D’amour l’ardente flamme from La Damnation de Faust

Berlioz was first fired by creative enthusiasm for Goethe’s Faust by way of Gérard de Nerval’s inspired French translation of Part One of the drama – which, he said, “made a strange and deep impression on me.” Within months of its publication in 1828 Berlioz completed his Huit Scènes de Faust which he published at his own expense as Op.1 and which, six months later, he withdrew from sale, realising perhaps that there was a much bigger and more consistently dramatic work to be made of the subject. Certainly, when he returned to the Faust theme in 1845 he incorporated those eight scenes into the monumental Damnation de Faust, a “dramatic legend in four parts” that was first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1846.

One of the original eight scenes, where it is entitled Romance de Marguerite, D’amour l’ardente flamme is Berlioz’s equivalent to Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, where the girl laments the loss of peace of mind occasioned by her all-consuming passion for Faust. In La Damnation de Faust it opens the fourth and last part where Faust has already abandoned her. She does not know at this point but it is clear, from the sadly melodious cor anglais solo that opens and closes the song and the breathlessly panic-stricken rhythms of the middle section, that she suspects it.