MASTERWORKS CONCERT IV: Romeo & Juliet and Symphonie Fantastique

Few works in music did more to give shape to the immediate post-Beethoven era (the early Romantic period) than the highly individualized compositions of Hector Berlioz. The son of a liberal, free-thinking doctor father and an intensely devout Catholic mother, Berlioz cultivated an eccentric personality from a young age. Originally inclined toward a career in medicine, Berlioz became fascinated with death and the macabre as a Romantic artist rather than as a scientific investigator. Strongly influenced by the raw and personalized works of Beethoven, Berlioz left medicine to begin a career as a composer. Against his parents’ wishes, he enrolled at the Paris Conservatory.

The young Berlioz met several difficulties along the way, and had to find work as a music critic to supplement his income. Berlioz’s compositions, especially his operas, were met with very mixed reaction from audiences and critics. Determined to win the famous Grand Prix de Rome, the most coveted prize for composers, Berlioz finally did achieve his goal and won, though only after failing to win on three prior occasions. Typical of a Romantic artist, Berlioz’s personal life was in constant upheaval, marked by tumultuous love relationships and suicidal depressions. Berlioz ended life a lonely and eccentric hermit.

The influence of Berlioz’s music during his lifetime was largely confined to Russian composers, though Liszt and Wagner borrowed and developed Berlioz’s new concept of orchestral color and its importance as an integral element in music. After Berlioz’s death, his music became an important influence on other great composers of large-scale works such as Richard Strauss, Leos Janáček, and Carl Nielsen. For nearly a century after his death, most of Berlioz’s works were rarely performed, with one exception: the Symphonie fantastique, the most autobiographical as well as the most admired of the composer’s works. 

A medley of romantic idealism, blasphemy, witchcraft, and the macabre, the five movement Symphonie fantastique is a tone poem that depicts the artist’s obsession with love coupled with morbid visions. Bearing the subtitle “Episode in the Life of an Artist,” Symphonie fantastique was first issued with an elaborate narration corresponding to each movement. The narration concerns an artist who is deeply jealous that his lover has betrayed him. 

Berlioz’s symphony tell the story of how the artist poisons himself to the point of death, experiences bizarre visions, murders his lover in a jealous rage and then is sentenced and executed for the crime. It tells the story of “an artist gifted with a lively imagination” who has “poisoned himself with opium” in the “depths of despair” because of “hopeless love.”  Berlioz captures the lover with a reoccurring theme (called an idée fixe -– performed by the E-flat clarinet, oboe, and flute) that appears in passionate scenes and haunting recollections. 

In his program notes about the first movement (Reveries – Passions), Berlioz explains, that he:

…imagines that a young vibrant artist sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.

Titled “A Ball” and set in a brilliantly exciting waltz, the second movement finds the artist siting in “peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature; yet the beloved image of his lover haunts him and throws his spirit into confusion.” In the third movement, “Scene in the Fields,” two shepherds call to one another in the pasture and the artist’s spirit calms. Anxiety begins to brew and the artist broods over his loneliness and begins to obsess if his lover has betrayed him. The final shepherd’s call goes unanswered, and the movement ends with “distant thunder…solitude…silence.”

In the final two movements, “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witches Sabbath,” the artist poisons himself with opium, has visions he killed his beloved, dreams of his trial, execution and damnation. The artist watches as evil spirits dance before leading him to hell to the well-known Dies irae (“Day of wrath”) theme from the Roman Catholic funeral mass. The distorted tones in the final movement symbolize the transformation of his love and admiration for his beloved into jealousy, revenge, and guilt. 

Berlioz insisted that Symphonie fantastique was “entirely autobiographical in intention.” Like the artist in the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz lost his lover to a rival, causing him first to attempt suicide, and then to plot to murder his lover. (A meeting with Mendelssohn side-tracked him). While courting another woman, Berlioz threatened to poison himself if she did not marry him. Moreover, Berlioz specifically used this Symphonie fantastique to come to terms with his unrequited love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson and to compensate for emotional frustrations through the medium of his art. It is clear that Berlioz saw himself as a hero and unrecognized artist at the focus of an imaginary five movement opera. 

Like all of Berlioz’s works, the Symphonie fantastique strives for the unconventional, aiming for (in the composer’s words) “overwhelming” effects “of horrifying grandeur” and “Babylonian immensity.” Although many other artists, such as Mahler, contemplate life after death in their art, the Symphonie fantastique confirms that Berlioz possessed dramatic gifts and a sonorous imagination that are uniquely and unmistakably his.