Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Program notes

About the Work

On 11 September 1827 a company of English actors played Hamlet in Paris. In the audience was Hector Berlioz, twenty-three years old. He was overwhelmed twice over: by Shakespeare, and by the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia. He wrote her letters, which went unanswered. She left Paris in 1829 without having met him.

The symphony he wrote early in 1830 turned this obsession into music. He called it ‘Episode in the Life of an Artist’ and had a printed programme handed to the audience. A young musician of morbid sensibility, despairing in love, takes opium. The dose is too weak to kill him and instead brings on a series of visions, in which the woman he loves has become a melody that follows him everywhere. Berlioz called this melody the idée fixe. He had written the tune two years earlier, for a competition cantata, and it appears in each of the five movements, changed every time by its surroundings.

The first performance took place at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, conducted by François-Antoine Habeneck. Beethoven had been dead for less than four years, and his symphonies were still new to Paris. Berlioz revered them. The five-movement plan and the scene in the country both look back to the Pastoral Symphony, but nothing in Beethoven sounds like this. The score asks for two harps, a cor anglais, an oboe placed offstage, a shrill small clarinet, bells, four players on the timpani and two ophicleides, deep brass instruments whose parts are now taken by tubas.

Smithson was not at the premiere. She heard the symphony two years later, on 9 December 1832, when Berlioz, back from his prizewinner’s stay in Italy, presented a revised version together with a sequel, Lélio. They met the next day and married the following year. The marriage was not happy, and by 1844 they had separated. Berlioz himself came to feel that the music could do without its story, and in later years he played the programme down.

What to Listen For

I. Rêveries, Passions. A slow introduction of muted, sighing strings stands for the vague longings of the artist before he has seen his beloved. When the Allegro begins, violins and flute play the idée fixe almost unaccompanied: a long melody that climbs by stages and keeps falling back. Fix it in the ear here, since everything later depends on recognising it.

II. Un bal. Harps and shimmering strings set the scene for a waltz. In the middle of the dance the idée fixe drifts in on flute and oboe, as if the artist had caught sight of her across the room, and it returns once more, on a clarinet, before the brilliant close.

III. Scène aux champs. A cor anglais calls, and an oboe answers from offstage: two shepherds piping to each other. The long, calm movement that follows is troubled at its centre, when the beloved’s theme returns over agitated low strings. At the end the cor anglais calls again. There is no answer, only distant thunder from four timpani.

IV. Marche au supplice. The artist dreams that he has killed his beloved and is being led to the scaffold. Muffled drums and growling low brass alternate with a blazing march for the full band. At the last moment a solo clarinet begins the idée fixe, his final thought of her, and a single crashing chord cuts it off.

V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat. He sees his own funeral, attended by witches and monsters. The beloved’s theme arrives squealing on the small clarinet, turned into a vulgar jig. Bells toll, and bassoons and tubas intone the Dies irae, the chant from the Mass for the Dead. A witches’ round dance starts up as a fugue in the strings, and near the end Berlioz plays both at once. Listen too for the dry clatter when the violins strike the strings with the wood of their bows.