by Juan-David Domínguez
Symphonie fantastique was premiered on December 5, 1830, at the Paris Conservatoire. It is the first of four programmatic symphonies (music written to convey literary ideas) Berlioz composed, and for this reason it is considered a revolutionary work, being the first symphony in history to present a detailed program.
By tradition, the symphony genre was developed to express musical ideas with no literal meaning. Music before Beethoven largely carried an entertainment function; as late as 1839, Schubert’s C Major Symphony was performed with solos inserted between movements. Only with Beethoven did we begin to think of the symphony as a work of the same spiritual weight as a great poem, painting or drama. Conductor Habeneck, in the first performance of Beethoven that Berlioz ever heard, substituted the Allegretto of the seventh symphony for the Scherzo of the fifth. Today we think of the integrity of Bach’s, Haydn’s and Mozart’s as unquestionable, but this was not common practice at the time.
Symphonie fantastique is crucial in the way audiences began to think differently about what they were hearing in music. Disagreement begins as soon as listeners try to explain what they felt. In Berlioz’s program, the shift is that music conveys “literary” ideas. In other words, real life can be depicted in music. If we perceive reality in music, it becomes an analogy a translation into sound of human experience.
The symphony is structured in five movements, in which the symphonic plan is still respected: allegro, adagio, scherzo and a double finale. Berlioz wrote the program to help the public understand and attach ideas to what they were about to hear. People discussed what they read, not only what they heard. Instead of traditional tempo markings alone, each movement is given a title to evoke a clear idea. Nowadays, these titles could easily be reduced to familiar musical categories such as I. Appassionata; II. Waltz; III. Pastoral; IV. Death March; V. Witches’ Dance. However, the original names are as follows:
I. “Rêveries – Passions” (Daydreams – Passions)
II. “Un bal” (A Ball)
III. “Scène aux champs” (Scene in the Country)
IV. “Marche au supplice” (March to the Scaffold)
V. “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat” (Dream of a Night of the Sabbath)
Another revolutionary device in this symphony is what Berlioz called the idée fixe: the organization of musical elements around a single subject. This recurring musical theme symbolizes the “beloved,” inspired by Harriet Smithson. The theme appears throughout all five movements and provides unity to the work, although Berlioz had already experimented with this technique in earlier compositions and developed it further from his cantata days.
The musico-dramatic fusion is highly effective. Just as in a fugue, where the subject and answer suggest pursuit and tension, the recurring idée fixe creates a sense of chase, intensifying the drama until it reaches its climax in the final two movements.
by Hector Berlioz
A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.
He recalls first that soul-sickness, that vague des passions, those depressions, those groundless joys, that he experienced before he first saw his loved one; then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his frenzied suffering, his jealous rages, his returns to tenderness, his religious consolations.
He encounters the loved one at a dance in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant party.
One summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds piping a ranz des vachesin dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees gently brushed by the wind, the hopes he has recently found some reason to entertain — all concur in affording his heart an unaccustomed calm, and in giving a more cheerful color to his ideas. But she appears again, he feels a tightening in his heart, painful presentiments disturb him -what if she were deceiving him? - One of the shepherds takes up his simple tune again, the other no longer answers. The sun sets — distant sound of thunder- loneliness — silence.
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now somber and fierce, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sound of heavy steps gives way without transition to the noisiest clamor. At the end, the idée fixe returns for a moment, like a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.
He sees himself at the sabbath, in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved’s melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is no more than a dance tune, mean, trivial, and grotesque: it is she, coming to join the sabbath. — A roar of joy at her arrival. — She takes part in the devilish orgy. — Funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, sabbath round-dance. The sabbath round and the Dies irae combined.