Symphonie Fantastique: episode de la view d’un artiste, Op. 14.
HECTOR BERLIOZ (1803–1869)
Composed 1830, première: Paris, 1830.

“…some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
— Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The same might be said for madness: some are born mad, like Schumann, and some achieve madness. Did Berlioz achieve madness? Mendelssohn did not think so: “with all his efforts to go stark mad he never once succeeds.” When they met in 1831, Mendelssohn found Berlioz to be a “‘friendly, quiet, meditative person’ with an acute critical sense for everything except his own work, and he was depressed by the contrast.” As a young artist in the forefront of a Romantic movement in music, he understood the resources of the irrational side of consciousness as ready to be tapped. By what means did he drive himself toward madness? Cherchez la femme! He tried to thrust madness upon himself by carrying an obsession with an English actress Harriet Smithson as far as he could possibly take it. When the actress appeared in Paris as Ophelia, Berlioz, captivated by Shakespeare, was smitten with Smithson. As recorded by Berlioz, the whole affair epitomized romantic longing with countless love letters that went unanswered, missed encounters and reversals of fortune. During a lull in Berlioz’ pursuit, when it seemed that Smithson was having an affair with her manager, Berlioz found the necessary lucidity to compose the symphony.

Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven each exerted a powerful influence on Berlioz. Not only was Berlioz seeing Shakespeare performed for the first time, but he had just read Goethe’s Faust, and had just attended the Paris première of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. While Berlioz sought to bring the literary character of Shakespeare and Goethe to the symphony, the most pressing influence was Beethoven’s. Like Schubert and Mendelssohn, Berlioz found himself wrestling with the problem of symphonic composition in the shadow of Beethoven. The solution Berlioz came up with led to the incorporation of many elements that preserve the scale of the Beethoven symphony while altering the sound and scope.

The Symphonie Fantastique is a programmatic work, which means that there is an explicit narrative for each of the movements as well as for the symphony as a whole. A recurring theme throughout the symphony called the idée fixe ties the various movements together. The theme represents “the artist’s obsession with the woman he adores.” Early in the first movement the melody soars resisting any accompaniment that would confine it harmonically. It is a theme won’t listen to reason, delighted in its own obsession. This is also the kind of theme Beethoven would never have used. It lacks concision and potential for development. The idée fixe is a glorious song that persists in its obsession even as it becomes progressively haunted and deformed.

…from this state of melancholic reverie, interrupted by a few fits of groundless joy, to one of frenzied passion, with its movements of fury, of jealousy, its return to tenderness, its tears its religious consolations—this is the subject of the first movement.

The scene shifts to a grand ball for the second movement where “the artist finds himself in the most varied situations…but everywhere—in town, in country—the beloved’s image appears before him and disturbs his peace of mind.”

Loneliness is the subject of the third movement whose setting is out in the country. Here the artist finds himself listening to the shepherd’s pipes answering one another until: “the other no longer replies. Distant sounds of thunder—loneliness—silence.

The final two movements, the March to the Scaffold and Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath are two of the most famous and on occasion, like Halloween, played alone. Berlioz’s claim that he composed the March in one night strikes scholar and pianist Charles Rosen as entirely plausible since Berlioz “merely copied it out from a work written a few years before, Les Francs-juges.” About the March, Berlioz writes, “Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The does of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that his is condemned and led to the scaffold.” Just before the fatal blow, the idée fixe reappears. Finally, Berlioz sees himself “in the midst of a frightful troop of ghosts, sorcerers and monsters of every kind, who have come together for his funeral.” A round dance combined with the Dies Irae creates one of the eeriest and most spectacular orchestrations in all his works.

© Steven J. Cahn, 2009
Steven J. Cahn is Program Annotator of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony. He is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati.