Ex. 13-4: Absence

No. 4 of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été (Op. 7), set to a poem by Théophile Gautier. The six songs were written in 1840–41 for voice and piano. The title "Les nuits d'été" (Summer Nights) was Berlioz's own, not Gautier's — some think he took it from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

At this time Berlioz's marriage was falling apart. His wife was the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, the model for the beloved in his Symphonie fantastique. By now she had left the stage, and her health was failing. Meanwhile he had begun a relationship with the singer Marie Recio, who later became his second wife. Absence was the first of the six songs Berlioz orchestrated (Dresden, February 1843), and Recio was the first to sing it in public, in Leipzig on 23 February 1843. She was encored.

He orchestrated the other five songs in 1856, and dedicated each of the six to a different singer at the Weimar court, where his friend Franz Liszt was music director and worked to promote his music.

Because the orchestral songs call for different voice types, no single singer really fits all six — and Berlioz seems never to have performed the complete cycle.

Les nuits d'été is often called the first true orchestral song cycle — a form few composers took up until Mahler.

For all his writing — a long memoir, many letters, and music criticism — Berlioz said almost nothing about Les nuits d'été anywhere.

In 1868, near the end of his life, Berlioz had lost much of his memory and speech after a series of strokes. Visiting his friend the singer Anne Charton-Demeur, he took her album and wrote down the refrain of Absence from memory — the words "Reviens, reviens, ma bien-aimée" and the tune. He died the next year, on 8 March 1869.

From the album Berlioz: Les Nuits d'été by Véronique Gens with the Orchestre de l'Opéra National de Lyon, conducted by Louis Langrée (2000)
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