Les nuits d'été

Hector Berlioz published over 50 songs, but only one group is gathered together as a set. Les nuits d'été (Summer Nights) isn’t a song cycle in the traditional sense; there’s no consistent narrator, hero, or unfolding story. But the six songs are united both by their poet—Berlioz’s friend Théophile Gautier—and their theme: love longed for and lost, often just beyond reach. While Berlioz later arranged them for voice and orchestra, a daring innovation, the songs were originally scored just for voice—mezzo or tenor—and piano. The cycle opens and closes in lighthearted optimism. We start with a vision of spring, all the more intense for being imagined from the cold of winter. The irrepressible “Villanelle” bursts with new life, new discoveries, and—perhaps—new love. The closing “L'île inconnue” is another imagined journey: this time to distant lands, deftly painted in Berlioz’s orchestration. The central sequence of four songs is more introspective. “La Spectre de la rose” imagines the ghost of a rose, pinned to a girl’s dress at her first ball, in rapturous detail. “Sur les lagunes” is another journey: the poet’s lover is dead and he is rocked by the waves of the lagoon. Loss runs through both “Absence”, in which the poet longs for his lover’s return, and the chilly “Au cimetière”, in which he experiences a ghostly vision of his beloved as he stands by her grave.