Berlioz was a busy man throughout 1835, organizing concerts, attempting to compose an opera while shouldering the burden of a new career as music critic, and attending to his recently acquired role as husband and father. On the merest circumstantial evidence, Les Chant des Bretons—a brief, bounding, boastful chorus marked Allegro fieramente—seems to have been composed and privately published in that year, perhaps as a companion piece to Le Jeune Pâtre breton, composed a year or two before. Both seem to have been reprinted and put on sale by the firm of Schlesinger by the end of 1835, though exact dating has proven elusive. Both set words from the collection, Marie (Paris, 1832), by the Breton poet, Auguste Brizeux (1803 - 1858). And, though both songs make an immediate appeal, they gain by the listener's awareness of their setting in legendary Brittany—the sea-lapped land of granite and oak inhabited by long-haired Celts or, as Brizeux calls them, according to their ancient name, "hommes d'Armorique" (in English, Armorica). A wild and woolly place, so to speak. Berlioz certainly thought of them together when he revised them for publication in Fleurs des landes, a collection of five mélodies published in 1850. Variations in the accompaniment of the second version relieve the repetitiousness of an essentially strophic song. Although it had undoubtedly been heard many times before, the first noted performance of Les Chant des Bretons was given by the Galin-Paris-Chevé school of singing in late March or early April 1853. The École Chevé may have published the work that year in the notational system of Emile J. M. Chevé (1804 - 1864)—musique en chiffres—though no copies survive. In any case, Berlioz invites Brizeux, in a letter of 28 March 1853, to hear Les Chant des Bretons sung by students of the École Chevé. An orchestration of the song by Berlioz was announced in 1843, though no copies are extant, while an orchestration in another hand cannot be authenticated as Berlioz's. In sum, this unpretentiously rousing mélodie comes fraught with teasing questions which Berlioz scholarship has been unable to answer. Enjoy.

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In late 1850, Berlioz prepared for the publisher, Richault, a collection of five mélodies and choruses in a French pastoral vein titled Fleurs des landes ("wildflowers," or "flowers of the heath"). It opens with a striking anomaly—the same poem by the Abbé Adolphe de Bouclon (1813 - 1882) in two settings. Nothing is known about the prompting or origin of this gesture, and one imagines Berlioz silently tongue-in-cheek. He was not, after all, above an occasional musical joke. The poem itself is an unremarkable paean to a little bird who heralds the dawn in a rustic grove. Marked Andantino quasi allegretto, Le Matin is in 3/4 time, where its companion, Petit Oiseau, is in a faster 6/8. Though quite different, both essay an odd mixture of ecstatic and melancholy, with Le Matin crowned by a nimbus of warble-like trills.

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Wishing to include Le Trébuchet—"the snare"—in a collection of his songs to be titled Fleurs des landes, issued by Richault in 1850, Berlioz could locate his manuscript of the first stanza only. Unable to recall the author—who was, in fact, Antoine de Bertin (1752 - 1790)—he turned to his friend, Émile Deschamps (1791—1871), for verses to round out the theme of first love encountered, lost, and sought again. A literary man-of-all-work, who had supplied the narrative tissue for Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette (1839), Deschamps provided the composer with two shapely stanzas exactly tailored to his purpose, for which Berlioz thanked him profusely. The upshot is curiously similar to a pair of lyrics by Germany's greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)—Die Spröde and Die Bekehrte ("the prude" and "the convert")—set together by Hugo Wolf (1860 - 1903) in his collection of 51 Goethe Lieder (1889). But where Wolf speaks with a late-Romantic awareness of erotic longing, Berlioz composes a sharply accented scherzo for two evenly matched voices—two sopranos, or tenor and bass—which gives the first blush of desire a knowing wink. It is one of the most original, scintillant, and charming of all Berlioz's mélodies.

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With the almost furtive completion of the Te Deum in 1849, Berlioz busied himself preparing several collections of his smaller works for the publisher, Jean-Charles-Simon Richault (1780 - 1866). Vox Populi, for instance, pairs two patriotic choruses, while Tristia gathers works associated with Hamlet. Published in 1850, Fleurs des landes—variously translated as "wildflowers" or "flowers of the heath"—essays a vein of French pastoral to which Chabrier and Ravel would make distinctive contributions. To the numbers inspired by Brittany—the boastful, bounding chorus, Les Chant des Bretons (1835), and the sweetly wistful solo, Le Jeune Pâtre breton (1834)—Berlioz ranges into le pays d'amour with the "scherzo," Le Trébuchet (1846), for two matched voices, on a theme of love encountered, lost, and sought again. Curiously, the album opens with two settings of the same poem, the evocation of a rustic dawn by the Abbé Adolphe de Bouclon (1813 - 1882). Le Matin, which seems to have been Berlioz's last song, probably composed in 1850, is marked Andantino quasi allegretto and in 3/4 time, while Petit Oiseau is an Allegretto con moto in 6/8—both essay, with different minor keys, accompaniments, and melodies, an odd mixture of the ecstatic and the melancholy.

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Over a gently rocking Allegretto simplice accompaniment, the young Breton shepherd—of "Marie," by the Breton poet, Auguste Brizeux (1803 - 1858)—croons a melody of wistful naïveté recalling the "air plaintif et tendre" to which he serenades his sweetheart, Anna, the shepherdess on the mountain, where distance transforms his song to a sigh of mixed pain and pleasure. Precise dating is impossible. Originally called Le Jeune Paysan breton, this simple and affecting strophic romance for voice and piano was composed by Berlioz probably in 1833—it was included in a concert on December 22 of that year, to which the composer sent the poet a ticket. A version for soprano and orchestra performed at the Paris Conservatoire on December 23, 1834, is lost. But another arrangement, from the same period, for tenor or soprano, horn ad libitum, and piano, was published by Schlesinger in 1835. The horn—sometimes replaced by a cello—lends the lover's plaint a mournful rustic touch. A version for mezzo or tenor and small orchestra was made in 1835 and published by Catelin, probably in 1839. And its inclusion in 1850 in Fleurs des landes, a collection of five mélodies, with that other evocation of Brittany, Les Chant des bretons, looms to confirm the importance Berlioz attached to this oddment of picturesque nostalgia. Indeed, in one or the other of the latter two versions, Le Jeune Pâtre breton, sung by his mistress, Marie Recio, became a staple of Berlioz's concerts as he took his music on European tour throughout the 1840s.

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