BERLIOZ Les Nuits d’ete Op. 7
Villanelle
Le Spectre de la Rose
L’Absence
L’Ile inconnue
(arr. Kevin Power) soprano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn and piano
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Berlioz composed the original version of Les Nuits d’ete in about 1840, at the time his marriage to the English actress Harriet Smithson was breaking up. While it is tempting to suggest, as many commentators have, that in selecting these six poems by Théophile Gautier Berlioz was creating a little parable about the transient nature of love based on his own feelings and experiences, there is no documentary evidence to support this.

Originally written for mezzo-soprano or tenor and piano the work was orchestrated in piecemeal fashion over the next fifteen years and today it is this latter version which is best known. It is the only one of Berlioz’s four collections of songs which can be performed by a single voice and which has a unifying theme, and is therefore the only one which can be legitimately considered a song cycle.


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