In his memoirs, Hector Berlioz writes about his highly dramatic cantata *Cléopâtre*, with which he hoped to win the Prix de Rome: “I had tried to convey a sense of deep agony in the scene with Cleopatra. I wanted to depict the dying queen’s final gasps.” But he failed for the third time because the jury found his realistic portrayal of death shocking. There could hardly be a stronger contrast between Berlioz’s dramatic climax and Schubert’s monumental final symphony. Robert Schumann raved about its “heavenly length,” which transports the listener into entirely new dimensions of time.