The cool reception accorded Berlioz's newest and most exquisitely radical work, La Damnation de Faust—which premiered on December 6, 1846, to a half-empty house—left him at a crossroads, artistically, emotionally, and financially. Having returned to Paris in May from a highly successful concert tour of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he was lavishly fêted and his music enthusiastically received, he embarked for St. Petersburg on February 14, 1847, to repair his fortunes—secretly, leaving his mistress, Marie Recio, behind. During his Russian tour, he conducted five concerts in St. Petersburg and one in Moscow, performing the first two parts of La Damnation de Faust and the complete Roméo et Juliette in both cities, to rapturous acclaim and handsome receipts. Taken with an opulent gift from the Czar, his financial crisis was overcome at a single stroke. But other issues remained unresolved. Roméo et Juliette had for its composer a special meaning, an exalted vision of love mixed with the most intense memories of his discovery of Shakespeare and of the Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, who portrayed Ophelia and Desdemona, and later became his wife. In St. Petersburg, he struck up a romance with a member of his chorus, a seamstress (shades of Marguerite in La Damnation de Faust!), with whom he took midnight strolls and shared an intensity of feeling which seemed an extension of his music. (Unfortunately, the lady was engaged, and married soon after Berlioz's departure.) It was on this emotional plane that Berlioz, at the invitation of the Czarina, was introduced to the music of the Imperial Chapel. His rapt account in Soirées de l'orchestre is testimony to its lasting impact—80 singers in costume, ranging from the incredible Russian basses reaching notes below the staff to ethereal boy sopranos, responding to an invisible signal to spin, with flawless precision, a polyphonic web which seemed fraught with "sighs, vague murmurs such as one sometimes hears in dreams...accents that in their intensity resembled cries gripping the heart unawares, oppressing the breast, catching the breath." He was hearing a mass by Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751 - 1825), a prolific composer who had reformed the Imperial Chapel under Catherine the Great. When Berlioz left Russia, he brought back several of Bortnyansky's works, to two of which he substituted Latin words. The more ambitious of these, sometimes cited as "Adoremus" (after the Latin text, "Adoremus Dei..."), he performed in Paris in 1850 and at Lille the following year. Berlioz's own title is Chant des chérubins, de Bortniansky, cette douce et grave inspiration basée sur les vieux thêmes traditionnels des églises grecque et latine. It is an apt description—long-breathed phrases of ineffable sweetness flanking a more animated central section.

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