IV. March to the Scaffold

Hector Berlioz was born in 1803 in France. He studied science in higher education and won the Prix de Rome in 1825. Throughout his life, he composed a total of 116 works. His Symphonie Fantastique is an example of program music, which was a new art form at the time where the audience was given a program to read before hearing the piece. The program contains a story that transpires over the five movements of the symphony that is about his love for a woman and his journey of feelings for her that shift between sadness, hope, and dread. To represent his love interest, Berlioz incorporates an ideé fixe, or a fixed idea, which is a motif that is recurrent throughout the five movements

The fourth movement of Symphonie Fantastique is titled March to the Scaffold. Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes somber and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.