Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869): Symphonie Fantastique
I wish I could calm the feverish excitement which so often torments me; but I shall never find it, it comes from the way I am made. In addition, the habit I have got into of constantly observing myself means that no sensation escapes me, and reflection doubles it – I see myself in a mirror. Often I experience the most extraordinary impressions, of which nothing can give an idea; nervous exaltation is no doubt the cause, but the effect is like that of opium… I have found only one way of completely satisfying this immense appetite for emotion, and that is music.
Hector Berlioz, 1829
Berlioz was a born iconoclast. Even in his student days, he showed little deference towards the canons of musical history. He thought nothing of profaning such names as Palestrina (harmonically unadventurous and overrated) or JS Bach (an oversized schoolmaster). He constantly questioned established rules and railed at accepted truths.
He was also a man at odds with himself and the world. Living in Paris for almost half a century, he quarrelled constantly with the city’s musical establishment, whether it was stuffy professors at the Paris Conservatoire, incompetent conductors who didn’t understand modern music, or the reactionary newspaper critics who plagued his professional career.
But Berlioz did little to help himself by refusing to kowtow to many societal norms. A deeply sensitive and emotional man, he wore his heart on his sleeve like few others. He would turn up to operatic performances and either shout insults to the performers if something displeased him, or else throw himself to the ground in floods of tears if the music moved him.
His blunt honesty, allied to a certain wariness towards others, did not exactly make him comfortable to be around. “Few were at ease in his company”, according to one contemporary. But like many bipolar types (which Berlioz almost certainly was) he could be brilliant and inspiring. He never learned to play the piano and was largely self-taught as a composer, and yet he wrote some of the most historically important works of the early nineteenth century. He may have appeared artistically chaotic, but he had a clear-sighted mind and a deeply practical approach towards writing and performing music.
He would develop an unsurpassed understanding of the ever-expanding symphony orchestra, not by reading endless theory books, but by the simple and endlessly repeated practice of attending orchestral performances: he would arrive with a score of the work in hand before positioning himself in various parts of the auditorium, allowing himself to hear the players from many different angles.
When it came to putting on concerts, he would do much of the practical organisation himself, personally hiring musicians, preparing the hall, setting up chairs and sometimes even building his own conducting platforms. Largely distrusting others to direct his works, he became a fine conductor in his own right, eventually famous across the whole of Europe.
Part of Berlioz’s unusual psychology can certainly be attributed to his upbringing. He grew up in a large, comfortable house (which included several servants) in the town of La Côte-Saint-André, quite close to Grenoble and within sight (on a clear day) of the Alps and Mount Blanc.
From the age of ten, Hector was home-schooled by his father Louis, a pioneering doctor and amateur scholar, who taught him geography, the natural sciences and introduced him to a good deal of classical literature. It was an excellent education, while at the same time denying Hector the socializing atmosphere of a school. As the only son (though he had two sisters) and regarded as his father’s cherished protégé, he became accustomed to receiving doting attention from both parents and servants. He was rarely challenged by outsiders, and such pampering may have made it harder for him in later life to understand or accept individuals with a different outlook to his own.
But Hector’s childhood also seemed to imbue him with the necessary self-belief to succeed as an artist, particularly as an artist who seldom took the easiest paths. He really believed he could do the impossible, and at times he virtually did. His Symphonie Fantastique of 1830 is a vivid example of this – in its dramatic background story, ground-breaking creation and extraordinary aftermath.
Not that Berlioz had it easy with everything. His youth would be littered with obstacles, and one of the very first he had to surmount was to not become a doctor. This was less simple than it sounded. At the age of 19, he was packed off to Paris to follow in his father’s footsteps and study medicine. But Berlioz soon discovered he did not have the aptitude never mind stomach for such a profession. On his first visit to a dissecting room, he was so repelled by the sight of mangled corpses and disembodied limbs that he let out an involuntary scream before exiting through the nearest window. Somehow, he talked himself into returning the next day, before surviving two subsequent years of study and even passing some exams.
But Berlioz already knew that his real passion was for music. When not cutting up bodies, he divided his time between the Paris opera houses and the library of the Music Conservatoire, where he studied score after score. He quickly developed a deep passion for the pioneering operas of Gluck, Méhul and Spontini (with their colourful and mood-setting orchestral accompaniments). Then he discovered his near contemporary, Carl Maria von Weber, and was blown away. Weber’s late operatic masterpieces, such as Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, would have an important influence on Berlioz’s early orchestral works.
It was inevitable that Berlioz would eventually abandon his medical studies for music, but the transition was nonetheless a deeply painful one for both himself and his parents. His father implored him to study law instead and when Hector still refused, he stopped his allowance.
But after formally enrolling at the Conservatoire in 1826, Berlioz excelled at his new studies, quickly demonstrating an instinctive talent for composition and orchestration, even as some of his tutors grumbled about his bolder, more avant-garde experimentation. By this point he had already written a surprisingly assured mass (his Messe Solennelle), and he was working at his first opera, Les Francs-Juges (The Judges of the Secret Court). He soon became known as one of the wild men of the Conservatoire, both for his unruly behaviour and equally unruly music.
He was also still rapidly developing as an artist, even if this was a sometimes surprisingly traumatic process. Berlioz was never the sort who could absorb something in a mild way – whatever new revelation came his way had to utterly consume him, mind and body, almost to the point of psychologically crippling him for several days afterwards.
All of his artistic discoveries of the late 1820s followed this pattern. After Weber operas had rocked his world, he quickly moved on to Beethoven symphonies, describing the latter composer as an “awe-inspiring giant.” Then he came across Goethe and was immediately hooked on his Faust (perhaps Faust’s trading piety for sensual pleasure had a personal appeal for him). Last but not least, he went to see a Shakespeare play in the autumn of 1827, and fell in love simultaneously with both the celebrated playwright, and a charismatic young Irish actress starring in the performance.
The actress in question, Harriet Smithson (left), was in Paris for several months with an English touring theatre company. Berlioz first saw her playing Ophelia in a production of Hamlet and never forgot the experience. But his infatuation was more than just physical. On some level, Berlioz recognized a kindred spirit. Smithson was not the most technically trained of performers, but she made up for it with a huge stage presence, a wide dramatic compass and an ability to empathize deeply with her characters. As one contemporary critic wrote of her Ophelia performance:
Miss Smithson acted the scene in which, robbed of her sanity, she takes her own veil to be her father’s body with utmost grace and truth. The whole passage which seemed long and relatively insignificant and even exaggerated in reading, had tremendous impact on stage…The most remarkable feature of her acting is her pantomime; she adopts fantastic postures; and she uses the dying fall in her inflections, without ever ceasing to be natural…
On the same tour, she played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and again appeared to do something out of the ordinary with the role – at a time when tragedy was still regarded as a preserve of male actors:
Miss Smithson was charged with the role of Juliet, and she was excellent in it. It was in the scene in the second act, where she has a night meeting with Romeo, that her acting began to attract the audience’s attention. This scene is extremely beautiful, even though it is written with a studied refinement…Miss Smithson could not have been more graceful upon the balcony; her posture were full of truth, grace, and love…In her strong moments, she is no longer a woman, but a Fury or something approaching that…
Berlioz would have seen both performances, very probably more than once, after which he would have happily moved heaven and earth to get closer to the Irish actress. He became one of her most obsessive fans (even at a time when he had plenty of competition), going to see her perform as often as possible and declaring to anyone who would listen that she was his definition of feminine perfection. Never the shy or retiring type, he peppered her with love letters and various invitations, all of which she declined to answer. Such was his mania that he even rented an apartment quite near hers so that he could watch her return home every night.
When he eventually sensed he was getting nowhere with her, he fell into the deepest, most self-destructive slump. “Intense, profound melancholy, combined with extreme nerve-exhaustion, reduced me to a pitiable state of mind and body that only a great physiologist could diagnose”, he later admitted. He wandered the countryside aimlessly, sometimes for days on end. A “martyr to insomnia, by dint of overtiring my body, I managed, during this wretched time, to get four spells of death-like sleep or torpor, and four only; one night in a field near Ville-Juif, one day near Sceaux; a third in the snow by the frozen Seine near Neuilly, and the last on a table in the Café Cardinal, where I slept five hours, to the great fright of the waiters, who dared not touch me lest I should be dead.”
Finally: “I ceased to write; my brain grew numb as my suffering increased. One power alone was left me – to suffer.”
But he did still have one other power open to him. Gradually he decided that he would pour all of his amorous agonies into a new symphony, one that would be like no other symphony ever written. “I mean to stagger the musical world”, he told a friend.
At the time, descriptive, programmatic symphonies were about as rare as genuinely well-functioning composers. There had been just the odd, tasteful precedent over the past fifty years, usually about nature (the most famous being Beethoven’s Pastoral). Writing an intimate symphonic portrayal about a lovesick young artist on the brink of madness was quite another matter.
But Berlioz would indeed “stagger” the musical world with the new symphony. With its highly original use of the orchestra, its expressive, asymmetrical melodies, driving rhythms and powerful emotional range – from sensual ecstasy to pure Gothic horror – the work is really like no other symphony ever written. Above all, the Symphonie Fantastique (as Berlioz eventually titled it) is really a covert piece of autobiography. Everything about it relates so closely to Berlioz’s own experiences.
Musically speaking, the work is structured around a recurring motif, or idée fixe (fixed idea), which in this case is a long, sweeping, yearning melody representing Smithson herself. The Idée fixe unites the whole work, making a conspicuous appearance in each of its five movements, although always in a way that reflects the ever-changing emotional landscape of the work.
The first movement, entitled Rêveries – Passions, portrays the artist in the first fervour of love. But it is no idolized representation. The music is constantly on edge, sometimes exalted, at other times uneasy, uncertain and even menacing. The idée fixe first appears on violins and flute, and with only the thinnest of accompaniments on strangely percussive strings, giving it an almost unworldly quality. It appears several times, not least finding its place in an exalted orgy of sound quite close to the end of the movement.
The second movement, Un Bal (A Ball), takes the form of a graceful waltz, opening with two harps and employing some of Berlioz’s silkiest orchestration. It is the prettiest of the five movements, but again there is tension with the re-appearance of the idée fixe, now accompanied by nervous, fluttering strings. According to Berlioz’s programme note, the artist goes about his daily life, sometimes in jolly society, sometimes alone in nature, and yet the “beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.”
The third movement, Scène aux champs (Scene in the Country) is the longest and weightiest (and most Beethoven-like) of the symphony. It also gave Berlioz the most trouble to write. Now the heartsick young man is sitting alone in a rural setting, enjoying the tranquility of his surroundings while believing that his hopeless love will someday be returned. The movement opens with the calls of two herdsmen – one represented by a cor anglais (English horn) the other by an oboe, their ranz des vaches melodies echoing each other and sometimes overlapping to the most gorgeous effect.
The rest of the orchestra gradually enters, builds to more drama (again with the idée fixe to the fore), before subsiding peaceably to allow the return of the plaintive cor anglais calls. But there is now a difference. The second herdsmen, the echoing oboe, is gone and in his place are ominous drum rolls from the timpani – as Berlioz notes in his programme note: “distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…” These are some of the most affecting bars in the entire work.
The symphony veers into distinctly darker territory for its last two movements, even as the music positively overflows with vigour and invention. In the fourth movement, Marche au Supplice (March to the Scaffold), Berlioz’s young artist has taken an overdose of opium and is now living out some terrible nightmares. In one vision, he has killed his beloved in a fit of jealous rage and faces guillotining for his crime. The music vividly suggests the condemned march (accompanied by a military band), a passing fragment of the idée fixe, followed by the moment of execution (including the severed head dropping into a basket). Finally there are triumphal drumrolls and fanfare roars in the brass. With its catchy tunes and generally boisterous mood, the Marche has since become one of Berlioz’s most popular pieces – and yet its surface charm only thinly conceals a pretty disturbing premise.
The fifth movement, Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of a Night of the Sabbath) strikingly depicts the aftermath of the artist’s (imagined) execution. Now existing in a kind of hideous underworld, he finds himself at a witches’ sabbath, full of demons, sorcerers and other monstrous figures who have come to celebrate his demise. His beloved also appears, now shockingly transformed into a witch (reflected in a mocking treatment of the idée fixe). Berlioz introduces a tolling bell into the ceremony while the brass grimly intones the Dies Irae, the old plainsong sequence for the dead. It is altogether very dark music, and yet it is always presented with more than a hint of gleeful irony, while the orchestral effects are superb.
After the witches’ dance and Dies Irae are combined, the music finishes in a blaze of brassy, high-spirited glory, almost as if Berlioz wants us to imagine all the ghoulish characters now taking a smiling curtain call, reminding us that the whole thing is, after all, just make-believe.
This extraordinary work was first performed in November 1830, and although there were plenty who were nonplussed by its wild, ultra-modern innovations (and offended by its irreverent use of the solemn Dies Irae), there were just as many who were enchanted by its imaginative powers, quickly recognizing it as a masterpiece from a highly original young mind. One reviewer got it just about spot on when he wrote of the work:
I accept that this symphony is of an almost inconceivable strangeness, and that the schoolmasters will no doubt pronounce an anathema on these profanations of the ‘truly beautiful’. But for anyone who isn’t too concerned about the rules I believe that M. Berlioz, if he carries on in the way he has begun, will one day be worthy to take his place beside Beethoven.
As for the eternal question of whether art ever imitates life, an uncanny amount of the Symphonie Fantastique‘s narrative would find its way into Berlioz’s own immediate destiny. With Harriet still showing no sign of interest, he turned his fevered attentions to a talented young pianist named Marie Moke (later Marie Pleyel), whom he had met through musical friends. Despite her family’s protestations, the two became engaged.
When Berlioz then went off to study in Rome for two years (after winning France’s prestigious Prix de Rome), Marie’s family took the opportunity to talk her out of the engagement and hook up her up with an older and wealthier suitor. When Berlioz found out what had happened behind his back, he completely lost the plot. Arming himself with pistols, poison (and a chambermaid’s disguise) he set off for Paris intending to kill Marie, her new lover, her meddling mother (whom he had nicknamed “l’hippopotame”) and then finally himself. But at Nice he thought better of it and after a brief flirtation with drowning himself in the Mediterranean, he returned to Rome with almost no-one having even noticed his absence. Perhaps recognizing that he had gone too far, even by his own usual standards, Berlioz never again repeated such behaviour.
By the time he was back in Paris in 1832, his career was on the way up and Harriet Smithson’s was on the way down. It was now that she deigned to hear a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique and was duly touched and flattered to find herself at the centre of a now voguish piece of music. Shortly afterwards she was introduced to Berlioz. A year later they were married at the British embassy in Paris.
“Love cannot express the idea of music”, Berlioz once wrote, “while music may give an idea of love.” The Symphonie Fantastique was certainly a vivid attempt at the latter – even as its composer was about to discover that being married to the object of his most poetic and exalted desires would not be quite as idyllic as he had expected.
Suggestions for Further Listening
Berlioz would compose three other programmatic symphonies over the following decade – Harold en Italie (based upon a famous Byron poem and containing an unlikely viola obbligato written for Niccolò Paganini – 1834), the Shakespeare-themed choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839) and the Grande Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale (1840) written for the French government in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the 1830 revolution.
He also created a sequel for the Symphonie Fantastique for narrator, voices and orchestra, using some of the same thematic material: Lélio. Popular in its day, though nowadays overshadowed by its more famous sibling, Lélio serves as a form of creative self-therapy, depicting the headstrong young artist (Berlioz) recovering from his recent heartache (and by inference his near-breakdown over Marie Moke) before finding spiritual renewal through the twin pleasures of music and literature.