Bristly encounters with France’s official institutions were common in the life of Hector Berlioz, his travails with the Prix de Rome being but one chapter among many. Though sent to Paris by his father to study medicine, once there he succumbed to the lure of music, which had always been a passion. Despite unconventional background and training (flute and guitar were his instruments, and he taught himself harmony from a textbook), he entered the Paris Conservatory at the advanced age of 23, to study composition with Jean-François Le Sueur and counterpoint with Anton Reicha.

Berlioz entered the Prix de Rome competition for the first time in 1826, even before entering the Conservatory, but was eliminated at the first stage, the fugue (an exercise he described to a friend as “a musical problem of surpassing uselessness and very difficult to solve”). The next year, the judges deemed the piano accompaniment of his cantata La Mort d’Orphée to be unplayable. In 1828, Herminie won second prize. In 1829, La Mort de Cléopâtre should have won; the most distinctive and passionate of Berlioz’s surviving cantatas, it proved too much so for the conservative jury, which awarded no prize at all. The following year, Berlioz suppressed his personality and imagination in favor of a conventional style and finally won first prize with La Mort de Sardanapale (most of which, perhaps fortunately, is lost). In addition to the official performance at the prize ceremony, the piece was repeated on Berlioz’s December 1830 concert, which also launched the Symphonie Fantastique and more firmly pointed the direction of his career.

In the end, the importance of the Prix de Rome for Berlioz’s life and work was that it sent him to Italy, whose landscape, light, and spirit illumine many of his greatest compositions, including Roméo et Juliette and Harold en Italie as well as the operas Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens, and Béatrice et Bénédict. Less significantly, the prize cantatas, never published during Berlioz’s lifetime, were quarried for later and more substantial works: for example, Herminie included the first use of the Symphonie Fantastique’s idée fixe, while ideas from Cléopâtre made their way into Cellini and the “Choeur des Ombres” of Lélio.

Like baroque and classical cantatas, the prize competition texts generally comprised several arias, each preceded by recitative, and Cléopâtre is no exception. The orchestral introduction (its vehemence and syncopations foreshadowing Dido’s final scene in Les Troyens) leads to a recitative and then an aria (“Ah! qu’ils sont loin, ces jours) in A-B-A form, which contrasts the queen’s glory days with Caesar and Antony to the ignominious consequences of the battle of Actium. The central “Meditation” (“Grands Pharaons”) follows another recitative; over a throbbing rhythm from pizzicato strings, Cleopatra addresses the Pharaohs of the past; again, there is a more active contrasting section. The text concludes with what was clearly intended as another recitative (“Non, j’ai d’un époux”) leading to an aria setting two rhymed quatrains (“Osiris proscrit ma couronne”), but Berlioz sets this very freely, using quatrains for dramatic recitative, the orchestra depicting the queen’s death throes with vivid gestures.

La Mort de Cléopâtre is scored for an orchestra comprising 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons; 2 horns, 2 trumpets; timpani; and strings. The optimistic Berlioz had engaged a soprano from the Opéra to sing it for the judges, but the chosen date conflicted with the dress rehearsal for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, so she sent her inadequately prepared sister for the performance with piano on August 1, 1829, apparently the work’s only hearing during Berlioz’s lifetime. First published in 1903, it has in the second half of the twentieth century attracted increasing attention, especially among mezzo-sopranos seeking material for appearances with orchestra.