At the end of August 1828, Berlioz set out to visit his family after an absence of three momentous years in Paris, during which he had seen his Messe solenelle performed, to critical acclaim, and composed the Waverley and Les Francs-Juges overtures, both of which still figure in concert programs. In his family's eyes, having just taken second prize in the annual Prix de Rome competition—for his cantata Herminie—counted for more in justifying his turn from medicine to music. During those years, too, he had discovered Beethoven and Shakespeare—and fallen violently in love with Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who took the parts of Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona. The last of this series of transformative thunderclaps was the discovery of Gérard de Nerval's newly published translation of Faust, the testamentary work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) that was to become one of the first books of the Romantic bible. The aged Goethe, then in his Olympian phase, was still at work on Part II of Faust, which would not be published until after his death. Hence, Faust meant Part I, the episodic, colloquially phrased portrait of an aging, tormented philosopher who summons a devil, Mephistopheles, to be his companion, regains his youth, sets forth to seize life by the hair, and seduces a village girl, Gretchen. To Berlioz, she was Marguerite, and she held for him, and for his generation, a fascination similar to that of Ophelia—the incarnation of an artless, virginal, yet passionately smoldering femininity. It is perhaps not accidental that the first of Berlioz's Faust settings should have been the distracted chanson gothique, Le Roi de Thulé—suffused with an aura of the archaic and legendary in its modal inflections and gently rocking 6/8 time—which Gretchen/Marguerite sings, alone, just after her first abrupt encounter with Faust. Inviting his friend Humbert Ferrand to visit him at La Côte-St-André and meet his family (in a letter of September 16, 1828), Berlioz entices him with the prospect that "We'll read Hamlet and Faust together. Shakespeare and Goethe! The silent confidants of my torments, the elucidators of my life." And he notes that "The day before yesterday, travelling in a carriage, I wrote the ballad of the King of Thulé in Gothic style; I'll give it to you to put into your Faust, if you have one." The piano accompaniment is quite simple, but the imperishable melody is the one known from La Damnation de Faust (1846). Back in Paris, Le Roi de Thulé became the first of nine settings from the Nerval translation Berlioz published in 1829 as Scènes (8) de Faust (Marguerite's romance, Une amoureuse flamme, is rounded off with a Choeur de soldats) for voices, chorus, and orchestra. Here, Le Roi de Thulé acquires its unforgettably atmospheric solo viola introduction, etching the melody with aching sweetness.

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