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Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte-St-André, France on December 11, 1803, and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. He composed Symphonie fantastique in 1830. The work runs approximately 49 minutes in performance, and is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, E-flat Clarinet, 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, 2 timpani, percussion, 2 harps, and orchestral strings.

Berlioz in the late 1820s was teeming with new ideas absorbed from musicians, writers, painters—any source that offered a model of Romantic rebellion against established forms of artistic expression. At the same time, he was nursing an almost violent romantic obsession with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson (he eventually married her, unhappily). It all came to brilliant fruition in 1830 in the Symphonie fantastique, which Berlioz wrote “furiously,” his mind “boiling over,” and in which he forged a new kind of symphony, a new kind of instrumental program music, and a new kind of orchestration.

The influence of the Classical symphony is still perceptible, especially Beethoven’s symphonies, which had shown Berlioz that instrumental music had as much potential for drama, poetry, and expression as the vocal genres he had favoured up to then. Specific models, like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Weber’s Der Freischütz, are sometimes apparent, too. But Berlioz’s debts seem trivial next to the astonishing originality of the piece. He used every means at his disposal to express the emotional, psychological, and pictorial implications of his program, to which all rules of syntax, form, melody, and harmony were made subservient.

The work reveals a composer with a genius for musical depiction, whether of the feelings and states of mind or of things and events. The hero’s beloved, for instance, is represented musically by a long-breathed melody that becomes an idée fixe in every movement. More prosaically, one hears beating hearts, ballroom dancing, the gentle rustling of leaves, a storm, cavorting witches. Notoriously, at the end of the march, one hears the hero’s last thoughts of the beloved, the fall of the guillotine blade, the drop of the severed head, and the cheers of the crowd.

Berlioz’s revolutionary orchestration stands out above everything else here. He imported instruments previously heard only in opera houses and military bands, used conventional instruments in novel ways, and made unprecedented demands on the players. But then, new kinds of musical expression demanded a new palette of sounds; as a result, scarcely a moment in the piece was not strikingly original in its day.

Programme Note by Kevin Bazzana

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