Programme note
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
Symphonie fantastique (1830–32)
1 Daydreams – Passions: Largo – Allegro agitato e appassionato assai
2 A Ball. Waltz: Allegro non troppo
3 Scene in the fields: Adagio
4 March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo
5 Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto – Allegro
With all its innovations – including the introduction of instruments, textures and rhythms new to symphonic music – the Symphonie Fantastique has its roots in other music, past and present: not least the music of Gluck and Spontini, which was for several years Berlioz’s main diet and whose melodic style he absorbed into his innermost being when he first came to Paris in 1821, a boy of 17 who had never heard an orchestra. A few years later, the discovery of Weber, and still more of Beethoven at the Conservatoire concerts in 1828 (paralleling that of Goethe and Shakespeare) had an even more profound effect on the young musician till then reared on French classical opera. The Fantastique is unthinkable without Beethoven’s Pastoral and Fifth, and without Der Fresichütz. Above all, the revelation of the symphony as a dramatic form par excellence, and of the orchestra as an expressive instrument of undreamed of richness and flexibility, opened before him a new world which he must at all costs enter and inhabit.
It became the springboard for a leap into unknown territory. The influence of Beethoven could only be general, not specific; it was a matter of inspiration, not imitation. So, though Berlioz is deeply concerned with issues of musical architecture, he works out his own salvation. Though he will learn from Beethoven’s technique of thematic transformation, he will not use him as a model. He composes in melodic spans rather than in motifs. The work’s recurring melody – the idée fixe – is forty bars long; and its repetition two thirds of the way through the first movement represents not a sonata reprise but a stage in the theme’s evolution from monody to full orchestral statement.
No one had composed symphonic music or used the orchestra like this before. As Michael Steinberg says, ‘no disrespect to Mahler or Shostakovich, but this is the most remarkable First Symphony ever written’. It was typical of Berlioz’s boldness and freedom of spirit that his first major orchestral work comprised a mixture of genres analogous to what the Romantic dramatists were attempting after the example of Shakespeare – bringing the theatre into the concert hall - and that in doing so he should override the normal categories of symphonic discourse and create his own idiosyncratic version of classical form in response to the demands of the musical drama: the ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’ that is the work’s subtitle.
Yet the score given at the Conservatoire Hall in December 1830 was, to him, a logical consequence of the Beethovenian epiphany that he had had two years earlier in the same hall. It was addressed to the same eager young public and performed by many of the same players, under the same conductor, François Antoine Habeneck.
It might embody autobiographical elements: not just his much publicised passion for the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, but his whole emotional and spiritual existence up till then – as he wrote at the front of the manuscript, quoting a poem by Victor Hugo, ‘All I have suffered, all I have attempted … The loves, the labours, the bereavements of my youth… my heart’s book inscribed on every page’. For Berlioz, however, all this was not essentially different from what Beethoven had done in his Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Carrying on from him, he could use intense personal experience, and movement titles, to bring music’s inherent expressivity still further into the open and at the same time extend its frame of reference and blur still more the distinction between so-called ‘pure music’ and music associated with an identifiable human situation. All sorts of extra-musical ideas could go into the composition, yet music remained sovereign. It could describe the course of one man’s hopeless passion for a distant beloved and still be - as Beethoven said of the ’Pastoral’ - ‘expression of feeling rather than painting’, the whole contained within a disciplined musical structure.
The literary ‘programme’ offered to the Conservatoire audience gave the context of the work; it introduced the ‘instrumental drama’ (to quote Berlioz’s prefatory note) whose ‘outline, lacking the assistance of speech, needs to be explained in advance’. It is not this that holds the symphony together and makes it a timeless record of the ardours and torments of the young imagination. The music does that.
The five movements may be summed up as follows:
1 Slow introduction; sadness and imagined happiness, creating out of a state of yearning an image of the ideal woman, represented (Allegro) by the idée fixe – a long, asymmetrically phrased melodic span, first heard virtually unaccompanied, then gradually integrated into the full orchestra. The melody, in its alternate exaltation and dejection, its fevers and momentary calms, forms the main argument. At the end, like a storm that has blown itself out, it comes to rest on a series of solemn chords.
2 A ball, at which the beloved is present. Waltz, at first dreamlike, then glittering, finally garish. Middle section with the idée fixe assimilated to the rhythm of the dance.
3 A shepherd pipes a melancholy song, answered from afar by another. Pastoral scene: a long, serene melody, with similarities of outline to the idée fixe and, like it, presented as monody, by flute and first violins, then in progressively fuller textures. Agitated climax, precipitated by the idée fixe, which later takes on a more tranquil air (without its characteristic sighing fourth). Dusk, distant storm. The first shepherd now pipes alone. Drums and solo horn prepare for:
4 March to the Scaffold. The artist imagines he has killed the beloved and is being marched through the streets to execution. The dreams of the first three movements are now intensified into nightmare and the full orchestral forces deployed: massive brass and percussion, prominent and grotesque bassoons. The idée fixe reappears pianissimo on solo clarinet, but is cut off by the guillotine stroke of the whole orchestra.
5 Strange mewings, muffled explosions, distant cries. The executed lover witnesses his own funeral. The beloved melody, now a lewd distortion of itself, joins the revels. ‘Dies irae’, parody of the church’s ritual of the dead. Witches’ round dance. The climax, after a long crescendo, combines round dance and ‘Dies irae’ in a tour de force of rhythmic and orchestral virtuosity.
© David Cairns
