To IGNACE PLEYEL

CÔTE-SAINT-ANDRÉ, APRIL 6, 1819

Sir,

As I am anxious to have some musical works of my own composition published, I address myself to you in the hope that you may be able to accomplish my desire. My proposition is that you should undertake at your own risk the publication of a pot-pourri consisting of selected pieces arranged for flute, French horn, two violins, viola and violoncello.

See if you can manage this, and let me know how many copies you will give me. If the proposition suits you, pray let me know as soon as possible how long it will take you to print the work, and if it will be necessary to prepay the carriage of the MSS.

To RUDOLPH KREUTZER

(?) 1826.

Oh! Genius!

I succumb! I die! My tears suffocate me! La Mort d'Abel! Ye gods!

What an ignominious public! It feels nothing! What must be done to rouse it?

Oh, Genius! And what shall I do if one day my music depicts the passions? They will not understand me, seeing that they do not crown, or bear in triumph, or prostrate themselves before the author of all that is lovely!

To M. Humbert Ferrand, at Paris.

Côte-Saint-André, June 10, 1825.

My Dear Ferrand,

I am no sooner away from the capital than I feel an irresistible need of converse with you. I myself proposed that you should not write to me until a fortnight after my departure, so that I might not then have to remain for too long a time without news of you, but I am now going to ask you to write as soon as possible, because I hope that you will not be lazy enough to write merely once to me, and then to let me languish for two months, like the man of sorrow who, far from the rock of Hope, longed to go to Tortoni's for a vanille ice (Portier in. lib. Blousac, p. 32).

I have taken a somewhat wearisome trip to Tarare; there, having alighted to make the ascent on foot, I found myself, as it were in spite of myself, engaged in conversation with two youths who had a dilettante appearance, and, as such, were unapproachable so far as I was concerned. They began by informing me that they were on their way to Mount St. Bernard for the purpose of landscape painting, and that they were pupils of MM. Guérin and Gros.

Among the human race there are certain beings endowed with peculiar sensibility, upon whom nothing acts in the same manner or in the same degree as upon other people, and for whom the exception becomes the rule. With them, their natural peculiarities explain those pertaining to their lives, which in turn explain the peculiarity of their destiny. These, too, are the exceptions which lead the world, and this must inevitably be the case, because they are the persons who, by their struggles and sufferings, pay for the enlightenment and onward movement of the human race. When these leaders of intelligence lie dead upon the road they have opened up, the flock of Panurge rushes in, quite proud of bursting through the open gates; each individual sheep, with all the dignity of the fly on the coachwheel, boasts aloud of the honour of having brought about the triumph of revolution.

J'ai tant fait que nos gens sont enfin dans la plaine!

Berlioz, like Beethoven, was an illustrious victim of the mournful privilege of being an exception, and dearly did he pay for the heavy responsibility! The exceptions are doomed by fate to suffer, and to make others suffer also. How can the crowd (that profanum vulgus which Horace so cordially detested) be expected to recognise and confess itself incompetent before the diminutive audacity, purely personal, which has the hardihood to give the lie direct to inveterate habits and prevailing routine?

Somebody said of Berlioz, twenty years ago, “He has not achieved success, but he has gained glory.” He is now in a fair way to win both, and that is the reason why the materials for this book have been collected, and this notice has been written.

Glory and success at one and the same time! To unite these two desiderata, which as a rule go hand in hand, and, in the case under notice, were separated by the merest chance, Berlioz had only to do a very simple thing—a thing to which we are all exposed, a thing inevitable alike to the birds that fly in the air, the fish that swim in the waters, the flowers that turn their petals to the warm kisses of the sun, the beggar in his rags and the sovereign in his purple, a thing that we can neither find when we seek it, nor avoid when we seek it not—he had merely to die.

Berlioz, alive, suffered from all the inconveniences incidental to the state of living, and although, by reason of his frequent illnesses, he held out great hopes to those who were waiting for his disappearance, none the less did he occupy a certain position in the journalistic world, a chair at the Institut, a box at the theatre, breathing room of some kind. I do not allude to his musical prestige; some critics thought they had destroyed that for ever, or imagined that they thought so, for in reality, they were not very certain about it.

The life of Berlioz is only known to us through the Mémoires which he published during his life-time, not for the mere pleasure of writing a series of confessions, but to leave behind him an exact biographical notice which, by its recital of his struggles and his mortifications, might serve as a course of instruction to youthful composers. Consequently, while entering into the details of his artistic career, he avoided any confidential disclosures about his private life. He omitted the most interesting particulars, and even when he narrated certain episodes, he did it under every possible restriction, or presented them under a dramatic aspect which deprived them of their greatest charm, sincerity of expression. In many respects it would have been difficult for him to have acted otherwise. If it is permissible in an author to hide personal facts under the fiction of romance, there is always something painful in the spectacle of a man of talent abusing his celebrity by unfolding the intimate relations of his life to the public gaze, and scattering before him the contents of his secret drawer. Berlioz, therefore, only recounted what he could set down without injury to his dignity. But posterity is bound by less reserve, especially when such a life as this presents itself, brimful of exceptional agitation and the torments of a genius unfathomed and oppressed.