The Scene

For an aspiring composer in early nineteenth-century France, a fully staged performance of a lyric work at Paris’s prime venue, the Académie Royale de Musique, was likely to result either in triumph or disaster. Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz’s first opportunity to conquer the house we know as the Opéra, turned out to be the latter. It was pronounced dead after only four nights. Evidence of foul play was offered by Berlioz himself, who insisted that he had been unfairly treated not only by Charles-Edmond Duponchel, the director, but also by members of the cast, including tenor Gilbert Duprez (who sang the title role), by the press, and by other antagonists largely generated by Berlioz’s acerbic critical writings. “Je marche à l’Opéra comme dans un nid de vipères […]”—“I am entering the Opéra as I would a nest of adders, thanks to two or three intimate enemies I have in the house,” Berlioz wrote to his sister Adèle in May 1838, two months after rehearsals had begun. Bracing himself for strong opposition to his novel and difficult musical style, as well as to perceived improprieties in the libretto, he added: “I believe it will be a stormy first night […] . If I have a success, it will be a violent and scandalous one, because of the argument and the satirical elements of the libretto.”

Did the failure of the work result from some kind of conspiracy, as Berlioz implies? Or was it the natural consequence of quite discrete, if related, features of musical life in Paris in 1838, some of which remain prevalent even today in the dynamics of the performance of new works? The testimony of Joseph d’Ortigue, author of De l’école musicale italienne et de l’administration de l’Académie Royale de Musique à l’occasion de l’opéra de M. H. Berlioz, and a most knowledgeable and sympathetic supporter of Berlioz, can help us to understand why the hypothesis of a “conspiracy” must be taken with a grain of salt, and must be dissected with care. For while it is clear that d’Ortigue believes that foul play was involved, he nevertheless gives us enough evidence to conclude that the protagonists in the affair acted predictably and without prior collusion in the string of events that eventually led to the opera’s demise.