Editing Hector Berlioz (section)

===Mélodies===
Berlioz wrote songs throughout his career, but not prolifically. His best-known work in the genre is the song cycle ''[[Les Nuits d'été]]'', a group of six songs, originally for voice and piano but now usually heard in its later orchestrated form. He suppressed some of his early songs, and his last publication, in 1865, was the ''33 [[Mélodie]]s'', collecting into one volume all his songs that he chose to preserve. Some of them, such as "Hélène" and "Sara la baigneuse", exist in versions for four voices with accompaniment, and there are others for two or three voices. Berlioz later orchestrated some of the songs originally written with piano accompaniment, and some, such as "Zaïde" and "Le Chasseur danois" were written with alternative piano or orchestral parts.<ref name=grove/> "La Captive", to words by [[Victor Hugo]], exists in six different versions.{{refn|"La captive" was so popular during the composer's lifetime that he frequently revised it to meet the particular requirements of a performance. The song developed from what the conductor and academic [[Melinda O'Neal]] describes as "a beguiling strophic tune" with guitar or piano accompaniment to "a miniature tone poem with five varied strophes and a coda, significantly greater in length and dimension".<ref>O'Neal (2002), p. 22</ref>|group= n}} In its final version (1849) it was described by the Berlioz scholar Tom S. Wotton as like "a miniature symphonic poem".<ref>Rushton (2001), p. 53</ref> The first version, written at the Villa Medici, had been in fairly regular rhythm, but for his revision Berlioz made the strophic outline less clear-cut, and added optional orchestral parts for the last stanza, which brings the song to a quiet close.<ref>Rushton (2001), pp. 53–54; and Holoman (1898), p. 242</ref>

The songs remain on the whole among the least known of Berlioz's works, and [[John Warrack]] suggests that Schumann identified why this might be so: the shape of the melodies is, as usual with Berlioz, not straightforward, and to those used to the regular four-bar phrases of French (or German) song this is an obstacle to appreciation. Warrack also comments that the piano parts, though not lacking in harmonic interest, are discernibly written by a non-pianist. Despite that, Warrack considers up to a dozen songs from the ''33 Mélodies'' well worth exploring – "Among them are some masterpieces."<ref>Warrack, pp. 252 and 254</ref>