Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique

A young woman lies dead, and the drug-addled young artist who killed her is sent to the gallows to await his fate. A hellish descent into madness follows. This is the gruesome dream which concludes Hector Berlioz’s great programmatic masterpiece and his most enduring work: the Symphonie fantastique: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts. With themes of obsessive love, groundbreaking orchestration, and daring originality, it stands as the quintessential Romantic symphony.

Yet the composer’s own life nearly imitated art. In the months following the symphony’s premiere the artist, heralded as a possible successor to Beethoven, nearly became relegated to the pages of history as an emotionally unstable mass murderer. This fiery young man was nearly consumed by his passions, yet Berlioz transfigured his unrequited longings into one of the most fascinating masterworks of the nineteenth century.

Literary Influences

If the cliché that inspiration arrives like a lightning strike is true, then the inspiration for the Symphonie came down as a holy trinity. The first of these was the work of William Shakespeare. Berlioz first saw performances of Shakespeare’s works in Paris in 1827. So profoundly moved was he that he began learning English in order to read the plays in their original language. Shakespeare, he later wrote, “had revealed a new universe of poetry” to him. Berlioz included a line from the tragedy King Lear alongside the Hugo poem on the symphony’s manuscript: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.” These despondent words reflect the frustrations of a tormented young composer, still unknown and unlucky in love.

Harriet Smithson

The second lightning strike arrived alongside the first. On 11 September 1827 Berlioz attended a performance of Hamlet at the Odéon Theatre. There he first laid eyes upon the woman who would become his muse, wife, and mother of his only child: his Ophelia, Harriet Smithson.

The composer became obsessed with the enigmatic and beautiful Irish actress. “I have just been plunged into an endless, insatiable passion,” he wrote to a friend. He also wrote love letters, many of them, to Smithson, all of which went unanswered. He eventually moved into an apartment across from the building where Smithson lived; from his perch he could watch her carriage bring her home after her performances, and spy upon her bedroom until she went to bed.

This consuming, unrequited attraction found a creative outlet in the autobiographical Symphonie fantastique. In an 1845 program note for the work, the composer described “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.” 

Harriet did not attend the work’s premiere in December 1830. She did, however, attend a performance of the piece two years later as a guest of Franz Liszt and Victor Hugo. Apparently deeply moved by the depth of Berlioz’s feelings, she finally began to warm to him. Less than a year later the two were married, and in 1834 they welcomed their son Louis. Theirs was a happy family for but a short while. Forced to retire from the stage after an injury, Harriet grew resentful and jealous of her husband. He, in turn, resented having to pay off her debts alongside his own. Neither made much effort to overcome their shared language barrier: she spoke little French, and he never became fluent in English. She correctly suspected her husband of engaging in an affair with the mezzo-soprano Marie Recio, and in 1844 the pair separated but never divorced. Within a year of Harriet’s death, Berlioz and Marie married.

Beethoven

The final lightning strike came in the form of Ludwig van Beethoven. One year after Beethoven’s death, Berlioz first heard the Third and Fifth Symphonies. Paris, dominated as it was by opera and liturgical music, had little in the way of symphonic music. For the first time Berlioz realized the full expressive potential of purely instrumental music. Without his encounter with Beethoven, Berlioz might never have written a symphony at all. “Now that I have heard the terrifying giant Beethoven,” he said, “I know exactly where musical art stands; the question is to take it from there and push it further.” 

He began composing the Symphonie fantastique in 1829, fueled by the creative storm of Beethoven, Smithson, and Shakespeare. Yet while the revolutionary strains of symphonic greatness swirled within, a revolution of an altogether different sort raged right outside Berlioz’s door.

Revolution

In 1830 the four-day July Revolution swept Paris; more than 500 lay dead in its wake, while the Bourbon monarchy led to the overthrow of King Charles X. But as the July Revolution swept through the streets of Paris, Berlioz was deeply immersed in composition—not the Symphonie fantastique, which he had completed that spring, but his entry for the Prix de Rome. “I was finishing my cantata when the revolution broke out,” he wrote. “I dashed off the final pages … to the sound of stray bullets coming over the roofs and pattering on the wall outside my window.”

Prix De Rome

For more than 160 years, the Prix de Rome sent promising young composers to live in the Italian capital to live and study. Some of France’s greatest composers including Georges Bizet and Claude Debussy won the prestigious award (Maurice Ravel caused a national scandal after failing five times to win the top prize). Berlioz won the Grand Prix in August 1830. Though enticed by its financial stipend, he was unenthused about the prospect of moving to Rome. Italy, largely devoid of a symphonic tradition and dominated by the highly ornamented bel canto style of opera, did not interest him. 

But Berlioz had another reason for not going to Rome: the prospect of leaving behind his new fiancée.

New Love

Shortly before completing the first draft of the Symphonie, Berlioz met a young pianist by the name of Marie Moke. She taught at the school where he taught guitar. The pair quickly became lovers, and later that spring he asked his parents for their consent to marry. Marie’s mother begrudgingly gave her approval, insisting that the pair wait a couple of years before getting married (Berlioz never liked his future mother-in-law, referring to her as “l’hippopotame”).

After the Symphonie’s December premiere he at last departed for Rome. Scarcely a month after his arrival and desperate to receive word from his fiancée, Berlioz left for Paris. Soon into his journey home he received a letter from Marie’s mother breaking off their engagement; Marie, she wrote, was now betrothed to another. 

In a blind fury Berlioz crafted a plot to murder his ex-lover, her mother, and her new fiancé. He obtained a pair of double-barreled pistols, laudanum (an opium tincture), the poison strychnine, and women’s clothing. Disguised as a lady’s maid, he planned to get close enough to his targets to shoot all three before turning a pistol at last upon himself.

He ultimately made it as far as Nice before returning to Rome to resume his studies, but not before making a pair of grisly detours. Coming upon the funeral of a woman who had died in childbirth, he joined the procession on its way to the morgue. Upon their arrival he bribed the porter, and when everyone had left he kissed the hand of the corpse. He also stole a skull from a cemetery; later in life he kept the skull on the desk of his workroom. In his final decade, rumors swirled that the skull belonged to Harriet Smithson.

The Program

One of the most crucial and unusual components of the Symphonie fantastique is its detailed written program. Berlioz was inspired by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major, “Pastoral,” with its vivid portrait of the German countryside as well as its extra fifth movement. He went still further, distributing printed copies of a program note. This piqued interest in the music of the then little-known young composer.

The program vividly presents a lovesick young man obsessed with the object of his desire. Throughout his days she haunts him, from a festive dance to a journey to the countryside. The despairing artist poisons himself with opium, inducing the most vivid and violent of nightmares. He dreams that he has killed his beloved; he in turn is executed by guillotine. The symphony concludes with a terrifying witches’ sabbath.

Berlioz wanted audiences to read the program in its entirety before hearing the piece. Some critics and fellow composers took issue with the amount of detail in the program. Robert Schumann, in his review of the Symphonie, complained, “At first the program spoiled my own enjoyment, my freedom of imagination.” A version of the program appears below in italics.

The Music

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

This obsessive melody, which appears in all five movements, Berlioz called the idée fixe. The term originated in psychiatry, where it was used in connection with partial insanity. The idée fixe returns in various guises, at turns passionate and shrill, feeble and devastated. This technique of transformation foreshadows the leitmotiv technique adopted by opera composer Richard Wagner in his operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelungen.

Despite its radical departures from Classical ideals, each movement roughly parallels those of a traditional symphony: a sonata-allegro followed by a dance movement, a (pastoral) slow movement, a march (to the scaffold), and an uptempo finale.

Part one: Daydreams, passions

He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Following an extended slow introduction, flutes and violin introduces the idée fixe in unison. The theme rises in hopeful, impassioned longing before ultimately collapsing. Leonard Bernstein called it “a perfect musical picture of lovesick longing,” while Schumann wrote, “he could not have succeeded better in depicting something monotonous and maddening.” A modified sonata form follows, though the movement’s structure is bound less to this Classical model than it is to the mercurial emotions of the protagonist.

Thanks to Berlioz’s original metronome markings, most interpretations run around the same length of time. Still, in the music’s more delirious moments Leonard Bernstein fully embraces Berlioz’s Romantic passions. Esa-Pekka Salonen keeps a tighter grip on the reins, balancing intense emotion with precision in the fast string passages. After these explosive outbursts the movement ends quietly: the coda, marked “Religiosamente,” a series of plagal “Amen” cadences.

Part two: A ball

He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Ascending harp arpeggios and trembling strings introduce the second movement waltz. This movement is the only one in the entire symphony where the harps are played. The waltz itself is charming, even insipid, but with a restless undercurrent. The idée fixe reappears in the woodwinds.

In Simon Rattle’s performance with the Berlin Philharmonic, crisper articulation in the strings imbues the waltz with a certain daintiness; the music seems external to the protagonist. Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Vienna Philharmonic impart the line with a legato that threatens to become overly sentimental; here, the music seems more aligned with the mawkish young musician’s feelings.

Repeated staccato pitches pulse throughout the movement like the furious beating of a lovesick heart. The whirling waltz melody swells to a climax, interrupted only by a soft refrain of the melody which opened the first movement, now played by clarinet. It is cut short by the irrepressible waltz, which ends in a triumphant climax. 

Part three: Scene in the countryside

One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their ‘Ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light 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; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Of the Symphonie’s five movements, perhaps the third shows clearest deference to Beethoven. Influenced by Berlioz’s favorite symphony, “Pastoral” (both are in the key of F major), it finds the protagonist in bucolic retreat. Cor anglais and an offstage oboe duet in imitation of an Alpine cattle call (a gesture borrowed from Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture). The idée fixe returns in the middle of the movement, played by oboe and flute.

Berlioz lauded the “magnificent terror” of the thunderstorm movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” He continued, “one must hear it to understand the degree of truth and sublimity which pictorial music can attain in the hands of a man like Beethoven.” Here, increasingly soft timpani rolls depict the distant roar of thunder.

Part four: March to the scaffold

He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to 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, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Horns introduce the solemn march over the thrumming pulse of plucked strings and timpani. The low strings first intone the main theme of the movement, a melody which descends two octaves before attempting to rise again.mA darting bassoon solo appears throughout. Berlioz wrote that its timbre, “totally devoid of brightness or nobility, has a propensity towards the grotesque,” yet he also acknowledged its agility. “Quick legato runs can be used to good effect; they only sound well when written in the instrument’s preferred keys,” including the key of this movement, G minor. In the movement’s final bars the clarinet sweetly and passionately begins the idée fixe, yet it is violently cut short as the death blow falls.

Unlike many conductors, Sir Antonio Pappano includes the optional repeat at the beginning of the movement. Zubin Mehta’s performance with the Verbier Festival Orchestra omits the repeat, as do performances by Bernstein and Jansons.

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… Roars 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.

Muted pianissimo strings immediately establish a nightmarish sense of unease in the fifth and final movement. Descending chromatic scales in the strings, diminished seventh chords, and sagging pitches in the woodwinds and horns evoke a sonic descent into Hell. The idée fixe returns, now a dancing parody vulgarly intoned on the clarinet. Berlioz specifically chose the piercing sound of the E-flat clarinet to “parody, degrade and vilify” the melody.

In the final section, when the Dies Irae theme and the dance of the witches merge, col legno strings create an eerie rattling sound akin to the clink of skeletons. Berlioz popularized col legno playing, a term meaning to hit the strings with the wood of the bow rather than with the hair. The symphony concludes with a grotesquely triumphant fanfare.

The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique specializes in music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This recording, led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, includes period instruments such as the ophicleide and serpent. Berlioz later replaced those instruments with the bass tuba. Though he preferred its “incomparably nobler” timbre, its larger sound can overpower other instruments. Such is the case in Mariss Jansons’s performance, where the tubas smother the bassoons as they introduce the Dies Irae theme.

Inventing the Modern Orchestra

Symphonie fantastique was the first of Berlioz’s four complete symphonies. In it he introduced numerous major innovations that would forever shape the orchestra’s expressive possibilities. Richard Strauss, the creator of such virtuoso tone poems as Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben, called Berlioz the “inventor of the modern orchestra.” One of his first innovations was the sheer number of instruments needed, including expanding the standard numbers of string and brass players. He wrote for several instruments that hadn’t typically been included in symphonies: pedal harps (four of them!), tuned bells, cor anglais, and ophicleide, a forerunner of the euphonium. 

Berlioz, with his fastidious approach to orchestration, used solo instruments to create new timbral effects (Schumann called him “a born virtuoso of the orchestra”). This influenced future generations of composers, especially in France; notable twentieth-century examples include the string divisi in Claude Debussy’s La mer and the woodwind solos in the second movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major. 

One of the most unusual orchestral effects in the Symphonie fantastique occurs at the beginning of the third movement with the placement of an oboe soloist offstage. Respighi later used offstage brass in his Pines of Rome; “Neptune, the Mystic,” the final movement of Holst’s The Planets, concludes with an offstage chorus. 

In the 1840s Berlioz published his Treatise on Instrumentation, a landmark text. Many composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Gustav Mahler, Strauss, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel, and Bernard Herrmann closely studied the Treatise. This influential manual further cemented his legacy as a master of orchestration.

Impact and Legacy

Berlioz had high hopes for his first symphony. “I mean it to stagger the musical world,” he wrote. Indeed it did. Violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini heralded the innovative music, telling the composer, “Monsieur, you are beginning where the others [Beethoven and Weber] ended.” He was initially heralded as the third of the “Three Bs,” successor to Bach and Beethoven (only later was he supplanted by Johannes Brahms). Some reviews praised the Symphonie as “bizarre” and even “monstrous,” the pinnacle of the musically macabre. When Liszt transcribed the work for piano, he wrote, “I have worked on this as conscientiously as if I were transcribing the Holy Scriptures….” 

Naturally, a work of such daring originality had its detractors. François-Joseph Fétis, an influential music critic and Berlioz’s longtime adversary, loathed the Symphonie. In a withering review he opined, “I saw that melody was antipathetic to him, that he only had a faint notion of rhythm; that his harmony, formed by an often monstrous accretion of notes, was nevertheless flat and monotonous; in a word I saw that he lacked melodic and harmonic ideas, and I judged that he would always write in a barbarous manner.” Still, even Fétis acknowledged the work’s masterful orchestration. 

The use of the Dies Irae in the finale cemented the melody’s associations with death and the supernatural: countless composers from Camille Saint-Saëns and Sergei Rachmaninoff to Hans Zimmer and John Williams have since incorporated the theme into their works. Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind adapted Berlioz’s orchestration for synthesizer for the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining. The Symphonie’s embrace of the macabre and supernatural opened the doors for other musically creepy works like Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead.

The Symphonie fantastique forever changed the course of symphonic history. Without it, the tone poems of Liszt and Strauss might never have come to be. Mahler’s programmatic symphonies and the “symphonic sketches” of Debussy, these too were influenced by Berlioz’s deeply descriptive program. His mutable use of the idée fixe theme inspired thematic transformation in Liszt’s Faust Symphony and the Wagnerian leitmotiv. 

Berlioz exalted Beethoven for revealing to him a “new world of music.” Nearly 200 years after the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique, it’s clear that he did the same for his contemporaries, his successors, and listeners like us.