Nuits d'été & La damoiselle élue is a 51-minute studio album of songs by Hector Berlioz and a cantata by Claude Debussy performed by Frederica von Stade, Susanne Mentzer, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Seiji Ozawa.

"Villanelle" was lowered from F to A, robbing the vocal line of some of its radiance and making the woodwinds and other instruments in Ozawa's "smooth and detached" orchestra sound less joyous than they should have done.

"Au cimetière", likewise, was lowered from D to B flat, while "Le spectre de la rose" was transposed upwards from B to C. One did not need perfect pitch to notice how these alterations had introduced a degree of awkwardness into the transitions from one song to the next.

Listening to Frederica von Stade's Les nuits d'été, he wrote, his soul was moved in a way that it had not been when he had heard the cycle performed by Hildegard Behrens[11] or Suzanne Danco.

In La damoiselle élue, Barbara Hendricks[9] had looked forward to her reunion with her lover with a "childlike sense of anticipation"; von Stade, "more private and vulnerable, expresses a deeper, more tender longing".

In Les nuits d'été, she was eloquent in the cycle's two most familiar songs, "Le spectre de la rose" and "Absence", singing both with "beautiful control and sense of line".

[14] A miniature drama about a dead young woman in heaven waiting for her beloved to join her, La damoiselle élue was a piece that could sometimes lapse into "a mawkish sweet-sadness".

Von Stade avoided this trap in a performance that shone a bright light on the dualities of Rossetti's vision, with its mixture of eroticism and purity, craving and holiness, hope and acquiescence, the sublunar and the celestial.

[14] John Steane revisited the album in Gramophone in January 1988, reviewing a compilation disc that combined von Stade's Les nuits d'été and La damoiselle élue with her earlier recording of Ravel's Shéhérazade.

It had to be conceded that some particularly loud or high notes reminded one that she was no longer a youngster, and her voice lacked the power needed to do full justice to Berlioz's climaxes.

It was inevitable, he thought, that even some singers as astute and alert as Frederica von Stade should struggle with the challenges of songs as elusive as those of Berlioz's cycle.

"[18] Alan Blyth provided a detailed comparison of von Stade's Les nuits d'été with other performances of the cycle in his book Song on Record.

[10][14] Also in 1984, CBS Masterworks issued the album on CD (catalogue number MK 39098), with a 20-page booklet including the same notes, texts and translations as were provided with the LP.

[21] In 1987, Sony issued a compilation CD (catalogue number SMK 60031) that supplemented the contents of the album with von Stade's recording of Ravel's Shéhérazade.