Two of the most ravishing nineteenth-century French song-cycles frame one of Dukas’ finest orchestral works, La péri, a dance poem based on the old Persian legend of King Isender and the péri (a beautiful female fallen angel). Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été, set to the impassioned love poems of his friend and fellow critic, Théophile Gautier, was the first ever French song cycle and shows the composer at the pinnacle of his powers of orchestration. Chausson’s luxuriantly orchestrated, and at times Wagnerian, Poème de l’amour et de la mer is set to texts by Maurice Bouchor, on the transient nature of love.