Though known primarily for a handful of overtures, the song collection Les Nuits d'été, and a dozen large, idiosyncratically imposing works - the Requiem, the Symphonie fantastique, Roméo et Juliette, L'Enfance du Christ, Les Troyens, and so on - Berlioz was from his teens a prolific composer who may have archived or destroyed as much music as he published, much of it estimable. The Grande Ouverture des Francs-Juges, composed over September and October 1826 at the age of 22, for instance, stood originally at the head of his first grand opera. Though Les Francs-Juges failed to attract a production and was eventually shelved, it contains music which we still hear - Lenor's Invocation was adapted for the Oraison of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840), while - most notably - its Marche des gardes became the Marche au supplice of the Symphonie fantastique (1830). The overture - a concert favorite from its first performance at the Paris Conservatoire, 26 June 1828 - combines a foreboding sense of the opera's dark doings in the mediaeval Black Forest with skippingly attractive melody, lean muscularity, and a preternatural ben trovato zest in which Berlioz has far outstripped his mentors, his teacher, Jean-François Le Sueur (1760 - 1837), and Gasparo Spontini (1774 - 1851), composer of La Vestale. It is all the more amazing that the Ouverture des Francs-Juges predates Berlioz's seminal discovery of Beethoven's symphonies, which would not begin to be heard in Paris until March 1828. And it is sobering, but of the essence of Romanticism, to recall that this potent, irresistible piece was composed in an attic room in Paris' Latin Quarter by a young man subsisting upon leeks, cheese, bread, and fruit, and that he had been eliminated in the preliminary round of the Prix de Rome competition just months before on the basis of a faulty fugue. It is dedicated to Narcise Girard (1797 - 1860), the conductor and early champion of Berlioz's works who became an intrigant rival as Berlioz's career as one of the greatest conductors of his age took shape in the 1840s.

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