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1840s: Struggling composer

The Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, marking the tenth anniversary of the 1830 Revolution, was performed in the open air under the direction of the composer in July 1840. The following year the Opéra commissioned Berlioz to adapt Weber's Der Freischütz to meet the house's rigid requirements: he wrote recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue and orchestrated Weber's Invitation to the Dance to provide the obligatory ballet music. In the same year he completed settings of six poems by his friend Théophile Gautier, which formed the song cycle Les Nuits d'été (with piano accompaniment, later orchestrated). He also worked on a projected opera, La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun), to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, but made little progress. In November 1841 he began publishing a series of sixteen articles in the Revue et gazette musicale giving his views about orchestration; they were the basis of his Treatise on Instrumentation, published in 1843.

During the 1840s Berlioz spent much of his time making music outside France. He struggled to make money from his concerts in Paris, and learning of the large sums made by promoters from performances of his music in other countries, he resolved to try conducting abroad. He began in Brussels, giving two concerts in September 1842. An extensive German tour followed: in 1842 and 1843 he gave concerts in twelve German cities. His reception was enthusiastic. The German public was better disposed than the French to his innovative compositions, and his conducting was seen as highly impressive. During the tour he had enjoyable meetings with Mendelssohn and Schumann in Leipzig, Wagner in Dresden and Meyerbeer in Berlin.

By this time Berlioz's marriage was failing. Harriet resented his celebrity and her own eclipse, and as Raby puts it, "possessiveness turned to suspicion and jealousy as Berlioz became involved with the singer Marie Recio ". Harriet's health deteriorated, and she took to drinking heavily. Her suspicion about Recio was well founded: the latter became Berlioz's mistress in 1841 and accompanied him on his German tour.

Berlioz returned to Paris in mid-1843. During the following year he wrote two of his most popular short works, the overtures Le carnaval romain (reusing music from Benvenuto Cellini) and Le corsaire (originally called La tour de Nice). Towards the end of the year he and Harriet separated. Berlioz maintained two households: Harriet remained in Montmartre and he moved in with Recio at her flat in central Paris. His son Louis was sent to a boarding school in Rouen.

Foreign tours featured prominently in Berlioz's life during the 1840s and 1850s. Not only were they highly rewarding both artistically and financially, but he did not have to grapple with the administrative problems of promoting concerts in Paris. Macdonald comments:

The more he travelled the more bitter he became about conditions at home; yet though he contemplated settling abroad – in Dresden, for instance, and in London – he always went back to Paris.

Berlioz's major work from the decade was La Damnation de Faust. He presented it in Paris in December 1846, but it played to half-empty houses, despite excellent reviews, some from critics not usually well disposed to his music. The highly romantic subject was out of step with the times, and one sympathetic reviewer observed that there was an unbridgeable gap between the composer's conception of art and that of the Paris public. The failure of the piece left Berlioz heavily in debt; he restored his finances the following year with the first of two highly remunerative trips to Russia. His other foreign tours during the rest of the 1840s included Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Germany. After those came the first of his five visits to England; it lasted for more than seven months (November 1847 to July 1848). His reception in London was enthusiastic, but the visit was not a financial success because of mismanagement by his impresario, the conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien.

Soon after Berlioz's return to Paris in mid-September 1848, Harriet suffered a series of strokes, which left her almost paralysed. She needed constant nursing, which he paid for. When in Paris he visited her continually, sometimes twice a day.