In the fall of 1844, the Odéon theater prepared to mount Hamlet and its directors asked Berlioz to contribute incidental music. He revised his mélodie, La Mort d'Ophélie, sketched a Scène de la comédie, and in November composed the Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d'Hamlet, though in the event they came too late, while the play was shelved for other reasons. But they stirred memory with bitter irony. The new production was to have been played in the translation of his friend, Léon de Wailly, but Berlioz had first seen Hamlet in 1827, performed in English—which did not lessen the revelatory impact of Shakespeare's art—at the Odéon with the Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, as Ophelia. The unwitting inspiration of a volcanic passion and, soon after, the femme inspiratrice of the Symphonie fantastique, after a checkered pursuit and courtship, Harriet had become Berlioz's wife on October 3, 1833. The creative apotheosis of this Shakespearean passion was achieved with the composition and performance of his dramatic symphony, Roméo et Juliette in 1839. But by the summer of 1844, Harriet had become obese, alcoholic, and abusive, and Berlioz managed a final separation from her, moving soon after to the apartment of his mistress, the Spanish-French mezzo, Marie Recio. By chance, in December an English troupe arrived in Paris to offer Hamlet and Berlioz found himself weeping in the street "thinking of Hamlet, Ophelia, and all that is no more, all that has become as poor Yorick...." Berlioz listed the new Marche funèbre, in an 1846 catalog of his works, as a coranach—Irish for funeral dirge. Thus, the somber Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d'Hamlet mourns not only the stricken hero of Shakespeare's play—"Let four captains/Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage..." (quoted on the title page)—but the failure of Romantic love, from whose lure Berlioz would never find release. Within a slow processional of 118 bars, punctuated at intervals by a wordless chorus intoning "Ah," a nobly rending lament rises, becoming more eloquent and agitated until it climaxes in a volley of musketry—realizing the direction of the play's final line, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot"—before dying away as if mortally wounded. Though compact, in its melancholy grandeur it has the effect of a much larger piece. In the wake of his father's death in the summer of 1848, he took it up again, revising it for publication. Nor is it fortuitous that in 1851 he added Hamlet's dirge to the collection, Tristia, with the Méditation religieuse, which dated from his 1831 stay in Rome—a testament to his love-sickness for Harriet Smithson—and the elegiac chorus, La Mort d'Ophélie, recounting the drowning of the virginal, distracted maiden of Shakespeare's play. As with his Roméo et Juliette, which drew tears from him on occasion even as he conducted it, the associations attached to the Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d'Hamlet were overpowering and Berlioz went to his grave leaving the work unperformed.

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