|
|
Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)
Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14
I. Reveries -
Passions
II. Un bal
III. Scene aux champs
IV. Marche au supplice
V. Songe d'une nuit de Sabbat
Hector Berlioz is one of the most extreme and larger-than-life
characters in Western Music. His personality was over
the top - highly intelligent and highly emotional, completely
devoted to the art of music, very articulate and very
honest. He was also hopelessly naïve in not realising
the effect of his outspoken honesty in antagonising
other people, particularly people whose support he needed.
His impact was particularly great given the shallow
dullness of most other French music of his time. Opera
and dance music was the order of the day, and music
was only for diversion and entertainment. More serious
and lofty aims of music as an art form were ignored.
In this environment Berlioz could get little work as
a serious composer, and was not prepared to prostitute
his art and become a trivial composer. Unable to supplement
his income by teaching - he could not play the piano
- he had to resort to journalism. And being both articulate
and intelligent, and with a wicked sense of humour,
he wrote extremely well. But it is a tragedy that this
brilliant composer had to spend a large proportion of
his career in writing newspaper criticism of bad operas
by forgotten composers who were so much more successful
than he was.
Berlioz wrote this symphony in 1830, when he was just
27 years old and passionately in love with an Irish
actress, Harriet Smithson. That the symphony expresses
Berlioz's feelings about this affair is clear from the
programme which he wrote, that begins "A young
musician sees for the first time a woman with all the
charms of the ideal he has dreamed of, and falls desperately
in love with her. She always appears in the artist's
mind in association with a musical idea with the same
characteristics as his beloved - passionate yet refined
and diffident. The woman and her melodic image pursue
him unceasingly through the symphony". Sadly the
real life relationship went horribly wrong when Berlioz
and Harriet married, and Berlioz fell out of love with
her just as she fell in love with him.
The first movement begins in dreamy melancholy, followed
by the long sinuous melody of the beloved. This tune
seems endless - as Berlioz must have felt his love for
Harriet to be. The movement gives us a hallucinatory
mix of storms of passion, rages of jealousy, tenderness
and tears. The movement ends in a religious calm which,
after the high emotion that has gone before, seems rather
unconvincing.
The second movement, much shorter, sees our hero at
a Ball where he sees his beloved in a constant swirl
of dancers. The music is a waltz, getting faster towards
the end, in which the harps take a prominent role.
'In The Country' is the slow movement of the symphony,
in which Berlioz creates some very novel orchestral
effects. It opens with two shepherds calling each other
on their pipes. This duet and the slight rustle of trees
stirred by the breeze instil peace. But doubts surface
- suppose she deceives him? "A mixture of hopes
and fear, thoughts of happiness disturbed by dark forebodings.
At the end, one of the shepherds takes up his pipe again,
but the other no longer answers … sounds of distant
thunder … solitude … silence"
In 'March to the Scaffold'. the hero is now convinced
that his love is not returned, and has poisoned himself
with opium. He suffers nightmare visions in which he
thinks he has killed his beloved, has been condemned
to death, is about to witness his own execution. The
procession is a march, by turn fierce and sombre, stately
and brilliant. At the end the first few bars of the
beloved tune is remembered, brutally interrupted by
the fatal blow of the axe.
In the fifth and last movement, the artist sees himself
at a meeting of witches who have assembled to celebrate
his own funeral. After a ghostly introduction the beloved
tune appears, but no longer refined and beautiful -
now it is crude and trivial, a common dance tune, played
on the shrill E-flat clarinet. It is greeted by a tumultuous
racket from the whole orchestra, and then the dance
tune is joined by bells and the Dies Irae, a theme from
the Catholic mass for the dead. The two tunes combine
in wild dancing and lead to the dramatic close. |
