Zaïde

An innovator in so many ways, Berlioz was one of the first French composers to indulge himself in the Spanish musical idiom. In his orchestral song Zaïde - which was written for a concert in Vienna in 1845 - he was inspired by Roger de Beauvoir’s evocation of Granada to adopt the rhythms of the bolero and the colour of castanets, neither of which was a familiar sound on the banks of the Danube. The same composer’s Hungarian March from the Damnation of Faust would have been a different matter.