The string of large-scale masterpieces that Berlioz produced in the 1830s—including the Symphonie fantastique, the Requiem, and the opera Benvenuto Cellini—placed him at the vanguard of the burgeoning Romantic movement. Berlioz epitomized the spirit of French musical Romanticism, as Victor Hugo did in literature and Eugène Delacroix in art. Although vocal and dramatic works figured prominently in his oeuvre, he regarded instrumental music as the purest expression of the Romantic ethos. “It is music on its own, with no verbal help to make the meaning clear,” he wrote in a famous essay published in 1830; “its language thus becomes extremely vague and precisely thereby acquires yet greater potency for listeners endowed with imagination. Like objects glimpsed in semidarkness, its scenes expand and its shapes become blurred and vaporous. The composer, no longer constrained by the limited range of the human voice, can give his melodies much greater flexibility and variety. He can write the most unusual, even the most bizarre, phrases without fearing that their execution will be impossible—the risk he always runs when writing for voices.”
A case in point is the Le corsaire Overture, one of a handful of concert overtures that Berlioz composed for nontheatrical settings. Listeners searching for an extramusical program in this proto–tone poem will be disappointed. The music has no audible connection to corsairs, or pirates, nor did Berlioz provide any clue as to the source of his inspiration. In fact, the original version of the piece was titled La tour de Nice, apparently in reference to a tower in the southern French city where the composer lodged in 1844. Only eight years later was the much-revised score published under the title by which we know it today, and which contemporary audiences likely would have associated with Lord Byron’s popular poem The Corsair. (Le corsair also happens to be the name of a Parisian newspaper to which Berlioz contributed articles on music in the 1820s.) The overture exudes the impetuous, devil-may-care spirit of a Byronic hero unbound by society’s laws and conventions. Dispensing with the customary formalities, Berlioz cuts straight to the chase: A series of helter-skelter flourishes in the strings, punctuated by syncopated wind figures, leads to a slow second theme of a tenderly lyrical character. These two ideas, in varying guises, alternate with a brassy, bumptious tune in an unpredictable blend of vulgarity and refinement. The compactness of the score belies its opulent orchestration, which includes four horns, three trombones, two cornets, and an ophicleide (a predecessor of the tuba).
“For the last three years I have been tormented by the idea of a vast opera, of which I should write both words and music, as I did for L’enfance du Christ. I am resisting the temptation, and I trust I shall continue to resist it to the end.” So wrote Berlioz in 1854, in the first edition of his Memoirs. Four years later, he added a plaintive footnote: “Alas, no! I could not resist. I have just finished the book and music of Les Troyens, an opera in five acts. What is to become of this huge work?” The fate of Berlioz’s crowning achievement is symptomatic of a composer who was in many ways ahead of his time. The Paris Opéra announced a production of Les Troyens (The Trojans), then strung the composer along for five exasperating years. Finally, in 1863, he read the handwriting on the wall, split the five-hour-long work into two parts, and consoled himself with a staging of the latter, titled Les Troyens à Carthage (The Trojans at Carthage), at Paris’s second-tier opera house, the Opéra-Comique. Part I, La Prise de Troie (The Capture of Troy), remained unheard until after his death, and not until 1969 did the complete Troyens reach the stage. The 60-year-old Berlioz was so disheartened by his ordeal that he quit composing altogether.
Virgil was a lifelong lodestar for Berlioz. In late middle age, he recalled reading the last book of the Aeneid (in Latin) as a boy and being “possessed by the glory of its characters ... Is that not a strange and marvelous manifestation of the power of genius? A poet dead thousands of years shakes an artless, ignorant boy to the depths of his soul with a tale handed down across the centuries, and with scenes whose radiance devouring time has been powerless to dim.” Berlioz’s libretto for Les Troyens is as artfully constructed, and as authentically Virgilian, as his music. Of the three excerpts on tonight’s program, the rousing aria “Chers Tyriens” (“Dear Tyrians”) introduces Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage who led her subjects from the Phoenician city-state of Tyre to establish a new colony in North Africa “dedicated to the works of peace.” Dido’s fateful dalliance with the Trojan hero Aeneas is depicted in the orchestral interlude “Chasse royale et orage” (“Royal Hunt and Storm”). In pantomimed action that Berlioz annotates in the score, the lovers seek refuge from a torrential squall in a woodland cave, where they consummate their passion wordlessly and unseen. (This erotic tableau was cut after the first performance at the Opéra-Comique, ostensibly because the elaborate set change took too long.) In due course, Aeneas heeds the call of destiny and sails off to found Rome, leaving Dido to sing her brief, eloquently becalmed death-scene aria “Adieu, fière cité” (“Farewell, proud city”) in delicately poised alexandrine verses.
—Harry Haskell
In the classical canon, there are precious few truly unprecedented works, pieces that at the time of their composition were so unexpected and deviated so drastically from convention that early audiences were shocked, confused, thrilled, and sometimes disgusted in equal measure, and that, through revolution rather than evolution, changed the course of music history. Among these are seminal works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s early 12-tone music—and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which both dramatically expanded the definition of what a symphony could be and gave birth to the new breed of vibrantly descriptive, viscerally dramatic program music that remained one of music’s strongest stylistic forces throughout the Romantic era.
With the privilege of nearly 200 years of hindsight, and with the Symphonie fantastique now familiar and firmly established in the repertoire, it is easy to lose sight of the work’s historical context. Almost unbelievably, the symphony burst forth from Berlioz’s imagination in 1830, just three years after Beethoven’s death. One can only imagine what it must have been like to encounter this wild, aggressive music at its Parisian premiere; Beethoven’s Ninth—itself plenty revolutionary enough for most listeners’ tastes at the time—was just six years old, and Brahms was not even born yet, the premiere of his First Symphony still 46(!) years distant. Just as incredible, Berlioz was only 26 when he wrote the Symphonie fantastique, and it was not only his first symphony—surely the most remarkable symphonic debut of all time—but also his first large-scale orchestral work of any kind.
As befits this early yet quintessential work of Romanticism, the Symphonie fantastique had a quintessentially Romantic inspiration. In 1827, Berlioz went to see visiting productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet that featured Irish actress Harriet Smithson as Ophelia and Juliet, respectively; despite understanding barely a few words of the English spoken on stage (though he knew the plays through translations), he fell instantly and desperately in love with Smithson. “By the third act,” he wrote after the Romeo and Juliet performance, “half suffocated by emotion, with the grip of an iron hand upon my heart, I cried out to myself, ‘I am lost! I am lost!’” The two did not meet until five years later, but Berlioz’s obsession endured, and the composer followed Smithson in the press. When he heard rumors in 1829 that the actress was involved in an affair with her manager, he was heartbroken and furious, and it was in this state of mind that he developed the program for the Symphonie fantastique and began composing. (Berlioz did eventually succeed in wooing and marrying Smithson, but their relationship, though less macabre and deadly than the one depicted in the symphony, was not much happier or more successful.)
Subtitled “Episode from the life of an artist,” the Symphonie fantastique portrays this episode in great musical detail, proceeding in five movements according to an extensive and explicit written program. In fact, Berlioz described the work as an “instrumental drama,” insisting that the program was as important to understanding the symphony as the libretto is to an opera. Not surprisingly, then, its musical style was inspired as much, if not more, by cutting-edge developments in opera and theater—not least the early-Romantic operas of Carl Maria von Weber—than by its symphonic forebears. In order to convincingly depict all of the action described in the program, Berlioz calls for the largest orchestra ever seen outside an opera house up to that time—featuring copious quantities of the standard instruments, a battery of percussion, church bells, and unusual instruments such as cornet and ophicleide—and marshals these forces in ingenious and novel ways, employing unusual instrumental combinations and extended performance techniques that produce an infinitely nuanced and vibrant symphonic color palette. With the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz for the first time raised orchestration to a level of importance equivalent to that of melody, harmony, and form; some 15 years later, he would go on to literally write the book on the topic, a treatise that was carefully studied by many of the greatest subsequent orchestrators, including Mahler, Strauss, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Just as Chopin and Liszt reinvented the piano and Paganini the violin, Berlioz changed the world’s understanding of what the orchestra could be and do.
The symphony begins with “Daydreams, Passions,” in which an artist languishing in a state of existential ennui encounters and falls irredeemably in love with a woman who, in his eyes, embodies all the attributes of an ideal being. Henceforth, each time he sees or even thinks of his beloved, the artist hears in his mind a melody that represents her perfect attributes; this melody “pursues him incessantly like an idée fixe,” according to the composer’s program. “That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first Allegro.” (The use of recurring, dramatically significant musical motives would become more and more common and sophisticated throughout the 19th century—inspired to no small degree by Berlioz’s work here—eventually culminating in Wagner’s elaborate system of leitmotifs.) In the second movement, “A Ball,” the artist finds himself not only at a party, where he encounters the object of his obsession, but also in various places around town and amid nature. “Everywhere, in town, in the country, the beloved image appears before him, troubling his soul.” The proceedings begin to darken significantly in the third movement, “Scene in the Country,” in which the artist descends from the hopefulness that all his dreams will be fulfilled to the sinking dread that his love will not be returned. Berlioz’s poignant master stroke here is the use of a ranz des vaches—a Swiss shepherd’s call—that at the bucolic opening of the movement is traded between two distant shepherds (English horn and offstage oboe). At the end of the movement, “one of the shepherds again takes up the ranz des vaches; the other no longer replies.—Distant sound of thunder—loneliness—silence.”
It has always been the final two movements of the Symphonie fantastique that have attracted the most attention and commentary, their gothic, fantastical atmospheres and scenarios providing particularly fertile and untrodden ground for Berlioz’s inexhaustible musical imagination. Before the fourth movement begins, convinced that his love is unrequited and that the perfect life he envisioned will never come to pass, the despairing artist has attempted suicide with opium. “The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him,” Berlioz writes, “plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions.” In the inexorable, thunderous “March to the Scaffold,” he dreams that he has murdered his beloved and that he is witnessing his own execution. The pounding of two timpanists marks his march to the guillotine as the bloodthirsty, jeering crowd looks on. Finally, at the moment of truth, the now-mournful idée fixe flashes, all alone on solo clarinet, before the condemned artist one last time, “like a last thought of love interrupted by the final stroke.” The blade falls, the severed head drops to the ground with two deliciously gratuitous pizzicato bounces, and the movement ends in a cacophony of roaring brass, rolling drums, and crashing cymbals.
The artist’s vision does not end with the ignominious demise of his dream-self, however, and in the final movement, his hallucinogenic trip becomes only more bizarre. As indicated by the movement’s title, our opium-addled hero finds himself amidst the lewd, demonic bacchanal of a witches’ sabbath, featuring “a frightful assembly of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, all come together for his funeral.” Berlioz pulls out all the stops to conjure this otherworldly scene: Eerie moonlight filters through the clouds with spectral shimmers of the strings, the high-pitched E-flat clarinet provides the shrill witches’ cackling, skeletons twirl and dance as violinists and violists tap their strings with the wood of their bows, and all hope is lost when the deep, ritualistic bells begin their doom-laden tolling. To drive the point home, Berlioz incorporates the medieval “Dies irae” hymn, traditionally used in the Requiem mass to signify the Day of Judgment. Through it all, the artist has not forgotten his lost love, and so the idée fixe still works its way to the surface, “but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is no more than a common dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she, coming to join the sabbath.”
—Jay Goodwin