“The Jupiter of our Olympus was Gluck,” Berlioz recalled, when speaking of the feelings he had had as an aspiring twenty-year-old composer. To this youthful metaphor of sincere admiration it is instructive to compare the expression of disillusionment set down in the Postface of the Mémoires by the now veteran artist approaching the end of his career:

This unspoken confession, with its telling ellipsis, leaves us with the impression that there was still unresolved dissonance at the end of Berlioz's long engagement with Gluck. That engagement, always marked by Berlioz's recollections of famous voices such as that of the great dramatic soprano Caroline Branchu, extended from an early, defensive phase – saving the composer from oblivion, on the one hand, and from impertinent arrangers, on the other – to a later, illustrative phase – “reproducing” his works (the word is Berlioz's) and transmitting them to posterity as models of excellence. Berlioz's participation in the revivals of Orphée in 1859 and of Alceste in 1861 and 1866 marks the culmination of a militant campaign waged by the French composer on behalf of the man whom he recognized, very early on, as both his master and his model.