To the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, on September 23, 1862, Berlioz writes after having added two more numbers to his last major work, the already performed Béatrice et Bénédict—"Now, I have finished. Yesterday I wrote the last note of an orchestral score to sully a piece of paper in my lifetime. 'No more of that, Othello's occupation's gone.' I've succeeded; and at any time I can say to death, the grim reaper: 'When you like!'" Despite the intended finality of this pronouncement, Berlioz would, the following year, be obliged to fill score paper with an orchestral prelude to the last three acts of his summa and testament, the grand opera Les Troyens, given at Léon Carvalho's Théâtre-Lyrique under the title Les Troyens à Carthage. In 1864, he would make an orchestral arrangement of the "Marche troyenne" from that work. And at some time during the decade of the 1860s, one Prosper Sain (or Saint) d'Arod, choirmaster of St.-Sulpice in Paris, would persuade Berlioz to contribute three motets—Veni creator, Tantum ergo, and an adaptation of a clavecin piece by François Couperin—to his extensive collection of devotional music for women's voices, Le Livre choral. Berlioz's autographs are lost and the dates of composition are not ascertainable. Nor is it certain that an edition of Le Livre choral was issued during Berlioz's lifetime—the first issue to have come down to us dates from around 1885. Nonetheless, these motets are likely to have been Berlioz's last compositions. In the Veni creator, alternations of solo voices and choral mass carry the listener briskly but mellifluously through the declarations of the ancient hymn with a certain wan charm. Unlike the Tantum ergo—a small but absolute masterpiece—the Veni creator is a masterpiece only in the sense that it comes from a well-practiced but perfunctory master hand.

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