Symphonie Fantastique
Symphonie Fantastique (
Fantastic Symphony) is a
symphony written by
Hector Berlioz in
1830. It is widely regarded as one of the most important and representative pieces of the early
Romantic period, and is still very popular with concert-going audiences worldwide.
The symphony is a piece of
program music which tells the story of "an artist gifted with a lively imagination" who has "poisoned himself with opium" in the "depths of despair" because of "hopeless love." There are five movements, which was unconventional for a symphony at the time:
# Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)# Un bal (A Ball)# Scène aux champs (Scene at the Country)# Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)# Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a Witches' Sabbath)
First movement: "Rêveries - Passions"
The movement is radical in its harmonic outline, building a vast arch back to the home key, which, while similar to the
Sonata Form of classical composition, was taken as a departure by Parisian critics. Throughout the movement, there is a simplicity of presentation of the melody and themes, which Schumann compared to "Beethoven's epigrams", ideas which could be extended, had the composer chosen to. In part, it is because Berlioz rejected writing the very symmetrical melodies then in academic fashion, and instead looked for melodies which were, "so intense in every note, as to defy normal harmonization", as Schumann put it.
Second movement: "Un bal"
The second movement, takes a rather plain waltz theme, again, similar to the idee fixe at first, and then transforming to it in a single startling moment. It is filled with figures that run up and down. While one critic called it "vulgar", the intent was to portray a single lonely soul amidst gaiety, as Berlioz wrote while writing it.
Third movement: "Scène aux champs"
The third movement opens with the English horn and offstage oboe tossing back and forth a characteristic melody meant to evoke the horns in the mountains. This intent, to evoke a spirit of the country side inhabited by, not mere rustics, but people who were one with their place is part of
Romanticism and can be traced back to the ideas of such writers as
Goethe. The movement swells to a peak, falls away, to the sound of distant thunder, in an innovative passage for four
timpani players on two sets of
timpani: it ends without resolution.
Fourth movement: "Marche au supplice"
The fourth movement, which Berlioz claimed to have written in a single night (but which he actually took from an unfinished project, the opera
Les Francs-juges), is filled with blaring horns and rushing passages, and scurrying figures which would later show up again in the last movement. The movement describes a dream, in which Berlioz is executed for killing the love of his life, the actress
Harriet Smithson. It uses a grotesque version of the theme by Berlioz's extraordinary technique of
orchestration, mixing string
pizzicato, woodwind
staccato, brass chords and a single loud stroke of percussion, forming a highly unusual series of tone colors. The scene ends with a single short
fortissimo G-minor chord that represents the fatal blow: the dropping of the trap door, or perhaps the guillotine blade; the series of pizzicato notes following can be seen to represent the rolling of the severed head into the basket. Immediately prior to the musical depiction of the beheading, there is a brief, nostalgic recollection of the idée fixe in a solo clarinet, as though representing the last conscious thought of the executed man; after his death, the final nine bars of the movement contain a victorious series of
tutti G major chords, seemingly intended to convey the cheering of the onlooking throng.
Fifth movement: "Songe d'une nuit de sabbat"
The last movement, often played as a tone poem by itself, has a brooding opening, the sound of spirits marching through the grave yard. It consists of a famous E-flat clarinet solo presenting the
idée fixe as a vulgar dance tune; the call of church bells; a burlesque of a famous
plainchant, the
Dies Irae; and a fugue meant to represent, as Berlioz privately admitted, a giant orgy. There are a host of effects (including
col legno playing in the strings), from the bubbling of the witches cauldron to the blasts of wind. The ending is also unique in that Berlioz combines the sombre Dies Irae melody with the wild fugue of the
Ronde du Sabbat (Sabbath Round).
Berlioz wrote in his essay "On Imitation in Music":
The aim of the second kind of imitation, as we have said before, is to reproduce the intonations of the passions and the emotions, and even to trace a musical image, or metaphor, of objects that can only be seen.
He later adds::emotional (imitation) is designed to arouse in us by means of sound the notion of the several passions of the heart, and to awaken solely through the sense of hearing the impressions that human beings experience only through the other senses. Such is the goal of expression, depiction or musical metaphors.
As part of this he uses an example of
cyclical structure in music, which was an idea drawn from
Beethoven's use of similar rhythmic structures or shapes, and the idea of musical "cycles", such as a "song cycle". Berlioz did not know of
Mendelssohn's Octet, which uses this device as well.
Berlioz called this repeating melody an
idée fixe (fixed idea).
Carl Maria von Weber had previously used similar recurring fragments to represent characters or objects in his
operas, though the
Symphonie Fantastique is a dramatic example that opens the way for many others in the symphonic genre. Later examples would be composed by
Robert Schumann and
César Franck. The idea of melodies representing specific characters would be part of
Richard Wagner's elaborate system of
leitmotifs.
Also important is Berlioz' aggressive use of instruments, which even his enemies admitted was genius, both in terms of the size and scope, but also in the specificity of instructions—when to use mallets of different heads for drums, when to place and remove mutes, all notated on the score. This too would become an aspect of the work which would receive careful study, all the way into the 20th Century.
Leonard Bernstein called this symphony the first musical expedition into
psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature, and because history suggests Berlioz composed at least a portion of it under the influence of
opium.
In 1831, Berlioz wrote a much less well known sequel to the work,
Lelio, for narrator and orchestra.
The soundtracks of
Stanley Kubrick's films
The Shining and
A Clockwork Orange feature a synthesized interpretation of the Symphonie Fantastique version of the Dies Irae, as arranged by
Wendy Carlos. It is easily recognizable as the music played during
The Shining's opening credits.
The band
Stars references the third movement of this work in the song "Look Up" on their album
Heart.
*
Symphonie Fantastique on The Hector Berlioz Website, with links to Scorch full score and program note written by the composer
*
Synthesized recording*
MP3 Creative Commons Recording
