'Oh, if only I did not suffer so much! So many musical ideas are seething within me. Now that I have broken the chains of routine, I see an immense territory stretching before, which academic rules forbade me to enter. Now that I have heard that awe-inspiring giant Beethoven, I realise what point of art music has reached; it’s a question of taking it up at that point and carrying it further – no, not further, that’s impossible, … but as far in another direction. If it turns out well, a whole new work of music would spring fully armed from my brain, or rather my heart.' (Berlioz, letter: 11 January 1829)

Symphonie fantastique is one of the most original and daring orchestral scores ever written. No previous composer had created such overtly personal and blatantly programmatic music, nor connected it so intimately to literary inspiration. For the first performance, at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, the twenty-six year old Berlioz published a story-line drawing on the most fashionable literature of the age, including Goethe’s Faust, Hugo’s Ronde du sabbat and Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, and especially to the bizarre visions of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, first translated freely into French by Alfred de Musset in 1828. (There is no evidence, however, that Berlioz was addicted to anything stronger than coffee and cigars.) Equally important was Berlioz’s own infatuation with Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he eventually married. Berlioz’s love for Shakespeare drew him to the English productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the Paris Odéon Theatre in 1827. Harriet played Ophelia and Juliet to great acclaim, and became the object of Berlioz’s boundless passion and vivid imagination:

'A young musician of morbid disposition and powerful imagination poisons himself with opium in an attack of despairing passion. The dose, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep sleep accompanied by strange dreams in which sensations, feelings and memories are transformed in his sick brain into musical images and ideas. His beloved appears to him as a melody, like an idée fixe, an obsessive idea that he keeps hearing wherever he goes.

I. Rêveries (largo) – Passions (allegro agitato e appassionato assai)

He first recalls the sickness of the soul, the flux of passion, the unaccountable joys and sorrows he experienced before he saw his beloved; then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious raptures, his jealous fury, his persistent tenderness, his consolation in religion.

II. Un Ball (Valse: allegro non troppo)

In a ballroom, amidst the confusion of a brilliant festival, he finds his beloved again.

III. Scène aux champs (adagio)

Summer evening: he is musing in the countryside when he hears two shepherds playing the ranz des vaches (used by the Swiss to gather their animals together) in dialogue. This shepherd-duet, the locality, the soft whisperings of the trees stirred by the zephyr-wind, prospects of hope recently made known to him, all these sensations united to impart long-unknown repose to his heart and lend a smile to his imagination. And then she appears again. His heart stops beating, painful foreboding fills his soul. ‘Should she prove false to him!’ One of the shepherds resumes the melody, but the other answers no more … Sunset … distant rumbling of thunder … loneliness … silence.

IV. Marche au supplice (allegretto non troppo)

He dreams that he has murdered his beloved, that he has been condemned and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sound of a march sometimes dark and sinister, sometimes brilliant and ceremonious, while a heavy tread persists through the clamour. At the end the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a last memory of love before being cut short by the fatal blow.

V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (larghetto – allegro assai – allegro)

He dreams that he is present at a witches’ dance, surrounded by horrible spirits, amidst sorcerers and monsters in many fearful forms, who have come to attend his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, shrill laughter, distant yells, which other cries seem to answer. The beloved’s melody is heard again but it has its noble and shy character no longer; it has become a vulgar, trivial and grotesque dance. She it is who comes to attend the witches’ gathering. Friendly howls and shouts greet her arrival …. She joins the infernal orgy …. Bells toll for the dead … burlesque parody of the Dies irae … the witches’ round-dance … the dance and the Dies irae are heard at the same time.'

In musical terms, Symphonie fantastique uses the orchestra as never before. The cor anglais, high E-flat clarinet, cornet, ophicleide (soon replaced by tuba), harp, bells, multiple timpani, a vast range of special effects including ‘col legno’ string playing (using the stick of the bow instead of the hair) and off-stage playing are used in a symphony for the first time. Berlioz canibalised much of the music from his student works (the opening melody is a teenage song, Je vais donc quitter pour jamais; the ‘Scène aux champs’ melody is from the Messe solennelle,  the fourth movement from ‘Marche des Gardes’ in his unfinished opera Les Francs-juges; even the idée fixe from his cantata Herminie). However, the most important influence is Beethoven, especially the Pastoral Symphony, with its five movements including rural idyll, storm, and programmatic description, combined with the rhetorical grandeur of the Eroica Symphony. The result is music of unprecedented emotional frankness which takes a new, uninhibited pleasure in orchestral sound.

© Dr James Ross