Worn out by the vicissitudes attending the production of the Requiem, given its premiere December 5, 1837, and securing payment for what had, after all, been a state commission, Berlioz, at the beginning of the new year, was preoccupied with completing his opera, Benvenuto Cellini. Having put aside his journalistic work and borrowed money from his devoted friend, Ernest Legouvé (1807 - 1903)—dramatist and author of Adrienne Lecouvreur—to see him through, February 1838 was largely given to the composition of the overture. Summer was taken up by rehearsals, for Benvenuto Cellini proved a virtuoso score whose rhythmic verve left the Opéra orchestra toiling in the rear. In the upshot, the opera scored a succès d'estime among connoisseurs, though it left the audience at large unmoved and chafing. After the opening night on September 10, 1838, the inevitable cuts and casting discontents compromised the work, and it was taken off after four performances. The overture, however, enjoyed a successful career as a separate piece, first heard in that form in a Paris concert on February 6, 1840. Berlioz performed it with success during his European concert tours of the 1840s wherever he found an orchestra capable of rising to its brilliant demands. Unified by several references to the great scene in which Cellini confronts the Pope and wins full indulgence for his follies (heard pizzicato after a brilliant opening flourish and full orchestra at the conclusion) the overture struts alternations of winsome poetry and heroic athleticism to scintillant—and often coruscating—effect. Liszt was sufficiently impressed by the Pope's theme to have arranged it for piano as the Bénédiction et Serment—deux motifs de Benvenuto Cellini. A transcription of the overture for piano solo by pianist and composer Adolfo Fumagalli (1828 - 1856) was published by Ricordi in 1851, while a version for piano, four hands, by the brilliant pianist, conductor, composer, and Liszt protégé, Hans von Bülow (1830 - 1894), was published with the Benvenuto Cellini vocal score in 1854—sure indicators of popularity. Berlioz dedicated the overture to Legouvé.

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Although Benvenuto Cellini was Berlioz's first opera to make it to the stage of the Paris Opéra, it was not his maiden voyage in the genre. Berlioz's first efforts to compose an opera resulted in Les francs-juges, which, except for its overture—the only part of the work to have had any sort of performance history—Berlioz discarded. Despite this early operatic failure, Berlioz had made a reputation for himself in Paris with performances of his Symphonie fantastique (1830), Harold en Italie (1834), and Grand messe des morts (1837); when he finally completed Benvenuto Cellini in the spring of 1838, the composer was poised for success. But from its first appearance at the Opéra on September 10, 1838, Cellini was received with ambivalence: Berlioz's supporters praised his music, but supporters and critics alike had difficulty accepting the comical Cellini at Paris' most elite forum for serious drama, and they found the complicated plot indecipherable. The original score received only four performances; thereafter at the Opéra it was given in a reduced one-act version. In 1852, Berlioz revised the score for a revival by Franz Liszt for Weimar; the score exists today in two "Paris" versions and the "Weimar" version. The lukewarm reception of Berlioz's score doubtlessly both thwarted Berlioz's professional ascent and doomed the work's performance history.

It was Alfred de Vigny who suggested that Berlioz base an opera on the autobiography of the sixteenth-century sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, and who supplied advice to the librettists Léon de Wailly and Auguste Barbier. The libretto bears only scant relation to the autobiography on which it is based, but as Raymond Hyatt has noted, rather more resemblance to E.T.A. Hoffmann's story Signor Formica. Indeed, according to Hugh Macdonald, one contemporary critic saw so much similarity between Hoffmann's story and the libretto that he levied a charge of plagiarism against the librettists.

The music of Benvenuto Cellini contains all the trappings of French Grand Opera and reveals Berlioz's orchestrational skills at their finest. After the rousing overture, the fugal beginning of Act I provides an example of one of Berlioz's favorite opening gambits. Teresa's cavatine-cabaletta in scene ii exemplifies the genre, with the brooding cavatina's four-square, melodically parallel phrasing, graceful vocal ornamentation, and ternary (ABA) form organization, and the cabaletta's contrasting piquancy. The duet between Cellini and Teresa in scene iii, as they conspire to elope, buzzes with strings whispering on repeated pitches and twitterish vocal declamation. Irregular rhythms mark the jaunty chorus of the metal workers in the "Second Tableau." The chorus is followed by the innkeeper's clever intonation of the metal workers' bar tab, each entrance a semitone or whole tone higher than the previous one. In the play-within-a-play at Cassandro's theater, Berlioz cleverly depicts the commedia dell'arte characters Arlequin and Pierrot (or Pasquarello) in their arias, using the English horn as the voice of Arlequin and the clumsy ophecleide for pathetic Pierrot. Act II ("Third Tableau") brings an off-stage chorus of white friars and echoes of the March from Harold en Italie in Teresa's and Ascanio's Prière. An insistent dotted rhythm scored for guitars and small anvil introduces the chorus of the foundrymen in the "Fourth Tableau," and prefigures the anvil scene of Wagner's Siegfried. The E flat major triad (enormously scored for full orchestra at fortissimo) that represents the explosion of the crucible in the final scene surely ranks among Berlioz's most playful effects. The music of the chorus of metalworkers returns in the opera's triumphant final scene.

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