In 1831, Hector Berlioz composed the first version of his monodrama Lélio, ou le retour à la vie (Lelio, or the return to life) as a kind of sequel to his masterful Symphonie fantastique (1830). The work was premiered in 1832; by 1834, Berlioz's close associate, Franz Liszt, had created a work for piano and orchestra based on themes from Lélio. The Grande fantasie symphonique is by no means an arrangement of Lélio (which requires a speaker, three singers, chorus, and orchestra), but rather, a novel work which seeks to present the essence of Berlioz's original in a new guise.

Cast in two sections, the Grande fantasie opens with a languorous Lento meditation on one of Berlioz's themes. The uneasy atmosphere of the opening—the music seems unable to decide upon a character, and its quietude seems intermittently desperate—is interrupted by the arrival of the much more active second half of the work, which is based largely on Berlioz's Chanson de brigands. Unexpectedly, Liszt brings the Lento music back shortly before the work's conclusion, dispelling the kinetic energy which has built up in the second section.

It is worth noting that the orchestration of the Grande fantasy is not Liszt's own, though it is not known who is responsible. It would be years before Liszt felt sufficiently comfortable with his instrumentation skills to score his own orchestral music, and even as late as the early 1850s he sought assistance from composers August Conradi and Joseph Raff. The manuscript of the Grande fantasie symphonique survives in the archives at Weimar, but it is still not known whose hand wrote out the score.



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