Berlioz – Symphonie fantastique H. 48, Op. 14

by Max Derrickson

Hector Berlioz  (Born in La Côte-St.-André, Isère, France,1803; died in Paris, France,1869)

Symphonie fantastique (Episode de la vie d’un Artiste…en cinq parties) H. 48, Op. 14
Part I:  Dreams – Passions
Part II: A Ball
Part III: A Scene in the Country
Part IV: March to the Scaffold
Part V: Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath

When the Symphonie fantastique premiered in 1830 with Berlioz conducting, he insisted that a literary program be distributed to the audience (that translated program is reprinted below).  He explained that the program was “…indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic outline of the work.”  This story tells of a troubled young artist who sees a woman, his “Beloved,” who embodies all his ideals in a mate and he becomes disturbingly obsessed with her.  Both the thought and a musical representation of his Beloved plague him with increasing amplitude (what Berlioz called a double “idée fixe”).  His obsession leads him to try poisoning himself with opium, but the dose is insufficient.  Instead, it plunges him into horrible dreams where he murders his Beloved and he witnesses his own execution followed by a graphic and hellish funeral attended by witches and ghouls of the grimmest sort.

 

Astoundingly, the Symphonie’s program was semi-autobiographical.  In 1827, Berlioz’s fascination with Shakespeare brought him to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet by a visiting English troupe.  [. . .]

[. . .]  This is a masterpiece of opposites – alongside his highly creative developments of motives that range through a host of extreme emotions, Berlioz nonetheless maintains a pacing and balance that are spellbindingly controlled.  And the Symphonie’s instrumentation and orchestration transform sound possibilities for a century to come.  Twentieth-century French composer Oliver Messiaen said that the Symphonie fantastique began other composers’ first, genuine awareness of timbre in the orchestra.  Extremely precise about the colors he wanted, Berlioz scored for a range of unusual instruments and for new and different playing techniques.  For the first time, for example, we hear four timpanists creating chords (thunder in the third movement), and in the fourth movement, Berlioz scored for “ophecliedes” (a variation of the tuba).  Messiaen’s case in point was the church bells in the last movement.  These were shockingly new in the symphony, but without them, we might never have heard the famous 18 tuned anvils of Wagner’s Das Rheingold (1869) or the wonderful array of instruments in Mahler’s symphonies some 70 years later (such as mandolins, sleigh bells, or a giant wooden box hit with a hammer).

[. . .]

Berlioz’s Program:

 

Part I:  Dreams – Passions

The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted with that moral disease that a well-known writer calls the vague des passions, sees for the first time a woman that embodies all the charms of the ideal being in his dreams, and he falls desperately in love with her.  Through an odd whim, whenever the beloved image appears before the mind’s eye of the artist, it is linked with a musical thought whose character, passionate but at the same time noble and shy, he finds similar to the one he attributes to his beloved.

This melodic image and the model it reflects pursue him incessantly like a double idée fixe.  That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first Allegro.  The passage from this state of melancholic reverie, interrupted by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with its gestures of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolation – this is the true subject of the first movement.

 

Part II: A Ball

[. . .]