By
© 2026 Anja-Rosa Thöming
Hector Berlioz came into contact with large sacred spaces at an early age. In 1824 — the young student had only just turned his back on his medical studies — he was given the opportunity to compose a Messe solennelle to be performed at the parish church of Saint Roch in Paris, a classical-Baroque building of impressive size. In 1827, he conducted the same mass in the equally spacious, hundred-metre-long Church of Saint-Eustache, a space which he described as having good acoustics, provided that the balance between the volume of the sound and the size of the space was right.
For a mind with a passion for drama and literature, who had devoted himself from an early age to his personal god, Shakespeare – alongside the other gods Gluck and Beethoven – Berlioz took a surprisingly keen interest in ‘musique sacrée’. In 1834, he warned in the Gazette musicale against a decline in the significance of sacred music: “Cette belle branche de l’art s’amoindrit chaque jour et finira vraisemblement par disparaître entièrement” he writes on the occasion of the death of Alexandre Choron, an eminent music philologist, teacher and expert on Palestrina.
Jennifer Walker has written an exciting essay on ‘Sound architecture and the Church of Saint-Eustache’ (Jennifer Walker, “Hector Berlioz, l’architecture sonore et l’église Saint-Eustache”. In: Berlioz et Paris, edited by Cécile Reynaud, Actes Sud / Palazzetto Bru Zane 2023, pp. 147-160). She explains that, for Berlioz, sacred music is a form of dramatic music; the two differ only in terms of the venue at which they are performed. “Pour Berlioz, la définition de la musique religieuse ne repose pas sur un style de composition, mais plutôt sur la manière dont elle sonne dans un espace sacré. Sa conception de cette musique est profondément liée à la configuration et à l’acoustique des églises parisiennes elles-mêmes.” Berlioz himself put it like this: “on ne veut jamais se persuader que l’édifice où l’on fait de la musique est un instrument de musique lui-même”.
For the Requiem, Berlioz specified eighty female and 130 male voices, and noted in the score: “Ces indications de nombre ne sont que relatives, et l’on peut, si le local le permet, doubler ou tripler toute la masse vocale, et augmenter un peu la masse instrumentale dans les mêmes proportions.” At the performance he conducted himself in the Church of Saint-Eustache in 1852, three hundred choristers sang, and the orchestra consisted of 250 musicians. The movements Dies Irae, Rex tremendae and Lacrimosa, with their four separate groups of trumpets, trombones, tubas, cornets à piston and ophicleides positioned at the outer corners of the choir and orchestra, as well as the focused percussion, have a theatrical character. The use of brass and percussion in conjunction with a very large choir dates back to the military ceremonies of the revolutionary 1790s, for which Berlioz’s first teacher, Jean-François Lesueur, had also composed monumental music. Berlioz ingeniously transposes this grandiose gesture into the Christian context of the Requiem aeternam, combining it with restrained, heartfelt movements such as Quid sum miser, Quaerens me and Hostias et preces.
According to Jennifer Walker, the theatricality does not stand in contrast to the religious sensibilities of the Parisian audience at Saint-Eustache. Rather, Berlioz’s innovative orchestration and “les configurations chorales colossales” should be seen as his contribution to the renewal of French sacred music, which had suffered as a result of the revolutions.
Camille Saint-Saëns said of his experience of hearing the Grande messe des morts at the church of Saint-Eustache: “Depuis que cette œuvre gigantesque a résonné sous les voûtes de Saint-Eustache, c’était la première fois qu’on l’exécutait dans un local assez vaste pour s’y trouver à l’aise; la salle du Châtelet, elle-même, est insuffisante, et son caractère théâtral s’accorde mal avec celui du Requiem, si théâtral pourtant quelquefois, mais d’un théâtral particulier, celui des Mystères”. (…) “Il me sembla que chaque colonette des piliers devenait un tuyau et toute l’église un orgue immense!”
Berlioz’s constant awareness of the need for an appropriate acoustic effect makes him, in Jennifer Walker’s view, an early exponent of an “architecture of listening” (following Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, “Spaces speak: Experiencing Aural Architecture” 2007). “L’architecture sonore” is defined by “the qualities of a place that can be perceived through listening. It is the result of the combination of numerous surfaces, geometries, objects and sound within a complex spatial environment”. In every space, the acoustics create the sound architecture of the place; even if the sound sources are the same, they are adapted by the sound architecture. Every concert hall and every cathedral possesses a specific and distinct sound architecture. And one can observe variations in the acoustics between different concert halls or cathedrals.
Walker’s interesting point is that Berlioz’ sacred works are not mainly expressions of romantic monumentality but: “Il s’agit plutôt de manifestations sonores de la recherche d’une esthétique musicale sacrée s’élaborant en fonction des espaces spécifiques pour lesquels elle est destinée.”
See also Anja-Rosa Thöming’s review of a performance of the Requiem in Bremen on 10 October 2026.
The Hector Berlioz Website was created by Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin on 18 July 1997; this page created on 21 October 2026.
© (unless otherwise stated) Monir Tayeb and Michel Austin. All rights of reproduction reserved.
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