The various tours which Hector undertook in Germany brought him artistic honors and material successes of which in France he never dreamed. Among average audiences he discovered a seriousness and a degree of taste such as were limited to a few circles at home. He refashioned old musical friendships and cultivated new ones. Mendelssohn met him in Leipzig and the pair continued the old artistic discussions and arguments as they had years before in Rome. Felix “was charming, fascinating, ceaselessly obliging and determined to be a guarantee for his French colleague’s success”. The two exchanged batons to symbolize their professional amity. Felix praised some of Hector’s songs but avoided saying a word about his symphonies, overtures or the Requiem (actually, he detested them!) Berlioz saw Robert and Clara Schumann, the former appeared “wholly electrified by the Offertory of my Requiem”. The Schumanns were hospitality itself, even if Clara sometimes found the Frenchman “cold, indifferent, morose” and “not the kind of artist I like”. Robert, however, “feels a sympathy for him which I cannot explain”. Mendelssohn privately confessed that he felt like washing his hands after he had been through a Berlioz score. In Dresden there was Richard Wagner, whose “Rienzi” and “Flying Dutchman” Hector listened to with interest and who turned himself inside out to assist the extraordinary visitor in training orchestra and chorus for his concert in that city. One thing astonished Berlioz and grew to be something of a fly in the German ointment: that worship of Bach with which he was surrounded! “People do not believe that this divinity can ever be subjected to question”, he sighed. “Heresy on the subject is forbidden; Bach is Bach, just as God is God!”
On these travels, which went on intermittently for years, Hector visited not only Germany but also Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Russia. He went to Russia in 1847 and later. There he was greeted like a conqueror and more than any other nation that country proved, materially, a gold mine to him. A pity that the harsh climate of places like St. Petersburg was, in the end, to try him so sorely! For whenever he went there he was literally overwhelmed with honors, decorations, costly gifts. In short, whenever neglect or disappointment became unbearable he could turn to Russia for at least temporary alleviation.