For a professed agnostic, if not an atheist, Berlioz shows a remarkable interest in sacred music. A significant proportion of his output is concerned with religion – and this in a period when sacred music was in decline in France. Three of his major works – those dealt with in this chapter – are religious works; and in each case the original impulse came from within, from the composer himself, not from a commission. Even in his secular works one is struck by the frequent recurrence of religious imagery. This is more than just a reflection of the Romantic vogue for religion as a picturesque detail of landscape: it is a preoccupation.

Yet the paradox is easily explained. ‘For seven years’, wrote Berlioz of his boyhood, religion was ‘the joy of my life’. The very loss of that joy left a deep imprint on his consciousness, and his music reflected it. It is not the music of a believer; but it conveys an intense regret at the inability to be one, and a profound awareness of the need, the desperate need, to believe, to worship. The Requiem, or Grande Messe des Morts, evokes the possibility of a universe without God; the God of the Te Deum is more terrible than compassionate; L'Enfance du Christ looks back nostalgically to a time when the healing myths of Christianity were received unquestioningly and nourished all.

Berlioz's own lack of belief is, as it were, used to suggest the eternal hopes and fears of the human race, faced with the enigma of death; his intuitive understanding of the religious instinct, his unsatisfied yearning for faith, enable him to respond to those immemorial feelings and express them in his art.