Page 212 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 12.4
The actress Harriet Smithson became an obsession for Berlioz and the source of inspiration
for his Symphonie fantastique. Eventually, Berlioz did meet and marry Smithson. Today they lie side by side in the cemetery of Montmartre in Paris. >
Symphonie fantastique (1830)
Berlioz’s most celebrated composition, then and now, is his Symphonie fantas- tique, perhaps the single most radical example of musical Romanticism. Over the course of five movements, Berlioz tells a story in music and thereby creates the first program symphony—a multimovement work for orchestra that depicts a succession of events, scenes, or ideas drawn from outside of music. The history surrounding the creation of the Symphonie fantastique is as fascinating, indeed fantastical, as the piece itself.
In 1827, a troupe of English actors came to Paris to present Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Though he understood little English, Berlioz at- tended and was overwhelmed by the human insights, touching beauty, and sometimes brutal onstage action that characterizes Shakespearean drama. But Berlioz not only fell in love with Shakespeare’s work, he was also smitten with the leading lady who played Ophelia to Hamlet and Juliet to Romeo, one Harriet Smithson (Figure 12.4). As a crazed young man might stalk a Hollywood starlet today, Berlioz wrote passionate letters and chased after Smithson. Eventually, his ardor cooled—for a time, he even became engaged to someone else. But the experience of an all-consuming love, the despair of rejection, and the vision of darkness and possible death furnished the stimulus—and story line—for an un- usually imaginative symphony.
Symphonie fantastique derives its name not because it is “fantastic” in the sense of “wonderful” (though it is), but be- cause it is a fantasy: Through the course of a symphony, Berlioz fantasizes about his relationship with Harriet Smithson. The thread that binds the five disparate movements is a single melody that personifies the beloved. Berlioz called this theme his idée fixe (“fixed idea” or musical fixation); the melody is always present, like Harriet, an obsession in Berlioz’s tortured mind. However, as his feelings about Harriet change from movement to movement, the com- poser transforms the fundamental melody, altering the pitches, rhythms, and instrumental color. To make sure the listener could follow this wild progression of emo- tional states, Berlioz prepared a written program to be followed as the music was performed. This itself was radical, for program notes at concerts at this time were nonexistent. Berlioz’s story reads like a Hollywood tab- loid: unrequited love, attempted suicide by drug overdose, murder of a
starlet, and a hellish revenge.
first movement: reveries, passions
Program: A young musician . . . sees for the first time a woman who em- bodies all the charms of the ideal being he has imagined in his dreams. . . . The subject of the first movement is the passage from this state of melancholy reverie, interrupted by a few moments of joy, to that of de- lirious passion, with movements of fury, jealousy, and its return to ten- derness, tears, and religious consolation.
190 chapter twelve romantic orchestral music
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Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library