Composed in 1834 at the suggestion of Paganini and later completed in Montmartre, Harold en Italie received its first performance at the Conservatoire de Paris later that year. "I wanted to make the viola a kind of melancholy dreamer" – Hector Berlioz. Taking inspiration from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Harold en Italie is among the most poetic of Berlioz's oeuvre, its ingenious use of solo viola charting the dreamy Harold's wanderings throughout the Italian countryside, and the characters encountered along the way.