Berlioz takes his protagonist to countryside that was surely inspired by the region of his birth in the Dauphiné: a plain, farmland (home to the quail whose call is, perhaps, imitated), and a distant prospect of mountains. The scene is prepared by a stylized ‘cattle-call’, known as ranz des vaches, played on another instrument rarely used up to this time in a symphony orchestra, the cor anglais (Berlioz did not risk ridicule by introducing an actual alphorn). The serene pastoral reverie that follows is disturbed by the idée fixe, arousing memories of the protagonist’s hopes and fears: could she love him? But now he is alone, and his isolation is emphasized when the ranz des vaches on cor anglais, formerly answered by an offstage oboe (another innovation!), is now heard amid the threat of distant thunder.

Stravinsky was a composer frequently given to announcing music’s independence from the other arts – in particular, its independence from literature. ‘In general’, he wrote in a well-known screed of 1924, ‘I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest.’1 Almost forty years later he still defined music in anti-literary terms, asserting (in an article for the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League, of all things): ‘The language of music is a special language; it is not the same as the language of literature.’2