Programme — La Spectre de la rose from Les Nuits d’été (1840), Élégie from Neuf mélodies irlandaises (1829)

Chant de bonheur from Lélio (1827-1831)

La Spectre de la rose from Les Nuits d’été (1840)

L’Île inconnue from Les Nuits d’été (1840-41)

Élégie from Neuf mélodies irlandaises (1829)

Composers have always hated wasting useful material. Even so, few have taken economy as far as Berlioz did in Lélio in 1831. Though presented as a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, it is made up entirely of material from earlier works and seems to have been designed primarily for that purpose. Whatever its faults as a large-scale structure, however, Lélio does have its individual successes. Chant de bonheur, the fourth of the six recycled items, is particularly interesting in that it realises the lyrical potential of a melody first used in a Prix de Rome cantata, La Mort d’Orphée, which was dismissed as unplayable by an uncomprehending jury in 1827. In the cantata the embryonic melody represents the enchantment of Orpheus’s lyre in purely instrumental terms. In Lélio Berlioz added words to it for a rapturous scene “under a blue sky studded with stars.” Introduced in the orchestral version by strings, the melody is elaborated by the voice to a harp accompaniment and echoed on woodwind at the end.

The two songs from Les Nuits d’été - the one a passionate expression of lasting devotion, the other a charming if cynical denial that such a thing exists - offer an effective contrast. Berlioz sets La Spectre de la rose almost as an operatic scena but, in the piano original at least, never overdramatises it. Without the imposing eight bars of introduction specially written for the orchestral version, the setting proceeds in a song-like manner up to the beginning of the second stanza. At that point the tempo quickens, the accompaniment becomes more animated and more expressive, and the voice rises to an ecstatic climax on the dominant. The third stanza, which begins with the same melody as the first, ends in inspired simplicity, the voice accompanied only by a parallel line in the pianist’s right hand. Gautier’s own title for the poem Berlioz set as L’Île inconnue was Barcarolle. Berlioz evidently preferred to draw attention to the poignant little exchange of opposing views on fidelity towards the end. The opening stanza, which returns in full in the middle and in part at the end, is as debonair as it is light-hearted. But, after the devastatingly innocent request of the young beauty, its conviction melts away.

“Finding open on my table the volume of Mélodies irlandaises by Thomas Moore,” wrote Berlioz in his Memoirs, “my eye fell on the one which begins with the words ‘Quand celui qui t’adore.’ I picked up my pen and in one go I wrote the music for the heart-breaking farewell found under the title Élégie at the end of my collection called Irlande… I think I have rarely been able to achieve such poignant melodic truth, steeped in such a storm of sinister harmonies.” He had set other poems from Moore’s Irish Melodies but in Thomas Gounet’s French verse translations. This one so moved him when he read it in a prose translation that he got to work on it as it was, without having it versified. The spontaneity of his inspiration - which is no less evident in the version revised for Irlande in 1849 than in the original version published in the Neuf mélodies irlandaises in 1830 - derives in part from the fact that the text is in prose, which discourages musical patterning and repetition and but requires dramatic immediacy instead. That is precisely what Moore’s elegy on the death of Robert Emmet, the Irish nationalist who was executed for his part in an uprising in 1803, is given in Berlioz’s extraordinary setting.