He presented himself three times at the Academy, and was beaten the
first time by Onslow, the second time by Clapisson, and the third time
he conquered by a majority of one vote against Panseron, Vogel, Leborne,
and others, including, as always, Gounod. He died before the _Damnation
de Faust_ was appreciated in France, although it was the most remarkable
musical composition France had produced. They hissed its performance?
Not at all; "they were merely indifferent"--it is Berlioz who tells us
this. It passed unnoticed. He died before he had seen _Les Troyens_
played in its entirety, though it was one of the noblest works of the
French lyric theatre that 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 _Mémoires_: "Since the
first performance of _Roméo et Juliette_ the indifference of the French
public for all that concerns art and literature has grown incredibly"