto_
has been played since 1879 (I am indebted for this information to M.
Victor Chapot, Berlioz's grandnephew). They are, in alphabetical order:
Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Dresden, Frankfort-On-Main,
Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Hamburg, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Mannheim,
Metz, Munich, Prague, Schwerin, Stettin, Strasburg, Stuttgart, Vienna,
and Weimar.]

He was the captain of a merchant vessel; a clever, good-hearted boy,
but restless and nervous, irresolute and unhappy, like his father. "He
has the misfortune to resemble me in everything," said Berlioz; "and we
love each other like a couple of twins."[33] "Ah, my poor Louis," he
wrote to him, "what should I do without you?" A few months afterwards he
learnt that Louis had died i