Hector Berlioz’s Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie was a sequel to his Symphonie fantastique, which premiered in 1830 at the Paris Conservatory. Comprising six sections, it was composed during his travels to and around Italy, and made use of material that he had already composed for the prestigious Prix de Rome.

Berlioz married the Irish Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson in 1833; the Symphonie fantastique had been an attempt to assuage her initial rejection of him, and their marriage by no means turned out to be the fulfillment of all dreams. In his memoirs about the 1832 premiere of Lélio at the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz made these observations about his future wife:

“... the passionate character of the work, its ardent melodies, its exclamations of love, its outbursts of anger [...] must have made an unexpected and deep impression on her sensitive nature and poetic imagination. [...] When in the monodrama the actor Bocage, who recited the role of Lélio (that is, myself), pronounced the following words: ‘Oh, if I could only find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart is searching!’ [...] she thought to herself: ‘My God! ... Juliet, Ophelia ... there’s no doubt, he means me ... And he still loves me as before …’”

Michael Gielen conducts the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singakademie with Joachim Bissmeier as narrator and highly-acclaimed soloists Herbert Lippert and Geert Smits in an absorbing live recording that took place on 7 December 2000 at the Vienna Konzerthaus.

Sung in French with German narration