It is hard to grasp today that the first performance of the “Damnation of Faust” at the Paris Opéra Comique (December 6, 1846) was the most heart-breaking fiasco of Berlioz’ life. It was not a question of violent opposition (if only it had been!) but of abysmal, devastating indifference. Only a scattering of friends occupied the first rows of the Salle Favart, with further back a handful of cynical faces. Otherwise an inhuman emptiness sat enthroned in the gaping theatre (the comic journal, Charivari, sniggered that if the Song of the Rat went unnoticed it was because there was not so much as a cat in the house!). From the outset Berlioz knew himself ruined, materially and spiritually. It was less the few remaining francs saved on his travels which mattered than the irreparable hurt done the morale of the afflicted man. “Nothing in my artistic career wounded me more deeply than this unexpected indifference”, he was to write in his Memoirs—lapsing, for once, into pitiful understatement! Not till 1877 was “The Damnation of Faust” revived in Paris, by which time the composer had been dead eight years.
Although Berlioz recouped some of his financial losses from the “Faust” misadventure when he went to Russia the following year he was the plaything of destiny once again when, late in 1847, he accepted an invitation from Louis Antoine Jullien to go to London and conduct opera at the Drury Lane Theatre, of which Jullien was then the manager. This spectacular French adventurer and charlatan, who speculated ruinously, went to jail for debt and died in a lunatic asylum, failed shortly after Berlioz suffered himself to be inveigled into what he thought would be a six years’ engagement; and the composer, after giving a few concerts of his own music, found himself back in Paris by July, 1848. But England saw him again in 1851-52, when the New Philharmonic Society of London secured him as conductor, and in 1855 when he occupied the same post—not to mention a visit two years earlier when he was lured across the Channel to witness a Covent Garden representation of his first opera, “Benvenuto Cellini”. This turned out almost as distressingly as had, in Paris, “The Damnation of Faust”.