Symphonie fantastique, Op.14

Of the five movements of the Symphonie fantastique - a wildly romantic story of frustrated love told through drug-induced erotic dreams and nightmares - the March to the Scaffold is one of the most frightening and at the same time one of the most thrilling. What is happening, according to the composer’s own account, is that the hero “is dreaming that he has killed his beloved and, condemned to death, is being led to the scaffold.” It is a masterful study in lugubrious orchestral colour with macabre muffled drums, weird lower brass and bassoons, militant cornets and frantic strings. Just before the fatal crunch of the guillotine at the end, he utters a last cry for the beloved high on clarinet.

“Vienna without Strauss is like Austria without the Danube,” wrote Hector Berlioz on the death of Johann I in 1849. Clearly, Strauss had his fans in France too. It is unlikely, however, that he had any influence on the waltz movement, Un bal, in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Johann I did not take his orchestra out of Austria until 1833, when they travelled down the Danube to Pest, and they first appeared in Paris only in 1837 - seven years after the Symphonie fantastique was first performed at the Conservatoire.

The more likely influence on Un bal was Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, which was written in 1819 and was one of the first examples of the concert waltz, a coherent sequence of waltz tunes, of the kind later developed by the Strauss family. It is true that Berlioz did not make his famous orchestral arrangement of Invitation to the Dance until 1841 but he would have known Weber’s piano original long before that. Anyway, the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique, the equivalent of the scherzo in a classical symphony, is a brilliant waltz most imaginatively scored, particularly for the two harps. The abrupt change of mood and the entry of a new melody on flute and oboe represents the moment where the hero of the story behind the work catches sight of his beloved among the dancers. She is briefly glimpsed again, in more reflective mood on clarinet, just before the acceleration at the end.

No one present at the first performance of the Symphonie fantastique at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830 could possibly have heard anything like it before. The Parisian public was only just getting to know the symphonies of Beethoven and here, only three years after the master’s death, was a scarcely known young Frenchman stretching the capacity of the form to spectacularly new expressive and acoustic dimensions.

What had enabled Berlioz to make this break-through was nothing less than the full-scale romantic agony of unrequited love. The object of his adoration, the beautiful Irish actress Harriet Smithson who had been such a sensation as Ophelia and Juliet at the Odéon in Paris in 1827, would have absolutely nothing to do with him, in spite of all his efforts to get to know her. While he was under her spell, however, it was impossible for him to get to work on the music she inspired in him. It was only when he renounced her - after her morality had been called into question by a younger rival whom he very nearly married on the rebound - that he could start on the Symphonie fantastique. It was then put together, though not entirely in the form we now know, within a couple of months.

Before the first performance Berlioz issued a detailed “programme” of the moods, scenes and surreal situations in which the composer-hero finds himself and against which he projects the image of his feminine ideal. Some years later, confident that the music has its own interest apart from the dramatic element, he declared that the titles of the five movements should be explanation enough.

Certainly, the first movement is clearly designed as a symphonic Allegro preceded by a Largo introduction and is comprehensible as such even without the information, supplied by their respective titles, that the Largo is associated with “Rêveries” and the Allegro with “Passions.” Where Harriet comes in, just after the dramatic change of tempo to Allegro agitato ed appassionato, is with the entry of her finely defined melodic image on flute and violins, at first unaccompanied and then urged on with increasing vigour by lower strings.

That yearning melody proves to be not so much the main theme of the Allegro as an obsessive preoccupation - the “idée fixe” as Berlioz called it - that leaves little room for other ideas. It is not developed as it would be in a Beethoven first movement but constantly varied on spontaneous impulse and at entirely unpredictable emotional tangents. It is not recapitulated in the classical manner either. The equivalent point is reached by way of a quite extraordinary inspiration, where the friction between an expressively elaborated version of the “idée fixe” on a solo oboe and a more impulsive variant of the same theme on lower strings generates a blazing climax with the theme now radiantly illuminated in C major on high brass and woodwind. The movement ends quietly, the theme now offered up as a prayer.

The second movement is Berlioz’s equivalent of the Beethoven scherzo, daringly presented as a waltz - which was unheard of in the symphony at the time - and most imaginatively scored, particularly for the two harps. Headed “Un Bal,” it is a ballroom setting for another sighting of the unattainable beloved, whose entry is signalled by an abrupt change of key and a waltz-time version of the “idée fixe” on woodwind. She is briefly glimpsed again, in more reflective mood on clarinet, just before the brilliantly accelerated coda.

Although those first two movements were revised after the first performance, they were not fundamentally different from what we hear now. The third movement, on the other hand, made such a disappointing effect in 1830 that it was completely rewritten a year later. It was a “Scene in the country” from the start, however, and was probably always a tribute to the “Scene by the brook” - with its gently flowing melody and echoes of bird song - in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. The movement opens with a dialogue between two herdsmen piping a traditional ranz des vaches, the cor anglais reassuringly answered by a distant (offstage) oboe companion. It ends with the same cor anglais playing into the void and finding no answer. This lonely outcome, a confirmation of the unease occasioned in the midst of pastoral tranquillity by two separate woodwind reminders of the “idée fixe,” is accompanied by ominous rumbles of thunder carried on the evening air by no fewer than four timpanists.

The drum rolls at the end of the third movement lead directly and naturally into the drum rolls at the beginning of the fourth, the “Marche au supplice” (March to the scaffold). It takes more than the title, however, to explain this thrillingly alien intrusion into the work. What is happening, according to Berlioz’s scenario, is that “he is dreaming that he has killed his beloved and, condemned to death, is being led to the scaffold.” Originally written for an unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, it is a masterful study in lugubrious orchestral colour incorporating, just before the fatal blow at the end, a last sigh for the beloved high on clarinet.

If the “Marche au supplice” had sounded less than grotesque to its first audience in 1830 and if the “Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat” had not seemed macabre beyond all reason, Berlioz would have been disappointed. This last movement is not only a finale but also, as the scenario makes clear, the beheaded hero’s funeral. The first to arrive, after the eerie introduction with its lewd sliding gestures on woodwind and horn, is the beloved herself but with the “idée fixe” now trivialised by a shrill clarinet into a vulgar dance tune - to suit the image the disillusioned Berlioz now had of the unfortunate Harriet. Funeral bells toll and, in a witches’ mockery of church ritual, the ancient Dies Irae chant is solemnly introduced by two tubas and parodied by the rest of the orchestra. At the climax of the wickedly contrapuntal “Sabbath Round” that follows, the Dies Irae is superimposed by woodwind and brass onto the dance rhythms on the strings. In the liberated coda its parody version is mixed in too. Not even Berlioz could do anything more shocking than that.

No one present at the first performance of the Symphonie fantastique at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830 could possibly have heard anything like it before. The Parisian public was only just getting to know the symphonies of Beethoven and here, only three years after the master’s death, was a scarcely known young Frenchman stretching the capacity of the form to spectacularly new expressive and acoustic dimensions.

In fact, Berlioz had at least as much respect for the “awe-inspiring giant” as any one else. It was his ambition not to carry Beethoven’s achievement further - “that’s impossible, he attained the limits of art” - but to take it “in another direction…into virgin lands which academic prejudice has left untouched.” Not every one was going to welcome the use of the symphony as a vehicle for drug-induced erotic dreams and nightmares. Mendelssohn was to go so far as to describe the Symphonie fantastique as “indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting screaming.” But Liszt, the most distinguished member of the audience at the first performance, was profoundly impressed by the work and it was by means of his masterly piano arrangement that many others first got to know it. Schumann played it through to himself “countless times, astonished at first, then horrified and finally overcome with wonder and admiration.”

What had enabled Berlioz to make this break-through was nothing less than the full-scale romantic agony of unrequited love. The object of his adoration, the beautiful Irish actress Harriet Smithson who had been such a sensation as Ophelia and Juliet at the Odéon in Paris in 1827, would have absolutely nothing to do with him, in spite of all his efforts to get to know her. While he was under her spell, however, it was impossible for him to get to work on the music she inspired in him. It was only when he renounced her - after her morality had been called into question by a younger rival whom he very nearly married on the rebound - that he could start on the Symphonie fantastique. It was then put together, though not entirely in the form we now know, within a couple of months.

Before the first performance Berlioz issued a detailed “programme” of the moods, scenes and surreal situations in which the composer-hero finds himself and against which he projects the image of his feminine ideal. Some years later, confident that the music has its own interest apart from the dramatic element, he declared that the titles of the five movements should be explanation enough.

Certainly, the first movement is clearly designed as a symphonic Allegro preceded by a Largo introduction and is comprehensible as such even without the information, supplied by their respective titles, that the Largo is associated with “Rêveries” and the Allegro with “Passions.” From the long-term point of view, on the other hand, it is as well to know that the slow introduction is pre-history, an uneasy memory mainly in C minor of a boyhood love for a teenage beauty called Estelle. Where Harriet comes in, just after the dramatic change of tempo to Allegro agitato ed appassionato and the change of key to C major, is with the entry of her finely defined melodic image on flute and violins, at first unaccompanied and then urged on with increasing vigour by lower strings.

That yearning melody, rising in wide leaps and falling back in short steps, proves to be not so much the main theme of the Allegro as an obsessive preoccupation - its “idée fixe” as Berlioz called it - that leaves little room for other ideas. It is not developed as it would be in a Beethoven first movement but constantly varied on spontaneous impulse and at entirely unpredictable emotional tangents. It is not recapitulated in the classical manner either. The equivalent point is reached by way of a quite extraordinary inspiration, where the friction between an expressively elaborated version of the “idée fixe” on a solo oboe and a more impulsive variant of the same theme on lower strings generates a blazing climax with the theme radiantly illuminated in C major on high brass and woodwind. The movement ends quietly, the theme now offered up as a prayer.

The second movement is Berlioz’s equivalent of the Beethoven scherzo, daringly presented as a waltz - which was unheard of in the symphony at the time - and most imaginatively scored, particularly for the two harps. Headed “Un Bal,” it is a ballroom setting for another sighting of the unattainable beloved, whose entry is signalled by an abrupt change of key and a waltz-time version of the “idée fixe” on woodwind. She is briefly glimpsed again, in more reflective mood on clarinet, just before the brilliantly accelerated coda.

Although those first two movements were revised after the first performance, they were fundamentally little different from what we hear now. The third movement, on the other hand, made such a disappointing effect in 1830 that it was completely rewritten a year later. It was a “Scene in the country” from the start, however, and was probably always a tribute to the “Scene by the brook” - with its gently flowing melody and echoes of bird song - in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony. It is no less original in expressive ideas even so. The change in atmosphere between the beginning and the end of the movement is particularly effective: the movement opens with a dialogue between two herdsmen piping a traditional ranz des vaches, the cor anglais reassuringly answered by a distant (offstage) oboe companion; at the end of the movement the cor anglais is playing into the void and finding no answer. This lonely outcome, a confirmation of the unease occasioned in the midst of pastoral tranquillity by two separate woodwind reminders of the “idée fixe,” is accompanied by ominous rumbles of thunder carried on the evening air by no fewer than four timpanists.

The drum rolls at the end of the third movement lead directly and naturally into the drum rolls at the beginning of the fourth, the “Marche au supplice” (March to the scaffold). It takes more than the title, however, to explain this thrillingly alien intrusion into the work. What is happening, according to Berlioz’s scenario, is that “he is dreaming that he has killed his beloved and, condemned to death, is being led to the scaffold.” Originally written for an unpublished opera Les Francs-Juges, it is a masterful study in lugubrious orchestral colour incorporating, just before the fatal blow at the end, a last sigh for the beloved high on clarinet.

If the “Marche au supplice” had sounded less than grotesque to its first audience in 1830 and if the “Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat” had not seemed macabre beyond all reason, Berlioz would have been disappointed. This last movement is not only a finale    but also, as the scenario makes clear, the beheaded hero’s funeral. The first to arrive, after the eerie introduction with its lewd sliding gestures on woodwind and horn, is the beloved herself but with the “idée fixe” now trivialised by a shrill clarinet into a vulgar dance tune - to suit the image the disillusioned Berlioz now had of the unfortunate Harriet. Funeral bells toll and, in a witches’ mockery of church ritual, the ancient Dies Irae chant is solemnly introduced by two tubas and parodied by the rest of the orchestra. At the climax of the wickedly contrapuntal “Sabbath Round” that follows the Dies Irae is superimposed by woodwind and brass on the dance rhythms on the strings. In the liberated coda its parody version is mixed in too. Not even Berlioz could do anything more shocking than that.

Quite by chance, incidentally, Harriet Smithson attended the second performance of the Symphonie fantastique at the Conservatoire in December 1832. Within less then ten months she and the composer were married.

Gerald Larner©