Eighteen-hundred thirty was an extraordinary year in the political and cultural history of France. On February 25, the Comédie-Française premiered Hernani by the 28-year-old Victor Hugo, a drama that openly challenged the conventions of classical drama, and it came to an outright battle between the conservatives and the defenders of the new work. Then, in July, the fighting hit the streets as the revolution broke out. The Bourbon dynasty, overthrown in the Great Revolution of 1789 but restored to power in 1815, was finally ousted for good, and Louis-Philippe, the ‟Citizen King,” assumed the throne to preside over an era of modernization. On December 5, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was performed for the first time at the Conservatoire. The premiere was somewhat overshadowed by the political events, but the 27-year-old Berlioz’s first large orchestral work, written in the wake of the Hernani scandal and shortly before the July Revolution, clearly exudes the revolutionary spirit of the time.
Berlioz claimed to ‟take up music where Beethoven had left it off.” The Fantastique is certainly indebted to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony ("Pastorale"), in which a fifth movement had been added to the usual four and each movement had a programmatic title. But Berlioz took the idea of program music much further than Beethoven had done. In addition to providing titles for the symphony as a whole ("Episode from the Life of an Artist") and its individual movements, Berlioz wrote an extensive literary program that he insisted should be distributed to the audience in the concert hall.
In the first edition of 1845, the program read as follows:
The composer's intention has been to treat of various states in the life of an artist, insofar as they have musical quality. Since this instrumental drama lacks the assistance of words, an advance explication of its plan is necessary. The following program, therefore, should be thought of as if it were the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce the musical movements and to explain their character and expression.
Episode in the Life of an Artist
First Movement
Daydreams—Passions
The composer imagines that a young musician, troubled by that spiritual sickness which a famous writer* has called "le vague des passions," sees for the first time a woman who possesses all the charms of the ideal being he has dreamed of, and falls desperately in love with her. By some strange trick of fancy, the beloved vision never appears to the artist's mind except in association with a musical idea, in which he perceives the same character—impassioned, yet refined and diffident—that he attributes to the object of his love. This melodic image and its model pursue him unceasingly like a double idée fixe. That is why the tune at the beginning of the first allegro constantly recurs in every movement of the symphony. The transition from a state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by several fits of aimless joy, to one of delirious passion, with its impulses of rage and jealousy, its returning moments of tenderness, its tears, and its religious solace, is the subject of the first movement.
Second Movement
A Ball
The artist is placed in the most varied circumstances: amid the hubbub of a carnival, in peaceful contemplation of the beauty of nature—but everywhere, in town, in the meadows, the beloved vision appears before him, bringing trouble to his soul.
Third Movement
In the Meadows
One evening in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds playing the ranz des vaches**; this pastoral duet, the effect of his surroundings, the slight rustle of the trees gently stirred by the wind, certain feelings of hope which he has been recently entertaining—all combine to bring an unfamiliar peace to his heart, and a more cheerful color to his thoughts. He thinks of his loneliness; he hopes soon to be alone no longer... But suppose she deceives him!... This mixture of hope and fear, these thoughts of happiness disturbed by dark forebodings, form the subject of the Adagio. At the end, one of the shepherds again takes up the ranz des vaches; the other no longer answers... Sounds of distant thunder... solitude... silence...
Fourth Movement
March to the Scaffold
The artist, now knowing beyond doubt that his love is not returned, poisons himself with opium. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to take his life, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most terrible visions. He dreams that he has killed the woman he loved, and that he is condemned to death, brought to the scaffold, and witnesses his own execution. The procession is accompanied by a march that is sometimes fierce and somber, sometimes stately and brilliant; loud crashes are followed abruptly by the dull thud of heavy footfalls. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe recur like a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal stroke.
Fifth Movement
Sabbath Night's Dream
He sees himself at the witches' sabbath, in the midst of a ghastly crowd of spirits, sorcerers, and monsters of every kind, assembled for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, far-off shouts to which other shouts seem to reply. The beloved tune appears once more, but it has lost its character of refinement and diffidence; it has become nothing but a common dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who has come to the sabbath... A roar of joy greets her arrival... She mingles with the devilish orgy... Funeral knell, ludicrous parody of the Dies irae, sabbath dance. The sabbath dance and the Dies irae in combination.
Anyone having read this program is likely to remember the witches, the execution and the ball, but it is easy to forget the very first sentence, according to which these figures and events are represented "insofar as they have musical quality" (dans ce qu'elles ont de musical). In other words, the program isn't really an "extra-musical" one, since it builds upon musical types such as dance, march or plainchant, endowing them with some more concrete meanings. Music and program are strongly interdependent: the musical style of the symphony, with its many unusual features, would hardly make sense without the program, but the program itself is full of musical references.
Some of the dreams described in the program were undoubtedly Berlioz's own (and we know that he had tried opium shortly before writing the symphony). There was a woman in real life who seemed to him to "possess all the charms of the ideal being"; this idée fixe was named Harriet Smithson, an Irish-born actress playing Shakespearean roles in an English company in Paris. Berlioz fell madly in love with Smithson after seeing her on stage just once, and his passion was burning for several years even though he had never met her in person. (They did eventually meet; they got married, had a son, were unhappy ever after, and, finally, separated—but that's quite another story.)
The Symphonie fantastique reflects Berlioz's intense feelings at the time of his infatuation with Harriet Smithson; yet some of the work's themes came from earlier compositions. The tune of the opening Largo was taken from a song of Berlioz's adolescence, and parts of the idée fixe may be found in an early cantata. Most importantly, the fourth-movement March seems to have come from Berlioz's unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges ("The Self-Appointed Judges," 1826), a tale about a band of vigilantes in medieval Germany (we have only indirect knowledge of this connection since the march does not survive in its original form). Some critics have argued that the presence of these self-borrowings diminishes the relevance of the program (after all, some of the music was originally composed with other ideas in mind), but in reality, the program and the new context effectively change the meaning of these borrowed themes which fit in perfectly with the newly composed materials.
To start at the beginning—the slow introduction to the first movement—there is so much more to it than that tune taken from a childhood essay. It contains some highly agitated passages where the conventional melody is suddenly swept away by utterly new sounds. The Allegro agitato has been said to be a fairly regular sonata movement; yet the exposition is extremely brief and consists merely of the first appearance of the idée fixe, followed by what could be described as transition material (containing some truly hair-raising modulations). The development section is interrupted by a passage in which all thematic relationships are suspended: all we hear is ascending and descending chromatic scales in the strings, with frightening interjections from woodwinds and horns. Then, a three-measure general rest follows, after which all the rules of the sonata form are thrown overboard. It is at this point that we hear the only complete recapitulation of the idée fixe (but not in the home key), followed by more development, including a wonderful counterpoint to the idée fixe played by the solo oboe (we are told that it was a compositional afterthought). The idée fixe, in varied form, is soon taken up by the whole orchestra, but by this time we are clearly in the coda of the movement. The first segment of the idée fixe and a series of C-major and F-major chords end the movement, to be played, according to Berlioz's instructions, "as soft as possible."
The second movement ("A Ball") had originally stood in third place, but Berlioz soon reversed the two movements, so that a central slow movement is now flanked by a dance and a march. The ball scene starts with a transition from the first movement's C major to A major, the key of the waltz that follows. The dance is twice interrupted by the idée fixe that appears in foreign keys to "disturb the artist's peace of mind."
The third movement ("In the Meadows") opens with a melody invoking the ranz des vaches, a traditional horn tune from the Swiss Alps, played by the shepherds as they drive their cattle to or from the pasture. (Another famous evocation of the ranz des vaches is in Rossini’s William Tell overture, written just a year before the Fantastique.) Berlioz scored the melody as a dialogue between the English horn and the oboe (the latter positioned behind the scene). It is not an actual quote from an alpine folksong; yet Robert Schumann found it so convincing that he wrote in his review of the symphony: "Just wander about the Alps and other shepherds' haunts and listen to the shawms and alphorns; that's exactly the way they sound." The movement's main theme is introduced by the flute and the first violins (the same combination that played the idée fixe for the first time!) and brought to a climax by the full orchestra. The idée fixe is then heard again in the flute and the oboe. The meadow scene has a symmetrical structure; after the idée fixe, the main theme returns, followed by a coda in which we hear the ranz des vaches again.
The fourth movement, "March to the Scaffold," is one of the wonders of orchestration, with effects such as the pizzicatos (plucked strings) of the divided double basses and the innovative tremolos of the timpani. The movement's first idea is a seven-note descending scale figure superimposed on a six-note rhythmic pattern—because of this discrepancy, the music never repeats itself exactly. The second idea is a regular march theme dominated by the distinctive sonority of the brass, especially the trombones and ophicleides (an obsolete instrument now replaced by tubas). At the end of this movement, the solo clarinet intones the idée fixe, as the artist's last thought before the guillotine comes down on him with a fatal blow.
It is perhaps in the last movement that Berlioz went the farthest in his innovations of both sound and musical form. The slow introduction to this movement with its special uses of percussion and novel wind effects creates an eerie suspense, into which bursts a cruel parody of the idée fixe, first scored for C-clarinet, and then for the shrill-sounding small E-flat clarinet. It is the image of the artist's beloved turned into a witch and showing up at the sabbath! The "devilish orgy" begins with the Gregorian melody of the "Dies irae," the sequence from the Mass of the Dead, presented in slow notes by the bassoons and tubas, repeated in a faster tempo by the horns, and finally transformed into a dance tune by the woodwind. The witches begin a round dance which is eventually combined with the "Dies irae" and brings the symphony to a truly blood-curdling close.
Many listeners in the 1830s were completely taken aback by the novelties of Berlioz's symphony. The musicologist François-Joseph Fétis wrote a scathing review, but even as great a musician as Mendelssohn found it "utterly loathsome" and depressing, even though he and Berlioz were friends. It is all the more surprising that Schumann devoted one of the longest and most analytical of his critical essays to the Fantastique. Schumann had not heard the piece and knew it only from Liszt's published piano transcription. His review, written in response to Fétis's attack, was full of admiration. Although he did see some flaws in the work, he was one of the first to recognize Berlioz's genius. As a direct result of his article, the French composer's name became widely known in German musical circles, and his international career was under way.
* The "famous writer" is François-René Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose René was widely read at the time. In this book, Chateaubriand defined "the vagueness of passion" as an emotional state that "precedes the development of great passions, when all the faculties, young, lively, and whole, but closed, have only acted on themselves, without aim and without object."
** The ranz des vaches is "a type of Swiss mountain melody played on the alphorn by herdsmen to summon their cows." (Harvard Dictionary of Music)
Notes by Peter Laki