Читать книгу The Life of Hector Berlioz as Written by Himself in His Letters and Memoirs - Hector Berlioz - Страница 16

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Into the midst of this stormy student life of mine came the revelation of Weber, by means of a miserable, distorted version of Der Freyschütz, called Robin des Bois, which was performed at the Odéon. The orchestra was good, the chorus fair, the soloists simply appalling.

One wretched woman alone, Madame Pouilley, by the imperturbably wooden way in which she went through her part—even that glorious air in the second act—would have been enough to wreck the whole opera. Small wonder that it took me a long while to unearth all the beauty of its hidden treasures.

The first night it was received with hisses and laughter, the next the audience began to see something in the Huntsmen’s Chorus, and they let the rest pass. Then they rather fancied the Bridesmaid’s Chorus and Agatha’s Prayer, half of which was cut out. A glimmering notion that Max’s great aria was fairly dramatic followed; finally it burst upon them that the Wolf’s Glen scene was really quite comic; so all Paris rushed to see this misshapen horror, the Odéon got rich, and Castilblaze netted a hundred thousand francs for destroying a masterpiece.

Now I must own frankly that I was getting rather tired of high tragedy, in spite of my conservatism, and, chopped about as it was, the sweet wild savour of this woodland pastoral, its dainty grace and tender melancholy opened to me a new world of music.

I deserted the opera in favour of the Odéon, where I had the entrée to the orchestra, and soon knew Der Freyschütz (according to Castilblaze) by heart.

More than twenty years have passed since Weber himself passed through Paris for the first and last time. He was on his way to his London death-bed, and breathlessly I followed in his track, hoping and longing to meet him face to face.

One morning Lesueur said:

“Why were you not here five minutes sooner? Weber has been playing our French scores by heart to me.”

A few hours later in a music shop—

“Whom do you think we had here just now? Why, Weber!”

At the Odéon people were saying:

“Weber has just gone by. He is up in one of the boxes.”

It was maddening—I, alone, never saw him. Unlike Shakespeare’s apparitions, he was visible to all but one.

Too obscure to dare to write, without a friend who could introduce me, he passed out of my world.

Ah, why do not the thrice-gifted ones of this world know of the passionate love and devotion their works inspire! If they could but divine the suppressed admiration of a few faithful hearts! Would they not gladly gather these chosen disciples about them to become a bulwark against the shafts of envy, hatred, malice, and luke-warm tolerance of which a thoughtless world makes them the target!

Weber was justly angry when he found out how Castilblaze—veterinary surgeon of music—had butchered his beautiful work, and he published a complaint before leaving Paris. Castilblaze actually had the audacity to play the injured innocent, and to say that it was entirely owing to his adaptation that Freyschütz had succeeded at all!

The wretch!—--yet a poor sailor gets fifty lashes for the slightest insubordination.

Exactly the same thing had been done a few years earlier with Mozart’s Magic Flute. It had been botched into a ghastly pot-pourri by Lachnith—whom I hereby pillory with Castilblaze—and given as the Mysteries of Isis.

Thus mocked, travestied, deprived of a limb here, an eye there—twisted and maimed—these two men of genius were introduced to the French public.

How is it that they put up with these atrocities?

Mozart assassinated by Lachnith.

Weber by Castilblaze—who did the same for Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, and Beethoven.

Beethoven’s symphonies “corrected” by Fétis, by Kreutzer, and by Habeneck (of this I have more to say).

Molière and Corneille chopped up by Théâtre Français demons.

Shakespeare “arranged” for performance in England by Colley Cibber! The list is endless.

No, a thousand times no! No man living has a right to try and destroy the individuality of another, to force him to adopt a style not his own, and to give up his natural point of view. If a man be commonplace, let him remain so; if he be great—a choice spirit set above his fellows—then, in the name of all the gods, bow humbly before him, and let him stand erect and alone in his glory.

I know that Garrick improved Romeo and Juliet by putting his exquisite, pathetic ending in the place of Shakespeare’s; but who are the miscreants who doctored King Lear, Hamlet, The Tempest, Richard the Third?

That all comes from Garrick’s example. Every mean scribbler thinks he can give points to Shakespeare.

But to go back to music. At the last sacred concerts, after Kreutzer had experimentalised by making cuts in one Beethoven symphony, did not Habeneck follow suit by dropping out several instruments in another, and M. Costa, in London, try all sorts of weird conclusions with big drums, ophicleides, and trombones in Don Giovanni and Figaro? Well! if conductors lead the way, who can blame the small fry for following after?

But is not this the ruin of Art? Ought not we, who love and honour her, who are jealous for the prescriptive rights of human intellect, to hound down and annihilate the transgressor; to cry aloud:

“Thy crime is ridiculous. Thy stupidity beneath contempt. Despair and die! Be thou contemned, be thou derided, be thou accursed! Despair and die!!!”

My devotion to Gluck and Spontini at first somewhat blinded me to the glories of Mozart. Not only had I a prejudice against Italian, both language and singers, but in Don Giovanni the composer has written a passage that I call simply criminal. Doña Anna bewails her fate in a passage of heart-rending beauty and sorrow, then, right in the middle, after Forse un giorno comes an impossible piece of buffoonery that I would give my blood to wipe out.

This and other similar passages that I found in his compositions sent my admiration for Mozart down below zero. I felt I could not trust his dramatic instinct, and it was not until years later, when I found the original score of the Magic Flute instead of its travesty, the Mysteries of Isis, and made acquaintance with the marvellous beauty of his quartettes and quintettes, and some of his sonatas, that this Angelic Doctor took his due place in my mind.