There was a time when ‘Berlioz the critic’ would have been the title of a lesser chapter in the larger biography of the composer. Now that his complete literary works have become available in modern critical editions, however, it has been possible to wonder, with more than a modicum of seriousness, whether Berlioz displayed his greatest talents as a musician or as a writer. For Berlioz himself, this was not a question. Setting down words, he often said, as in chapter 21 of his Memoirs, was ‘work’, while setting down notes was a ‘delight’. Many are the passages in his letters where he tells of the thrill of musical ideas coming to him so fast as to be unmanageable: ‘To tell you the truth, for several days I have been unable to sleep, I’ve lost touch with reality, so absorbed have I been by my work [Roméo et Juliette]’; ‘the music settled readily upon the words like a bird on a ripe fruit [the love scene from act 4 of Les Troyens]’; ‘the music is crowding my brain; I cannot even tell which number I prefer [in Béatrice et Bénédict]’. Years earlier, at the very moment he veered away from the medical study prescribed by his father in order to embrace harmony and counterpoint, he expressed extraordinary confidence in his musical future: ‘I am involuntarily drawn to a magnificent career’, he wrote in 1824; ‘I am certain that I shall distinguish myself in music […]; I should like to make a name for myself; I should like to leave upon this earth a trace of my existence’.