Berlioz often sketched out works for voice and piano that he later arranged in more ambitious orchestral settings—in fact, a large number of the arias from La damnation de Faust were first works for voice and piano. La Captive was reworked not just once , but twice—first for cello, piano, and voice, and then for orchestra and voice. As Berlioz tells the story, he was with an architect friend in an inn, and happened to pick up a copy of Victor Hugo's Orientales and was immediately inspired. His friend drew some music paper, and Berlioz wrote down his ideas. The sumptuous music captures all the elegaic longing of the text with a richness evocative of all the sensuality that Europeans attributed to "the East".

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