Berlioz in Paris
Église Saint-Roch
Built between 1653 and 1740 the church of Saint-Roch, one of the
largest in Paris, has very special associations with Berlioz’s career: it was
in this church that on 10 July 1825 was given the first performance
of Berlioz’s first large scale work, his Messe solennelle. The
performance created a stir and brought the young composer to the notice of the
Paris public, before he was even formally registered as a student at the
Conservatoire. The work had been composed in 1824 but a planned performance in
December of that year did not come off, and Berlioz took the opportunity to
revise the Mass before it eventually reached its first performance (Berlioz
tells the story at length in his Memoirs, chapters 7 &
8). He
subsequently destroyed the work, preserving only the Resurrexit which
subsequently provided music for the Tuba Mirum of the Requiem
(1837), the end of Act I of his opera Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and the Christe
of the Te Deum (1849). Remarkably, a copy of the complete work was
rediscovered in 1991 in a church in Antwerp, Belgium, and published in 1994. It
revealed further unsuspected borrowings by Berlioz from this early work in later
compositions.
A 17th century antiques shop on the left-side wall of the church
The foundation date of this shop, 1638, precedes the construction of the church, which was apparently built around it.
The interior of the church
© 2000-2006 (unless otherwise stated) Michel Austin and Monir Tayeb for all the photos, engravings and information on this and other Berlioz in Paris pages
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