The early romantic movement attracted to itself no more enthusiastic disciple and energetic exponent than Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). Indeed, he was one of the earliest and at the same time one of the most extreme of the romanticists. Eccentric, impatient of formalism of any kind, but gifted with an intensely vivid imagination and a prodigious sense of color, he possessed a creative force of great originality and spontaneity, whose effectiveness, however, was frequently marred by its extravagance of expression. Endowed with an insatiable desire to interline all music with some kind of a descriptive or narrative purpose, he gave a tremendous impetus to ‘program music.’ In attempting to find an effective medium for descriptive effort in striving after the fantastic, he mightily developed the resources of the orchestra and became the real founder of the modern science of orchestration; moreover, he used his orchestra as eloquently in his choral masterpiece, ‘The Damnation of Faust,’ as in his symphonic works. His choral-writing came under the same romantic spell of liberation from formalism as did his instrumental inspirations. His ‘Faust’ is not only the first choral work, but almost the only one until near the end of the nineteenth century, in which the romantic ideal wholly dominates both choral and instrumental forces. If some of the choral numbers suffer in comparison with present-day choral treatment, this is not because of any difference of viewpoint, but because of the inadequacy, which one sometimes feels, of the purely musical vocabulary at his command to express fully what he felt. He frequently used the chorus, as did Beethoven in the ‘Ninth Symphony,’ as an adjunct to his symphonic works, but in distinctly choral forms, he left, in addition to the ‘Faust’ and the works mentioned in Chapter VIII, the cantata _La mort de Sardanapale_, which was completed amid the uproar of the July Revolution, 1830, and with which he won the Grand Prix de Rome the same year; the cantata _Le cinq mai_ for bass solo, chorus, and orchestra, written in 1834 for the anniversary of Napoleon’s death; the cantata _L’Impériale_, written in 1855 for the Paris Exhibition; _Sara la Baigneuse_, a choral ballad; three youthful cantatas, _La révolution grecque_ (1826), _Herminie_ (1828), and _La mort de Cléopatre_ (1829); and a few occasional choruses and choral ballads.