Hector Berlioz notable work La damnation de Faust
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.
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