Nothing in Berlioz's oeuvre demonstrates more dramatically how his imagination revolved about a small but potent handful of archetypal ideas—musical and literary—than the single movement from his 1824 Messe solennelle he saw fit to preserve. Ideas from it turn up in the "Carnaval romain" scene of Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and the "Christe, rex gloriae" of the Te Deum (1849). But, most tellingly, the Resurrexit contains, in skeletal, form the fanfares and timpani salvo which would be expanded to cataclysmic effect in the great "Tuba mirum" of the Requiem (1837). An abortive attempt to perform his Messe solennelle in December 1824 was succeeded by a triumphant presentation on July 10, 1825, led by Henri Valentino of the Opéra—funded by borrowed money—prompting his teacher, Jean-François Le Sueur (1760 - 1837) to exclaim "You'll not be a doctor or apothecary, but rather a great composer." At a second performance of the Messe solennelle at St.-Eustache, on November 22, 1827, conducted by Berlioz himself, the Resurrexit, performed with 15 brass instruments for the fanfare, provoked such giddiness in him that he called for a brief intermission before he could go on. And no wonder, for the brilliant succession of stunning ideas, lashed by a series of climactic surprises, provokes an untethered exhilaration, which seems unique even when compared with Berlioz' most flamboyant mature works. Privately, Le Sueur had taken Berlioz to task for the prodigality with which he strewed generative musical ideas throughout the Messe solennelle without development. Consequently, in the revision of the Resurrexit, carried out in early 1828, both the orchestration and the choral writing have been enlarged to effect a more forceful presentation. But it remained for the mature composer to surpass, imaginatively, the ultra-Rossinian brilliance of the Resurrexit and achieve the terrific depth and grandeur of the Requiem's "Tuba mirum," with the spatial effect of its four brass choirs pealing forth and echoing one another to announce the Day of Judgment. It is of some interest that the revised Resurrexit, given at a concert of Berlioz's music on November 1, 1829, conducted by the champion of Beethoven's orchestral works, François Habeneck, was re-titled Le Jugement dernier—The Last Judgment—and that the movement was to figure prominently in a never-completed oratorio, Le Dernier Jour du monde, which occupied the composer from April 1831 to August 1833. Plainly, the musical possibilities of the Apocalypse continued to fascinate him until the composition of the Te Deum, with its final, crushing "Judex crederis." On a more mundane level, during Berlioz' sojourn in Rome as the 1830 laureate of the Prix de Rome, he was obliged to send the fruits of his leisure to an examining committee at home. In his Memoirs, he gleefully relates that, "obedient to the regulation, I sent back to the academicians in Paris..." the 1828 revision of the Resurrexit, "in which those gentlemen were pleased to discover...that I had abandoned my 'unfortunate tendencies' and was making remarkable progress...So much for the judgment of the Immortals."

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