In December 1830 Ludwig van Beethoven had been dead less than four years and his “Pastoral” Symphony and Leonore Overtures were then the most radical descriptive program music known to the world.
In December 1830 a twenty-six-year-old composer named Hector Berlioz was waiting anxiously for the first performance—scheduled at the Paris Conservatory for the fifth of the month—of his new “great symphony,” the first part of a work in two sections called “Episode in the Life of an Artist.”
One of the earliest mentions of the score was in a letter Berlioz wrote to his friend Humbert Fernand in February 1830: I am again plunged in the anguish of an interminable and inextinguishable passion, without motive, without cause. She is always at London, and yet I think I feel her near me; all my remembrances awake and unite to wound me; I hear my heart beating, and its pulsations shake me as the piston strokes of a steam engine. Each muscle of my body shudders with pain. In vain! ‘Tis terrible! O unhappy one! if she could for one moment conceive all the poetry, all the infinity of a like love, she would fly to my arms, were she to die through my embrace. I was on the point of beginning my great symphony (“Episode in the Life of an Artist”), in which the
development of my infemal passion is to be portrayed; I have it all in my head, but I cannot write anything. Let us wait.
The object of all this unrestrained outpouring of passion was a Junoesque Shakespearean actress from Ireland named Harriet (Henrietta) Smithson, whom Berlioz had seen only on the stage but neverSymphonic Fantastique, Op. 14 77 met! He tells of trembling at her performances in the roles of Ophelia and Juliet and says in his Memoirs that his “Episode in the Life of an Artist” is a “history of my love for Miss Smithson, my anguish and my distressing dreams.” (Elsewhere in the Memoirs he states, “It was while I was strongly under the influence of Goethe’s poem Faust that I wrote my Symphonie fantastique.”
But don’t let this seeming contradiction throw you. Harriet Smithson and Goethe’s Faust are only two of the many forces in Berlioz’ psyche which all together conspired to force the creation of such a work as the Fantastic Symphony, as the first part of “Episode in the Life of an Artist” has come to be universally known.)
For this Fantastic Symphony Berlioz concocted a fantastic program. Printed in the score it reads like this: A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination [what a marvelous self-description!] poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The beloved woman herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea which he finds and hears everywhere.
The five movements of the symphony then proceed to describe for us the different emotions and situations which Our Hero experiences in the course of his drugged dreaming. No more revealing a portrait of a creator exists in the realm of art—and make no mistake, a sovereign work of art the Fantastic Symphony assuredly is. It is the direct musical ancestor of spooks and rogues from Liszt’s Mephisto to Moussorgsky’s Bald Mountain to Strauss’ Till to Malcolm Arnold’s Tam O’ Shanter. But perhaps its most secure artistic merit is its proportion, sure-handedness, unity and—yes—disciphne, which all combine to make the Fantastic Symphony as remarkable a forward step in the history of Symphonic music as the “Eroica” was. A renowned interpreter of the score, Sir Thomas Beecham, once told me that there have been “no surprises given to us in orchestration since the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz,” and as I’ve thought of this statement over the years I have found myself agreeing more and more with these words.
The composer’s own vivid description of the sections of the Fantastic Symphony serves as an ideal guide to the “action” of the music:
First Movement: Dreams, Passions—At first [our young musician hero] thinks of the uneasy and nervous condition of his mind, of somber longings, of depression and joyous elation without any recognizable cause, which he experienced before the Beloved One had appeared to him. Then he remembers the ardent love with which she suddenly inspired him; he thinks of his almost insane anxiety of mind, of his raging jealousy, of his reawakening love, of his religious consolation.
Second Movement: A Ball—In a ballroom, amidst the confusion of a brilliant festival, he finds the Beloved One again.
Third Movement: Scene in the Fields—It is a summer evening. He is in the country, musing, when he hears two shepherd lads who play, in altemation, the ranz des vaches [the tune used by the Swiss shepherds to call their flocks]. This pastoral duet, the quiet scene, the soft whisperings of the trees stirred by the zephyr-wind, some prospects of hope recently made known to him—all these sensations unite to impart a long-unknov^Ti repose to his heart and to lend a smiling color to his imagination. Then She appears once more. His heart stops beating, painful forebodings fill his soul. “Should she prove false to himi” One of the shepherds resumes the melody, but the other answers him no more.
. Sunset . . . distant rolling of thunder
. . . loneliness . . . silence. . . .
Fourth Movement: March to the Scaffold—He dreams that he has murdered his Beloved, that he has been condemned to death and is being led to execution. A march that is alternately somber and wild, brilliant and solemn, accompanies the procession. . . . The tumultuous outbursts are followed without modulation by measured steps. At last the fixed idea returns, for a moment a last thought of love is revived—which is cut short by the death-blow.
Fifth Movement: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath—He dreams that he is present at a witches’ revel, surrounded by horrible spirits, amidst sorcerers and monsters in many fearful forms, who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, shrill laughter, distant yells, which other cries seem to answer. The Beloved Melody is heard again, but it has lost its shy and noble character; it has become a vulgar, trivial, Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14 79 grotesque dance tune. She it is who comes to attend the witches’ meeting. Riotous shouts and howls greet her arrival. . . . She joins the infernal orgy . . . bells toll for the dead … a burlesque parody of the Dies Irae . . the Witches’ round dance. . . . The dance and the Dies Irae are heard together.
One of the most widely honored performances of our time has been the reading of the Fantastic Symphony by Charles Munch. The score, when he conducted it in concert, triggered a magic spark in his make-up and he responded to it with irresistible drive and impetuosity. The final two movements were whipped up to an emotional fare-thee-well, achieving a frenzied and neurotic excitement of pure inspiration. And he also communicated the kaleidoscopic nature of the first three movements more successfully than any other conductor I’ve ever heard. Munch included the Fantastic Symphony on his first series of guest appearances vnth the New York Philharmonic in January 1947, and I remember Olin Downes devoting one of his full Sunday columns in the New York Times to an analysis of the Munch alchemy with this score.
