In the shadows of Berlioz's Nuits d'été are persons, places, paintings and poems once a part of the richly textured fabric of its genesis, now obscured, in the musical world, by the brilliance of the aesthetic object, the enduring artistic entity itself. This is not always the case. Many listeners know something of the ‘scandale’ surrounding Le Sacre du printemps, for example, but nothing of its substance; many shudder at Schoenberg prior even to the sounding of the ‘set’. It is my intention here to examine some of the paths that lead to and from a work whose prior reputation provokes no such aural paralysis for it is ‘one of Berlioz's works to treasure most’, in Hugh Macdonald's words, though one about which Berlioz himself was ‘shy to the point of silence’, the song cycle Les Nuits d'été. I wish to consider not the orchestral version – frequently performed, often recorded, rather well known – but the original version for voice with piano accompaniment – rarely performed, rarely recorded, little known indeed. Not yet appreciated in historical context, not yet exhausted by the ‘new Berliozians’, it invites critical enquiry.