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Faust.
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Faust, which was first performed at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1846, the opinion was expressed that he ought to have been a chemist, not a musician--a remark that gives extraordinary point to a piece of advice that Berlioz once gave to artists in general:
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Always collect the stones that are thrown at you; they may help to build your monument. The remark that Berlioz ought to have been a chemist, originally intended as a sneer, is a perfect case in point. He _was_ a chemist, and it is his chief glory to have been that in the world of music. He tested, analysed, combined anew, and prodigiously enriched those elements of tone which are the material of the musical artist. Of course he was far more than chemist. He was also explorer, but always in search of material for his essentially chemical experiments in tone. One can scarcely wonder that
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Faust was a failure at first. Amongst the happy-go-lucky patchwork of the book is much evidence of that coarse and satirical vein which was so strong in the composer. How could the public be expected to approve of an opera on the subject of Faust that had no love-song or truly lyrical utterance of any kind for the tenor hero, but, on the other hand, had a song about a flea and a rat's requiem, ending with an
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Amen chorus in mock ecclesiastical style, to say nothing of a scene in Pandemonium and an _orgie infernale_? Berlioz was a sort of a belated mediæval. The very title,
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Damnation de Faust,