“Au Grand et cher auteur de Roméo et Juliette, l'auteur reconnaissant de Tristan et Isolde” – so reads the dedication on the copy of the full score of Tristan that Wagner sent to Berlioz, on 21 January 1860, accompanied by a brief and touching letter:

“I am delighted to be able to offer you the first copy of my Tristan,” writes Wagner, who urges Berlioz to accept the score “as a token of friendship.” Such attentiveness is a small indication, I think, that even as a mature composer nearing his forty-seventh birthday, Wagner continued to regard Berlioz, then fifty-six, as his senior and by no means conventionally benevolent colleague. In fact the gift was one of extraordinary generosity, both because this was indeed a first, and rare, pre-publication copy, sent by the publishers to Wagner only one week earlier, and because it was a costly item, whose list price of thirty-five thalers, or one hundred and forty-four francs, was equivalent at the time to the monthly income of many a professor, government functionary, or itinerant musician. What led Wagner to bestow such bounty upon Berlioz? And why, for Wagner, was the Frenchman still the “grand and dear author of Roméo et Juliette” – the now more than twenty-year-old dramatic symphony of 1839?