The editor of the RGM wrote the following preface to Berlioz's text: ‘Since the excellent Philharmonic Society are to perform extracts from Gluck's Alceste next Tuesday, we think we shall be doing a real service to our readers to quote the fine pages written by Berlioz on these same extracts’. The ‘extracts’ are actually continuous from act 1, scene 3 to the end of the act in the French version of the opera (1776), and not much changed, bar the language, from the Italian original of 1767. The text translated below quotes two passages from reviews previously published in 1835 (they appear in quotation marks in the article). Since Gluck's operas constitute such an idée fixe in Berlioz's writings, it's only right that these final words should celebrate Alceste.

The third scene opens in Apollo's temple. Enter the high priest, the priest who will conduct the sacrifice together with the censors and other necessary instruments, and finally Alceste leading her children, the courtiers and members of the public. Here Gluck applies an extreme of local colour; it's ancient Greece he reveals to us in all its majestic, beautiful simplicity. Listen to the instrumental movement (aria di pantomimo) to which the cortege enters; listen to this gentle, veiled, calm, resigned melody, this pure harmony, this almost inaudible rhythm of the contrabasses, whose undulating patterns steal beneath the orchestra like the priestesses’ feet beneath their white tunics; lend your ear to the strange timbre of low flutes, to the intertwining of the two violin lines sharing the melody, and say whether there's any music more beautiful, in the ancient sense of the word, than this religious march.