9 minute read
Symphonie Fantastique Op. 14
(Episode in the Life of an Artist ... in Five Sections)
(1830)
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I. II. III. IV. V. "Rêveries – Passions" (Daydreams – Passions) "Un bal" (A ball) "Scène aux champs" (Scene in the country) "Marche au supplice" (March to the scaffold) "Songe d'une nuit du sabbat" (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)
“...I have found only one way of completely satisfying this immense appetite for emotion, and this is music.”
— H. Berlioz, 1829
1830 was a tumultuous year for Berlioz and his homeland France, with the composer reportedly completing his Prix-deRome-winning cantata scant moments before the July Revolution broke out. The cantata, his fourth Prix entry, was preceded by the completion of this Symphonie Fantastique, an earth-shattering first symphony (of an eventual four) which “[staggered] the world”.
The political turmoil was to serve as a pale backdrop to Berlioz’s “romantic” life. In 1827, the aspiring conservatoire student had given up a career in medicine (to his family’s chagrin), and shortly after his first Prix attempt, was awestruck by a renowned company’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
More importantly - he became lovestruck by one Harriet Smithson who played Ophelia. Smithson, against prevailing odds of gender discrimination and establishment of theatre norms, went on to wow and inspire French audiences and artistes with her convincing yet natural acting, playing no small part in subsequent productions of Romeo & Julie, and drumming up public demand for showings of Shakespearean tragedies. Notwithstanding Berlioz’s record in preferring older women, she became his obsession, muse, and idée fixe (fixed idea), “a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind”.
Romantic and dramatic distractions aside, one cannot speak of the Symphonie without mentioning Beethoven - at a disastrous 1808 charity concert, his fateful Fifth and programmatic Sixth (Pastoral) symphonies had premiered in a frigid Vienna winter. Coincidentally, 1808 also saw Goethe’s first edition of his magnum opus Faust being published. Twenty years later, a young impressionable Hector Berlioz was introduced to these great masters’ works. The Symphonie (and its composer) became unmistakably infused with the rhythmic brilliance, cyclical elements, and illustrative potential that Beethoven exemplified, combined with Faust’s tragic love, dramatic narcotic use, and pacts with the devil:
I. "Rêveries – Passions" (Daydreams – Passions)
A wistful entry - yet, could it be? Echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth, but in an opposite emotion. A lengthy introduction, a self-borrowed tune Berlioz wrote for a poem he read in his childhood - Je vais donc quitter pour jamais (lit. I will therefore leave forever), expressing an “overwhelming grief of a young heart in the first pangs of a hopeless love.” Notice already the conflicts of four-against-six within the pulse. The beat and harmony never really settling, the melody forever wandering, until… BA-DUMP! A throbbing heart!? The “double idée fixe” i.e. the beloved appears! It or she will keep returning to torment the protagonist-artist who is Berlioz. This theme was self-borrowed from his second Prix de Rome attempt Herminie, from the main section “Quel trouble te poursuit, malheureuse Herminie! (What trouble pursues you, unhappy Herminie!)” Miraculously, after many attempts and metaphorical hours at Confessional, the artist manages to shake off the obsession, and his aching heart somehow finds peace after a good quarter-hour. Ominously, the original text of Herminie ended with “Dieu des chrétiens, toi que j'ignore (God of the Christians, you whom I ignore).”
II. "Un bal" (A ball)
Softly scintillating, made doubly posh by two harps; the beloved returns suddenly, uninvited.
III. "Scène aux champs" (Scene in the country)
A song of Swiss herdsmen. Is this heaven? Perhaps Beethoven conducts his Pastoral in paradise. It does seem like an eternity. The spectre of the beloved appears with approaching thunder rolling over the plains. Did you notice the other herdsman? Did you notice where he went?
The main theme is a self-borrowing of the Gratias of Berlioz’s first large and sacred work, his Messe Solemnelle, the score of which he tried to destroy but was later recovered.
The effect of rolling thunder is unique, unlike when evoked by Beethoven or Vivaldi, it seems to be of no natural origin, leading almost seamlessly to the next movement.
IV. "Marche au supplice" (March of the supplicants/ March to the scaffold)
The mad artist is in deep - having an opium dream.
A self-borrowing from a section of his unpublished opera Les Francs-Juges (The Judges of the Secret Court), Berlioz transforms the Marche des Gardes (March of the Guards) into a glorious, grotesque, inexorable procession.
A brief moment of sweetness arrives amidst the clangour. The artist’s memory of the beloved flashes before his
eyes right before HIS OWN EXECUTION occurs - the guillotine drops! His head rolls.
This movement is a crowd favourite.
V. "Songe d'une nuit du sabbat" (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)
All hell breaks loose; Macbeth’s witches run amok. Observe very creative (ab)use of instruments.
The toll of bells, Dies irae, mixed with the diabolical creatures reflects Berlioz’s internal conflicts - his romantic dramas, his mother’s damnation of his path of an artist. The artist is dead, and his soul is damned and forsaken by both God and the Devil. Although the premiere of the Symphonie Fantastique was delayed till winter 1830, Berlioz only met with his object of passion in winter 1832, a few days after Ms Smithson finally heard the Symphonie and its sequel Lelio, or The Return to Life, and learnt that all this music was all about her. By this time, Berlioz had gotten engaged, dumped, and had hatched (and thankfully later abandoned) a plot to murder his ex-fiancee and her family. He also travelled Italy, and met Felix Mendelssohn, after winning the Prix de Rome. Berlioz and Smithson finally married a year later despite either of them hardly speaking a word of the other’s language. She continued to be the muse for a few of Berlioz’s major works, but they separated after just over a decade. Towards the end of her life, Berlioz dutifully visited her daily after she became ill, and continued to provide financially.
This “most remarkable first symphony ever written by any composer”, at once a semi-autobiography, a love offering, and a catharsis, encapsulated a musical revolution in 1830, inspiring future greats such as Liszt and Mahler. The writing is technically imaginative and wild - including hand-stopped brasses, painstakingly specific and challenging timpani techniques, hitting strings with the wood of the bow, and wailing glissandi in the winds. Ironically, the Symphonie was in its time overshadowed by his other works like the orchestral cycle La Damnation de Faust (1846), and Berlioz seemingly declined in popularity until his “modern [revival] in the acid-tripping 1960s'', not least due to the widespread popularity of this Symphonie Fantastique.
— Anonymous reviewer
“This programme should be distributed to the audience at concerts where [the Symphonie fantastique] is included, as it is indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic plan of the work…
If the symphony is performed on its own as a concert piece this arrangement is no longer necessary: one may even dispense with distributing the programme and keep only the title of the five movements…”
— Hector Berlioz
Symphonie Fantastique: Episode in the Life of an Artist … in Five Sections
Programme by H. Berlioz (1845; rev. 1855)
A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe (fixed idea) which he meets and hears everywhere.
I.
II.
III.
"Rêveries – Passions" (Daydreams – Passions)
He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.
"Un bal" (A ball)
He meets his beloved again in a ball during a glittering fête.
"Scène aux champs" (Scene in the country)
One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their ‘Ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…
V.
"Marche au supplice" (March to the scaffold)
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow. "Songe d'une nuit du sabbat" (Dream of a witches' Sabbath)
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.
