Hector Berlioz
Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14
Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte-Saint-André, France, in 1803 and died in Paris in 1869. He completed his Symphony Fantastique in 1830, and it was performed in Paris the same year under the direction of François-Antoine Haberneck. The symphony is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 ophicleides (usually substituted with 2 tubas), timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and strings.
*****
“I am plunged in the anguish of an interminable and inextinguishable passion . . . all my remembrances awake and unite to wound me; I hear my heart beating, and its pulsations shake me as the piston strokes of a steam engine. Each muscle of my body shudders with pain. Useless! Frightening!”

With this hyperbolic prose Berlioz described his infatuation with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom Berlioz had seen play Ophelia and Juliet in Paris. He had yet to meet the woman. He bombarded her with feverish love letters, which frankly scared her off. She returned to England; he, at age 26, composed his Symphonie Fantistique.

Berlioz subtitled his work “Episode in the life of an artist” and gave audiences the following scenario:

“A young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature and endowed with vivid imagination has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of lovesick despair. The narcotic dose he had taken was too weak to cause death, but it has thrown him into a long sleep accompanied by extraordinary visions. In this condition his sensations, his feelings, and his memories find utterance in his sick brain in the form of musical imagery. Even the Beloved One takes the form of a melody in his mind, like a fixed idea which is ever returning and which he hears everywhere.”

This bit of melody, which Berlioz called an idée fixe, is first played by the violins in the Allegro of the first movement; it returns throughout the symphony to haunt the young musician.

I.  Dreams, Passions. “The young musician sees for the first time a woman who embodies all the charms of the ideal being of whom he has dreamed, and he falls helplessly in love with her . . . he thinks of his almost insane anxiety of mind, of his raging jealousy, of his reawakening love, of his religious consolation.”

II.  A Ball. “In a ballroom, amidst the confusion of a brilliant festival, he finds the Beloved One again.”

III. Scene in the Fields. “Finding himself in the country at evening, he hears in the distance two shepherds piping the call to their flocks. He reflects on his isolation; he hopes that soon he will no longer be alone. His heart stops beating: what if she were deceiving him? At the end, one of the shepherds resumes his melody, but the other no longer replies . . . the distant sound of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence.”

IV.  March to the Scaffold. “He dreams he has murdered his Beloved, has been condemned to death, and is being led to his execution. At last, the idée fixe returns, and for a moment a last thought of love is revived—only to be cut short by the deathblow.” We hear the chop of the guillotine, the plop of the head into the basket, and the cheer of the crowd.

V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. “He dreams that he is present at a witches’ revel, surrounded by horrible spirits, amidst sorcerers and monsters in many fearful forms, who have come together for his funeral. The Beloved melody is heard again, but it has lost its shy and noble character; it has become a vulgar, trivial, grotesque dance tune.” A bell tolls for the dead and the witches’ round dance combines with the dies irae in the movement’s blazing rush to the end.

It is easy to make light of Berlioz’ histrionic emotional states, but the musical originality of Symphonie Fantastique—composed a mere three years after the death of Beethoven—is almost beyond comprehension. Program music had never before been carried to this extreme—we are a long way, here, from the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo of Beethoven’s Sixth—and there was no looking back. Likewise, the use of a recurring theme was not new, but never had such a theme driven a whole work, dramatically and musically, as did Berlioz’ idée fixe. And the whole sound of the work, with its orchestral color coming in infinite gradations between exquisite and grotesque, was nothing less than revolutionary. The “young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature and endowed with vivid imagination” had composed the most remarkable first symphony ever written.