Generation after generation of French composers coveted the famous Prix de Rome, which was a two- or three-year residency at the Villa Medici in Rome offered to the most talented young composers.  Once they were installed in the sumptuous villa, however, they often found their stay unstimulating—at least this was the case with two of the greatest recipients of the prize, Hector Berlioz and Claude Debussy.

Berlioz never completed the two years he was supposed to spend in Italy.  He stayed a total of 14 months in Italy in 1831-32, but he was away from the villa more than half of that time.  It was a turbulent period in the young composer’s life.  He had left his fiancée, the pianist Camille Moke, behind in Paris.  Then shortly after his arrival in Rome, he received a letter from Camille’s mother, announcing her daughter’s marriage to the piano manufacturer Camille Pleyel.  Berlioz later related in his memoirs how he had equipped himself with a pair of double-barrelled pistols and two bottles of poison, and set out for Paris, ready for a terrible vengeance.  He got as far as Nice, where he abandoned his murderous plans and returned to Rome.

No wonder, then, that the composer was restless during his Roman residency.  He spent little time composing, even though he was required to send annual envois back to the Conservatoire.  Instead, he wandered in the Abruzzi mountains, hunting, mingling with the villagers, singing songs to his own guitar accompaniment, and dreaming romantic dreams.

After his return to France, Berlioz picked up where he had left off before Rome.  In December 1832, there was a repeat performance of the Symphonie fantastique, which had been premiered in 1830.  Soon afterwards, he introduced himself to the Irish actress Harriet Smithson (he had been infatuated with her since the time of composing the Fantastique, but had never seen her except on stage).  They got married on October 3, 1833, and their son Louis was born on August 14 of the following year.

It was during this period that Berlioz worked on Harold in Italy, which he completed shortly before the birth of his son.  He had been approached by violin legend Niccolò Paganini, who asked him for a viola concerto.  

He told me he had a Stradivarius viola, a marvelous instrument, which he wanted to play in public; but he lacked the right music.  Would I write him a piece for it?  ‟You are the only one I would trust with such a commission,” he said....So, to please the great man, I attempted to write a solo for the viola, but a solo combined with orchestral accompaniment in such a way as to leave the orchestra full freedom of action; for I was confident that, by the incomparable power of his playing, Paganini would be able to maintain the supremacy of the soloist.  The concept struck me as new; and before long a rather happy scheme for the work formed itself in my mind that I was eager to carry out.  No sooner was the first movement written that Paganini wanted to see it.  At the sight of so many rests in the viola part in the allegro he exclaimed:  ‟That’s no good.  There’s not enough for me to do here.  I should be playing all the time.”

Disappointed, Paganini lost interest in playing a Berlioz viola concerto.  Yet the composer went ahead with the composition, now free to work out his ‟happy scheme” without any external restrictions.  As a result, the composition turned out to be not a concerto at all, but a symphony in the traditional four-movement form (the only time Berlioz ever used that form), in which the solo viola and the orchestra interact in a highly innovative manner.

Unlike the Symphonie fantastique, Harold in Italy does not have a detailed literary program, only programmatic titles for each movement that explain some of the work’s more unusual features.  The Harold in the title is Childe Harold, the hero of Lord Byron’s narrative poem.  But Berlioz didn’t follow Byron’s poem closely; nor would this have been possible, since Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has no real plot.  It is more a series of philosophical and historical meditations on the journeys undertaken by this philosophically minded, disenchanted man.  Inspired by his own travels, Byron wrote Childe Harold in several installments.  He started it in Albania in 1809-10.  By 1812 he had finished the first two cantos, whose publication brought him immediate fame.  He added a third canto in 1816 and a fourth one in 1818; it is in this last canto that Harold visits Italy.

My idea was to write a series of orchestral scenes in which the solo viola was involved, to a greater or lesser extent, like an actual person, retaining the same character throughout.  I decided to give it as a setting the poetic impressions recollected from my wanderings in the Abruzzi, and to make it a kind of melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold....As in the Fantastic Symphony, a motto (the viola’s first theme) recurs throughout the work, but with the difference that whereas the theme of the Fantastic Symphony, the idée fixe, keeps obtruding like an obsessive idea on scenes that are alien to it and deflects the current of the music, the Harold theme is superimposed on the other orchestral voices so as to contrast with them in character and tempo without interrupting their development.

In light of this background, it should come as no surprise that the first movement is titled ‟Harold in the Mountains:  Scenes of Sadness, Happiness and Joy.”  The movement opens with a fugue-like passage over a chromatic subject in Adagio tempo that seems to evoke the mist of the mountains; eventually, the Harold theme is foreshadowed by the woodwinds in the minor mode.  Soon afterwards, the solo viola enters, and—with the accompaniment of the harp—presents the Harold theme in major, the form in which it will recur in all four movements of the symphony, always played by the solo viola.  (The Harold theme was first used in a work written in Rome, the overture Rob-Roy after Sir Walter Scott, which was withdrawn after a single unsuccessful performance.)  The accompaniment becomes more and more animated, preparing us for the ensuing Allegro in sonata form.  The energetic and vibrant Allegro section of ‟Harold in the Mountains” concludes with a coda that made history with its astonishing juxtapositions of the most distant keys of the tonal system.

The second movement, Allegretto, is a ‟March of the Pilgrims, Singing their Evening Prayer.”  The sustained chords of the woodwinds and harp at the beginning and the end imitate church bells, which are sometimes surprisingly dissonant.  First, the violins and the violas take turns playing the melody, which is repeated in several variations and is combined with the Harold theme.  There is a gradual crescendo until the dynamics reach forte.  The middle section is marked ‟Canto religioso” (religious song).  The double basses play the rhythm of the pilgrims’ march, while the rest of the strings intone a solemn chant against the arpeggios of the solo viola.  Then the pilgrims’ march grows more and more dissonant and finally disappears, leaving nothing but the sound of the bells.

The third movement, ‟Serenade of a Mountaineer of the Abruzzi to His Mistress,” Allegro assai, seems to have been inspired by a young man in the mountains named Crispino.  This character is described in the Memoirs as ‟that young scalliwag, half bandit, half irregular soldier....who had the audacity to claim he had been a brigand on the strength of having spent two years in the galleys.”  One night, Berlioz and Crispino went out to serenade the latter’s girlfriend with a duet sung to Berlioz’s guitar accompaniment.  This experience found a direct echo in the symphony, but Berlioz added the Harold theme, which reappears as a melancholy counterpoint to the cheerful serenade.  There are two distinct serenade themes in this movement, plus the Harold theme.  At the end of the movement, all three are heard simultaneously, with two different 6/8 meters going on at the same time (one twice as fast as the other).  Then the three melodies fade out, one after the other.  According to Berlioz, the conductor Narcisse Girard (who led the first performance) could never get this passage right.  The composer eventually made a resolution to conduct his works himself, which he went on to do with great success for the next three decades (the last concert he ever gave, the year before his death, took place in St. Petersburg and ended with Harold in Italy).

The fourth movement is entitled ‟Orgy of the Brigands:  Memories of Past Scenes.”  Berlioz spoke of a 

wild orgy where the several intoxications of wine, blood, joy, and rage all blended; where the rhythm now seems to stumble in one moment, now to rush madly ahead; where the brass instruments seem to vomit imprecations and to answer suppliant voices with blasphemies; where there is laughter, drinking, fighting, quarrelling, murder, violation; while from the solo viola (the dreamer Harold fleeing in terror) we hear in the distance some few tremulous notes of the Evening Hymn.

At the beginning of this movement, themes from the first three movements are brought back, as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (which was written only a decade earlier).  After the opening Adagio from the first movement, the Pilgrims’ March, the Serenade, and the Harold theme are recalled.  It is only after these quotations that the ‟orgy” really gets under way.  Interestingly, the solo viola has nothing to play for much of the movement; after the quotes, it doesn’t re-enter until shortly before the end.  Instead, we have a turbulent orchestral piece filled with fascinating metric intricacies.  Near the end, the Pilgrims’ March is heard again, played by two solo violins and a cello from a distance, as a perfect contrast to the demonic outburst that brings the symphony to its astounding conclusion.

From Byron’s Childe Harold:

Few—none—find what they love or could have loved,
Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
Necessity of loving, have removed
Antipathies—but to recur, ere long,
Envenom’d with irrevocable wrong;
And Circumstance, that unspiritual god
And miscreator, makes and helps along
Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
Whose touch turns Hope to dust,—the dust we all have trod.

(Canto IV, stanza 125)

Notes By Peter Laki