UNDERSTANDABLY, composers through the centuries have responded to the text of the Roman Catholic Requiem and its evocations of the day of wrath, the last trumpet and other apocalyptic images with music of high drama (Mozart) if not overt theatricality (Verdi). But in the case of the French composer Hector Berlioz and his “Grande Messe des Morts” (“High Mass for the Dead”), the dramatic impulse seems to have come first, needing only a pretext  a death or an anniversary  to give it wing.

Berlioz had for years grappled with the notion of an oratorio depicting the day of judgment when, in 1837, he was commissioned to write a work for the anniversary of the July Revolution of 1830, honoring its dead. Composed quickly, the work fell victim to bureaucratic whim and went unperformed.

But when your subject is death, you can be sure that another occasion will arise soon enough. The work had its premiere in December 1837 at the funeral of Gen. Charles Denys, comte de Damrémont, killed in battle in Algeria, at Les Invalides, a hospital, home and church for military veterans.

Not to slight Damrémont, but the work, for huge chorus and multiple orchestras, is almost too grand to memorialize an individual. Though it is full of surprising subtleties, it represents Berlioz at his most grandiose, a formidable notion in itself: both untidy and glorious. Its most natural home today is on the concert stage, or rather, the stage and the balconies needed to accommodate the added batteries of brass instruments.