Lecture Four
The Program Symphony -- Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique
We explore the life, times, and music of one of the great Romantic originals, Hector Berlioz. Neither a child prodigy nor a particularly gifted adolescent, Berlioz grew up in the French countryside and was sent to medical school in Paris at the age of 18. Having quit medical school, he rather late in life, pursued a career in music unhindered by the sort of early musical training that might have constrained his imagination. He entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 23 and graduated at age 27 in 1830. In that year he wrote his Symphonie Fantastique, a work that combines his four great loves: the dramatic power of Shakespeare, the musical story-telling of opera, the symphonic genre of Beethoven, and himself. Berlioz’s own unrequited love for a Shakespearean actress named Harriet Smithson was the inspiration for the Symphonie Fantastique. We look at the stiry of the symphony, the fixed melodic idea that is heard in each movement and which represents the “beloved image,” and the final two movements of this five movement symphony, “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath.” Please refer to the class handout for an analysis of the symphony and we will view a video of his life story as related to Symphonie Fantastique and a video of the symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic.
Outline
I. Review: The governing principles of musical form evolved between the Middle Ages and the Romantic era.
A. Until c. I 300, musical form was governed by plainchant.
B. During the fourteenth century, musical form was governed by isorhythm.
C. During the Renaissance, clear articulation of words and their pictorial and literary meaning governed form.
D. During the Baroque, abstract principles governed musical form.
E. In the classical era, Baroque-era forms were adapted and new homophonic forms based on abstract processes were invented.
F. Romantic-era instrumental program music hearkened back to Renaissance tone-painting. in which words determined musical form, but these words were now unspoken and merely implied.
II. Hector Berlioz (1803-69) was determined to make music into an inclusive art form or a combination of literature and instrumental music.
A. Berlioz’s Memoirs reveal both his sense of self-importance and his extraordinary sense of humor.
B. He grew up in post revolutionary, Napoleonic France.
C. He inherited Beethoven’s legacy of music as self-expression.
D. Not a child prodigy, he was essentially self-taught as a composer.
E. After abandoning his medical studies, he attended the Paris Conservatory between I 826 and 1830.
F. He completed the Symphonie Fantastique in 1830; Berlioz’s works combined four of his great loves:
1. Shakespeare
2. Beethoven’s symphonies
3. Opera
4. Himself
III. We now examine how Symphonic Fantastique was written.
A. A Shakespeare revival swept across Europe during the nineteenth century.
1. Shakespeare’s plays were well suited to the artistic temper of the nineteenth century.
2. Berlioz himself fell for Shakespeare’s plays as well as for
3. Harriet Smithson (1800-54), an Anglo-Irish actress whom Berlioz first saw in 1827 in the role of Ophelia.
4. Berlioz nourished a mad and hopeless love for Smithson. He stalked her!
B. Berlioz provided a written program for his audiences which describes the dramatic content of the Symphonie Fantastique.
C. Symphonie Fantastique is about a young artist hopelessly in love with someone who does not return that love; each movement deals with some other aspect of this hopeless love.
D. Symphonic Fantastique embodies Berlioz’s artistic belief that the future of music lay in the creation of a composite art form, one that combined music and literature.
IV. Berlioz’s beloved is represented by the Idee Fixe (Fixed Idea).
A. The Idee Fixe is a unifying element—a single melody that represents “her,” the beloved image.
Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, first movement, fixed idea Or Idee Fixe
B. The first movement is entitled “Reveries-Passions.”
1. Read Berlioz Program Notes
2. Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, first movement. Idee Fixe
C. The second movement is entitled “A Ball“ The Idee Fixe appears in triple meter in the midst of a joyous waltz.
1. Read Berlioz Program Notes
2. Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, second movement, Idee Fixe
D. The third movement is entitled “Scene in the Country.” The artist’s doubts about his beloved (represented again by the Idee Fixe) are reflected in the musical storm that occurs at the center of this movement.
1. Read Berlioz Program Notes
2. Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, third movement, Idee Fixe
E. The fourth movement is entitled “March to the Scaffold. Idee Fixe appears as the artist’s last thought before the guillotine blade falls.
1. Read Berlioz Program Notes
2. Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, fourth movement, Idee Fixe
F. The fifth movement is entitled “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. The Idee Fixe has been transformed into an obscene and hideous witch.
1. Read Berlioz Program Notes
2. Featured Music:
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, fifth movement, Idee Fixe
V. More on the fourth movement—”March to the Scaffold”—is the most famous of the five movements.
A. It is in sonata-allegro form, although the dramatic line is more coherent than is the formal shape.
B. Theme I (the interior theme) portrays the terror felt by the condemned lover.
1. It consists of a violent descending minor scale.
2. In the development, this theme is played with a divided orchestration.
C. Theme 2 (the external theme) is a riotous march describing the progress of the cart bearing the condemned lover toward the scaffold.
VI. More on the fifth movement—The ghoulish introduction to the fifth movement—”Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”— owes much to the music of the opera house.
A. The melody of the Dies Irea—the Roman Catholic plainchant for the dead— lies at the heart of Berlioz’s witches’ sabbath.
B. Featured Music:
Thomas of Celano, Dies Irae, c. 1225
Berlioz, Symphonic Fantastique, fifth movement, Dies irae
C. This movement is a brilliant example of:
1. Pictorial “program” music, and
2. Romantic-era fascination with Gothic, supernatural horror.
Symphonie Fantastique: the symphony's programme
by Hector Berlioz
The composer’s intention has been to develop various episodes in the life of an artist, in so far as they lend themselves to musical treatment. As the work cannot rely on the assistance of speech, the plan of the instrumental drama needs to be set out in advance. The following programme* must therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera, which serves to introduce musical movements and to motivate their character and expression.
*This programme should be distributed to the audience at concerts where this symphony is included, as it is indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic plan of the work. [HB]
Part one
Daydreams, passions
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.
This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.
Part two
A ball
The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.
Part three
Scene in the countryside
One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their ‘ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his ‘ranz des vaches’; the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…
Part four
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 sombre 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.
Part five
Dream of a witches' sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae,** the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.