Carnegie Hall

The Symphonie fantastique is a revolutionary work that has become one of the most popular symphonies in the repertoire; a subjective musical autobiography based on a love obsession that depicts seduction and drug-induced hallucination. It inaugurated an aesthetic based on hallucinatory colors, unusual timbres, sudden shifts in mood and dynamics, and surreal structures—a “psychological” music that abandoned classical models and established new ones. At once a specimen of pure Romanticism and—in its dissonance, rhythmic displacement, and emphasis on sound for its own sake—a forecast of modernism.

Berlioz and the Gothic Tradition

If there is a Gothic horror tradition in music roughly comparable to that of literature, then Hector Berlioz is its Horace Walpole, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sheridan Le Fanu all in one. His revolutionary Symphonie fantastique, composed in 1830, not only strikes a note of satanic terror, but builds to it from a mood of deceptive, bucolic calm, and even parodies it at the end.

Berlioz’s mastery of the macabre certainly had precedents—Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s “Ghost” Piano Trio, Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” and others have phantasmal moments—but nothing had been heard in music that quite prepared audiences for the awesome tolling bell in the “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat,” the startlingly realistic depiction of a head lopped off by a guillotine, the ghoulish brass intoning the Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead, or the scratchings and rumblings in the strings that forecast the special effects in composers like Penderecki, Bartók, and Takemitsu.

Reviewers for Figaro and other publications called the new symphony “bizarre” and “monstrous”—and meant it as high praise. The symphony launched a tradition of terror that continued in the more spectral offerings of Liszt (who attended the 1830 premiere), Mussorgsky, and Scriabin. This intensely cinematic music has, unsurprisingly, invaded the world of film, as in the sinister opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Berlioz the Revolutionary

Berlioz’s influence and forward-looking insistence on sound for the sake of sound extend far beyond musical Gothicism. His imprint is everywhere in the 19th century and beyond—indeed, many regard him as the father of the modern symphony—but what imprinted him is less clear.

He greatly admired Beethoven and Gluck, but his originality seemed to come out of nowhere; the hallucinatory colors in works like the Symphonie fantastique and Roméo et Juliette are certainly not based on 19th-century models. According to Romain Rolland, Berlioz’s conservatory mentors “taught him nothing in point of instrumentation ... Berlioz taught himself. He used to read the score of an opera while it was being performed.”

Music of Morbid Sensibility

Berlioz’s idea of musical narrative was not based on classical models either. A depiction of opium hallucination and romantic obsession, the Symphonie fantastique has a program explicated in an elaborate appendage to the first performance: “A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination takes opium in a fit of despair over his love, and dreams of his beloved, who has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea, which he finds and hears everywhere.”

This idée fixe, the musical equivalent of an obsession, blooms lyrically in the opening “Rêveries—Passions,” then returns in ghostly fragments to haunt “Un bal” and “Scène aux champs.” In the sensational final movements, dream turns into nightmare: The tormented lover “dreams that he has killed his beloved,” and in the “Marche au supplice” imagines himself “led to execution” to a march “somber and wild ... At the end, the idée fixe appears for an instant, like a last thought interrupted by the fatal stroke.”

Finally, in the notorious “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat,” the lover “envisions himself in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters ... He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter.” The ghost of the beloved participates in “the diabolic orgy,” her “beloved melody” parodied as an “ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance tune.” At the end, the witch’s dance combines with the Dies irae in music of demonic energy.

Heroines Real and Fantastic

Berlioz never meant for the program to be taken literally and asked that the audience only be shown the descriptive titles of the movements. The heroine is not real, but a ghostly obsession based on someone real—like Poe’s “Morella” or Hitchcock’s fantasy heroine in Vertigo—so that her murder and resurrection are bound up with the narrator’s tormented psyche. Berlioz, as secular an artist as Poe, was more interested in the psychological than the fantastic.

His own obsession with actress Harriet Smithson was the background. The symphony was “the history of my own love for Miss Smithson, my anguish and my distressing dream,” but it was a depiction of awakening passion, not literal autobiography. As Jacques Barzun points out, Berlioz had never taken Harriet “to a ball, never been with her in the country—much less a public execution: He hardly knew her at all except across the footlights.”

The symphony was part of an elaborate seduction stratagem, an attempt to make fantasy real. Berlioz did succeed in marrying Smithson, but when the marriage dissolved into acrimony and alcohol, the grim ending of the symphony turned out to have an ironic appropriateness. Reality won over fantasy after all.