Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

On September 11^th, 1827, Hector Berlioz went to a performance in Paris of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Playing the role of Ophelia was the Irish actress, Harriet Smithson. To say that the 24-year-old composer fell in love with her immediately is an understatement. From the moment he first saw her he was smitten and pursued her incessantly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she refused to meet him and would not reply to the numerous love letters he sent her.

Berlioz’s response to this rejection was to write a ‘fantastic symphony’, a work that describes the life of an artist haunted by the vision of a perfect woman, and hallucinating with opium in order to cope with the hopeless dejection he felt from her indifference. The composer’s unrequited passion is represented by a constantly recurring theme that rises and falls with longing and despair. He called this an idée fixe, a contemporary medical term for an obsessive preoccupation. Berlioz knew this psychological condition could be ideally expressed through music but just to make sure there were no misunderstandings, penned a detailed programme note to go with his semi-autobiographical composition. ‘I conceive an artist,’ he wrote, ‘who sees for the first time a woman who epitomises an ideal of beauty and fascination that his heart has so long invoked, and falls madly in love with her.’

The first movement, Daydreams – Passions introduces us immediately to the idée fixe. Berlioz describes the tune as ‘passionate, but noble and timid,’ and the movement as a whole as expressing ‘those depressions, those groundless joys that the artist experienced before he first saw his loved one, then the volcanic love that she suddenly inspired in him, his frenzied suffering, his jealous rages, his returns to tenderness, his religious consolations.’

In the next movement, A Ball, the artist encounters his loved one at a party but, to quote the composer again, ‘the tumult of the dance fails to distract him; his idée fixe haunts him still, and the cherished melody sets his heart beating during a brilliant waltz.’ Harps, used for the first time in any symphony, lead the way as we imagine the composer trying to attract his belioved amidst the frenzy of the dancers.

The third movement, Scene in the Country, offers respite. ‘One evening, finding himself in the country, the artist hears two shepherds playing their pipes. This pastoral duet, and the slight rustling of the trees gently stirred by the wind, conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed calm, to give his ideas a more cheerful colour. He reflects on his isolation; he hopes his loneliness will soon be over. But what if she betrays him! This mixture of hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by some dark forebodings, form the subject of the movement. At the end, one of the shepherds resumes his call; the other no longer responds. Distant sound of thunder … solitude … silence…’

Berlioz’ description of the March to the Scaffold movement is even more vivid: ‘Having grown sure that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of the narcotic, too small to kill him, plunges him into a sleep accompanied by the most horrible visions. He dreams he has killed the one he loved, that he is condemned, that he is being led to execution, and that he is witnessing his own guillotining.’ Berlioz grew up in post-revolutionary France. A march to the scaffold was very real. We hear the band escorting the prisoners, the gleeful shouts of a jeering crowd, and, after one final glimpse of love, the guillotine’s descent is as unmistakable as the sound of the dismembered head bouncing down the steps!

The finale, Dream of a Night of the Sabbath, is a Satanic dream in which Berlioz depicts a motley collection of ghosts, sorcerers, and monsters gathering at the artist’s funeral. Even his beloved is there, but now her tune is distorted into something, in Berlioz’ words, ‘ignoble, trivial and grotesque.’ A bell peals the Dies Irae and a sinister, ritualistic, diabolical dance of death leads the artist’s soul to its damnation.

Two years after the work’s premiere, Berlioz invited Harriet Smithson to its second performance. The public success of the work had softened her attitude to the composer and realising that the music was about her, agreed to come and meet him. After the performance, Berlioz produced a vial containing a lethal dose of opium. She watched in horror as he gulped it down and, in her hysteria, agreed to marry him. At which point he immediately swallowed an antidote. (Do not try this at home!) Berlioz and Smithson were married in 1833 and though the marriage only lasted seven years, (neither speaking each other’s language can hardly have helped) they are buried side by side in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

The Symphonie Fantastique is a breathtakingly original work, with many of its orchestral effects being completely new. But depicting such specific and raw human emotion without the use of words was also groundbreaking. We take it for granted now but at the time it marked a radical turning point for symphonic music as a whole. The storyline may be fantastical, but as an expression of humanity’s passion and sincerity it is completely real.

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