“Malvenuto Cellini”? How astonishing that the public dismissed Berlioz’s early opera Benvenuto Cellini with that contemptuous epithet. Luscious arias for the female roles, astonishing rhythmic innovations, a dramatic score that transcends a libretto that itself was the only reason the opera was ever written—Benvenuto Cellini has it all. How could Berlioz’s contemporaries not respond to this delightful work? In fact, the sorry reception of Benvenuto Cellini established a pattern that echoed throughout the unhappy career of this man who—as he wrote in his bitterly funny Mémoires—“had the imprudence to be born in a not very musical nation at a not very musical time.”

Berlioz recounts the origins of Benvenuto Cellini in his splendid Mémoires. He was thirty-one and earning his living as a musical journalist when he came across the autobiographical Vitaof the great Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith. “I had the misfortune,” Berlioz noted dryly, “to believe that [it] would make an interesting and dramatic subject for an opera.” Not surprising: Cellini’s themes of artistic struggle, the battle against corruption, and the consequences of passion were themes that resonated powerfully in Berlioz’s life. Berlioz asked his friends Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly to prepare a libretto for the Opéra Comique. They did. It was promptly rejected. The Paris Opéra later accepted an altered version. Nevertheless, things were not promising. The administrator of the Opéra, Charles-Edmond Duponchel, whom Heinrich Heine once described as “a yellow little man who looked like an undertaker,” viewed Berlioz’s