Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

The Church of St. Roche

This is an appropriate composition for Palm Sunday: it was performed twice before the score was destroyed by the composer, but he missed a single copy which was rediscovered almost 200 years later. It was resurrected, you might say.

Hector Berlioz was an interesting fellow.  He was a free thinker and a rebel in a rigidly conformist period, and so his music runs a wide gamut from groundbreaking (like his Symphony Fantastique) to pedestrian (but commercially successful).  He wrote this piece when he was only twenty years old, and it is clearly in the "groundbreaking" category.  Beethoven was still alive, but this is very like Wagner, who would write decades in the future.

The Mass was performed only twice, initially at the Church of St. Roche in Paris.  Berlioz then destroyed all the copies of the score, preserving only this particular piece (Resurrexit).

Palm Sunday calls for triumphant, and this is nothing if not that.  And it is also somewhat poignant, a Mass lost for 167 years and then resurrected.