Berlioz’s third symphony Roméo et Juliette was composed in 1839 in response to a gift of twenty thousand francs from Paganini, to whom the work was dedicated. It has always been classed among the handful of his finest works, along with La Damnation de Faust and Les Troyens, and Berlioz himself retained a special affection for it to the end of his life. As part of the accepted history of the work it is well known that when he sat down to compose in the early months of 1839 this was not the first time he had contemplated music for Shakespeare’s play; in any case it was his usual practice to allow projects to mature slowly in his mind before taking their eventual form. This is certainly true of the Requiem, which grew out of several large-scale plans that he had been talking about for some years, and of La Damnation de Faust, which is a masterly expansion of the Huit Scènes de Faust composed seventeen years earlier. Most of his larger works have a prehistory threading back through his life.

In the case of Roméo et Juliette the prehistory can be traced in the reports of two of Berlioz’s collaborators with whom he shared confidences about earlier plans and in one memory from his own pen. The first is by Émile Deschamps, who wrote the verses for the 1839 Roméo et Juliette. Writing of his early friendship with the composer Deschamps recalled:

This reminiscence appeared in 1844, accompanying a publication of Deschamps’s translations of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. The time-lapse, ten years, sounds a little approximate, so it would be rash to give any date to their earlier conversations.