Meyerbeer was the undisputed leader in the operatic world when Robert Schumann struck the first blow at his supremacy.  Schumann was ignorant of the stage, although he had made one unfortunate venture there.  He did not appreciate that there is more than one way to practise the art of music.  But he attacked Meyerbeer, violently, for his bad taste and Italian tendencies, entirely forgetting that when Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber did work for the stage they were strongly drawn towards Italian art.  Later, the Wagnerians wanted to oust Meyerbeer from the stage and make a place for themselves, and they got credit for some of Schumann’s harsh criticisms,—­this, too, despite the fact that at the beginning of the skirmish Schumann and the Wagnerians got along about as well as Ingres and Delacroix and their schools.  But they united against the common enemy and the French critics followed.  The critics entirely neglected Berlioz’s opinion, for, after opposing Meyerbeer for a long time, he admitted him among the gods and in his Traite d’Instrumentation awarded him the crown of immortality.

Parenthetically, if there is a surprising page in the history of music it is the persistent affectation of classing Berlioz and Wagner together.  They had nothing in common save their great love of art and their distrust of established forms.  Berlioz abhorred enharmonic modulations, dissonances resolved indefinitely one after another, continuous melody and all current practices of futuristic music.  He carried this so far that he claimed that he understood nothing in the prelude to Tristan, which was certainly a sincere claim since, almost simultaneously, he hailed the overture of Lohengrin, which is conceived in an entirely different manner, as a masterpiece.  He did not admit that the voice should be sacrificed and relegated to the rank of a simple unit of the orchestra.  Wagner, for his part, showed at his best an elegance and artistry of pen which may be searched for in vain in Berlioz’s work.  Berlioz opened to the orchestra the doors of a new world.  Wagner hurled himself into this unknown country and found numerous lands to till there.  But what dissimilarities there are in the styles of the two men!  In their methods of treating the orchestra and the voices, in their musical architectonics, and in their conception of opera!

In spite of the great worth of Les Troyens and Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz shone brightest in the concert hall; Wagner is primarily a man of the theater.  Berlioz showed clearly in Les Troyens his intention of approaching Gluck, while Wagner freely avowed his indebtedness to Weber, and particularly to the score of Euryanthe.  He might have added that he owed something to Marschner, but he never spoke of that.

The more we study the works of these two men of genius, the more we are impressed by the tremendous difference between them.  Their resemblance is simply one of those imaginary things which the critics too often mistake for a reality.  The critics once found local color in Rossini’s Semiramide!