Berlioz's first article, the first of three entitled Polémique musicale, was published in Le Corsaire on 12 August 1823 when he was nineteen. He asked of Spontini's opera La Vestale, among other things, ‘Why does the orchestra make so much noise?’ Berlioz's propensity for causing trouble lasted throughout his career as critic; but at the same time, he was happy distributing praise when he felt it to be deserved. Other outlets in these early years included Le Correspondant (1829), the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1829), which published eight articles translated into German, the Revue européenne (1832), L’Europe littéraire (1833), Le Rénovateur (1833–5), L’Italie pittoresque (1834), Le Monde dramatique (1835), and La Chronique de Paris (1837–8).

There were two journals to which he remained loyal to the end of his critical career, if one counts as one the weekly Gazette musicale de Paris (1834– 5), which became the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (RGM) in 1835 (so before the period covered in this selection of articles). This was a specialist publication, as its name implies, edited by Maurice-Adolphe Schlesinger (1798–1871), also a music publisher of works by Berlioz and his teacher Jean-François Le Sueur among others; contributors to Schlesinger's periodical included Robert Schumann, Liszt, Wagner, and George Sand. The other was the Journal des débats (JD), a political daily for which Berlioz first wrote in 1835. A fuller account of these journals, their editors and owners, and Berlioz's connections to them, personal and professional, may be found in Peter Bloom's introduction.