Le Ballet Des Ombres

This title is taken from the French Songs and Choruses for Mixed-Voice Choir. Hector Berlioz' Le Ballet Des Ombres written for SATB, was withdrawn by the composer within six months of publication in 1829. Berlioz, in fact, went to some trouble to supress the work, rounding up and destroying all copies he could find. So successful was he that only one copy of the Baller des Ombres, in a private collection, was known to have survived at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that is now lost. Our sole source for the work is its inclusion in Malherbe and Weingartner's badly flawed edition of Berlioz' works published by Breitkopf and Hartel in the opening years of the twentieth century.