Harold en Italie, Op. 16

Program notes

About the Work

Harold in Italy is one of the most original works of the Romantic era: a symphony with a solo viola woven through it, somewhere between a symphony and a concerto, and like nothing written before it. It owes its existence to a famous near-miss. In 1834 the legendary violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, having acquired a fine Stradivarius viola, asked Berlioz to write him a concert piece to show it off. Berlioz obliged with a first movement, but Paganini, finding the solo part too restrained, with too many bars of rest, declared it would not do; he wanted to play continuously, and he never performed the work. Berlioz, undeterred, completed it on his own grander plan: not a virtuoso vehicle but, as he put it, ‘a series of scenes for orchestra in which the solo viola would be involved as a more or less active character, always retaining its own individuality.’

That character is Harold, Berlioz’s musical portrait of the melancholy, world-weary wanderer of Byron’s poem Childe Harold, here drawn from the composer’s own youthful travels in the mountains of the Abruzzi in Italy. The viola represents Harold himself: a solitary, observing presence who moves through four vivid scenes, sometimes participating, sometimes merely watching from the sidelines. A recurring ‘Harold’ theme, a Berliozian idée fixe cousin to the one in his Symphonie fantastique, identifies him throughout.

The work was premiered in Paris on 23 November 1834. Paganini did not hear it until 1838, and was so overwhelmed that he knelt and kissed Berlioz’s hand before the audience, and sent him a gift of 20,000 francs that freed the composer to write his next masterpiece. Today Harold in Italy is treasured both as a Romantic landmark and as one of the great showcases for the viola.

What to Listen For

Listen first for Harold’s theme: after a brooding orchestral introduction, the solo viola enters with a long, songful melody, noble and a little melancholy, that will return, transformed, in every movement, marking Harold’s presence in each scene.

The four movements are vivid pictures. The first, ‘Harold in the Mountains,’ moves from gloom to exhilaration. The second, the ‘March of the Pilgrims,’ is the most famous: a procession that seems to approach from afar and recede into the distance, with tolling bells, over which the viola muses; listen for the magical, fading close. The third, ‘Serenade,’ evokes an Abruzzi mountaineer serenading his sweetheart: a piping tune on the cor anglais and oboe, with Harold’s viola observing the lovers’ scene. The finale, the ‘Orgy of the Brigands,’ is wild and headlong; listen for how Berlioz, in a Beethovenian gesture, briefly recalls themes from the earlier movements before the riotous bandits sweep them away. Notice, too, how the once-central viola falls almost silent here, the dreamer overwhelmed by the violent world around him.