Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803 in La Côte-St.-André, near Grenoble and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. A leading figure in French romanticism, his early Symphonie fantastique, remains his most popular score. Its premiere took place on December 5, 1830 at a special concert produced by the composer in the Salle du Conservatoire, Paris, with François-Antoine Habeneck conducting. The work is scored for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets, 4 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets à pistons, 3 trombones, 2 tubas (originally ophicleides), timpani (4), percussion, 2 harps, and strings.

The dividing line between imagination and reality in Berlioz’s life was scarcely perceptible. Such was also the case between his art and his life. What creative outlet would this most sensitive of individuals have found had he fulfilled his father’s desire that he become a physician? The young man’s artistic soul knew better. He risked all to follow his muse, doing so with an integrity rarely equalled in history. He lay bare his innermost fantasies in the shape of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms that would rock the musical establishments of his time, and that jar and surprise even today. Posterity has judged Berlioz to belong to the Pantheon of greatness, but not without a struggle. The Symphonie fantastique, composed in 1830 (revised in 1831), was the work that launched his controversial career. It remains his most popular work to this day.

There is a tendency among critcs to claim that Berlioz composed with more enthusiasm and inspiration than skill or care. Idiosyncrasy has often been confused with lack of discipline. Berlioz, however, cared only for expressivity, even at the risk of exploring uncharted waters. But he did not travel without a compass. His lodestones and models were Gluck, Weber, Mozart, and Beethoven. Adam Carse once characterized Berlioz as an individual “whom Nature, perhaps rather capriciously, decided to make a Frenchman.” Berlioz was French from head to toe, however, as evidenced by many places in his scores that reveal his indebtedness to Gossec, Leseuer, Mehul, Meyerbeer, and others who flourished in France. His literary Gods were Virgil, Goethe, and Shakespeare. This last figure especially fired his imagination. Berlioz found in Shakespeare a true dramatic kindred spirit, and it is here that reality and fantasy in the Symphonie fantastique merge.

Berlioz had fallen in love with an Anglo-Irish actress, Harriet Smithson. Her Parisian performance as Ophelia in Hamlet on September 11, 1827 so beguiled the young composer, that he was unable to separate the actress from her role. She knew nothing of him as yet. He wrote letters to her and made other efforts to bring his name to her attention, but by the time she left Paris in 1829, the two had not yet met. All the while, the Symphonie fantastique, which Berlioz called an Episode from the Life of an Artist, was taking shape. The music and its program evolved simultaneously. Much of its thematic material, however, had already existed in other contexts. The opening theme of the first movement’s introduction, for example, was a melody from a setting of a text by Florian entitled Estelle et Nemorin (1823). His cantata, Herminie, composed in 1828, provided the theme that became the Symphony’s idée fixe. An excerpt from his opera, Les Francs-juges (1826) provided material for the Marche au supplice. Additional literary inspiration came from Nerval’s translation of Goethe’s Faust.

After the Symphonie fantastique’s first performance in Paris on December 5, 1830, Berlioz recalled that the second, fourth, and fifth movements “created a sensation.” A printed program was issued to the audience out of Berlioz’s awareness that his work contained radical elements whose expressive purposes would not be understood. When Berlioz composed the rarely-performed sequel to the Symphonie fantastique, a monodrama entitled Lélio, or the Return to Life in 1832, he revised his program, indicating that only the titles for each movement be issued to the audience whenever the Symphony is performed separated from Lélio. As fate would have it, Harriet Smithson had returned to Paris in 1832 in time to hear the first performance of both parts of the Episode in the Life of an Artist, and Berlioz contrived to have her present for the concert. She quickly realized that she was the idée fixe, the object of his affection and suffering. Berlioz and Smithson became married in 1833, only to drift apart by 1842. Harriet, as fate would have it, was not Ophelia.

The premise of the Symphonie fantastique is an opium dream. Beset with doubts and jealous love, the artist attempts to commit suicide, but succeeds only in achieving a hallucinatory state marked by strange visions. His beloved takes the form of a melody (the idée fixe) that returns in each movement:

I. Reveries; Passions

II. A Ball

III. Scene in the Country

IV. March to the Scaffold

V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath

Berlioz characterized the idée fixe as “passionate but at the same time noble and shy.” It first appears at the onset of the Allegro agitato e appassionato assai in the first movement, rendered by the unison violins and flute. Berlioz’s program tells that this movement depicts expressions “of fury, of jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.” Many of these emotional states may be perceived by listeners. The second movement, A Ball places the artist in the midst of a gay party. The middle section of its tripartite structure centers on a transformed version of the idée fixe. The Scene in the Country opens with a dialogue between the English horn and an off-stage oboe, representing the artist and his beloved respectively. This Alpine “ranz des vaches” (cattle call) leads to a calm musical paragraph that is interrupted by angry lower strings, stirred up by the image of the idée fixe in the woodwinds. The calm follows this jealous storm, but by movement’s end, the English horn call is answered only by silence and distant thunder, an effect that Berlioz achieves by means of four timpani. The spectacular March au supplice fills in the gap of any story line that may be followed. The artist dreams that he has murdered his beloved and is now being led to his own execution for the crime. This movement is a clinic in orchestral color that features two themes.The first of these is a sinister descending minor scale, while the second is a patriotic-sounding march in the brass instruments. The first theme at one point is given a “sound-color-melody” treatment (to use a term later applied to the music of Anton Webern) that points out Berlioz’s advanced orchestral thinking, giving each note, or group of notes, its own unique timbre. The movement ends with a brief recollection of the idée fixe in the clarinet before blade falls. One can literally heard the head roll into the basket, followed by the cheering of the mob.

The last movement, which may have been inspired in part by Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz (a work for which Berlioz later would compose recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue), completes the nightmare. Here is a panoply of ghoulish orchestral gestures representing a musical Walpurgisnacht. The tempo picks up with a final, horrible transformation of the idée fixe, now squawked raucously by an E-flat soprano clarinet. Tolling church bells reveal the purpose of this hellish revel: it is the artist’s funeral. The famous medieval plainchant, Dies irae, normally only heard at funerals, but never before in the concert hall, is solemnly incanted by tubas and bassoons. Each phrase is answered by horns and trombones and mercilessly mocked by the woodwinds. The witches begin their contrapuntal dance of celebration, which climaxes with its combination with the Dies irae. In a final brilliant

orchestral stroke, one can sense rattling bones and the fires of hell as produced by the violins and violas as they bounce their bows with the wooden side (col legno) on their strings.

Berlioz, the first true master of modern orchestration, calls for an immense orchestra for his day, comprising two each of flutes, oboes, and clarinets (with doubling on piccolo, English horn, and E-flat clarinet), four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, (originally ophicleides), four timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, bells, two harps, and strings. The astounding effects created by these forces seem all the more impressive when one contemplates that this work was composed only three years after Beethoven’s death. The Symphonie fantastique was a work that took the symphony in a bold new direction which paved the way for not only Berlioz’s later works, but those of Liszt, Wagner, Richard Strauss, and many others.

Program Note by David B. Levy © 2006/2015/2025