Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Symphonie fantastique

1. Rêveries – Passions (Daydreams – Passions)
2. Un bal (A ball)
3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the Country)Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
4. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a Witches' Sabbat)

Above all, Berlioz was a dramatic composer. That he wrote symphonies at all is a testament to the impact that Beethoven’s symphonies had on him. His experience of hearing the Third and Fifth Symphonies at a concert in 1828 was one of two encounters with great artists that had a decisive influence on the Symphonie fantastique that he wrote soon after.

The other artist whose work became a touchstone was Shakespeare. In 1827 Berlioz attended a performance of Hamlet which sparked a lifelong obsession. Shakespeare’s influence took a while to work its way into his music. A more immediate interest sparked by the play was the Irish actress who played Ophelia, Harriet Smithson. Berlioz became obsessed with her, projecting onto her his romantic ideals as filtered through Shakespeare’s heroines (he called her “My Ophelia” or “My Desdemona”). For the next two years he sought in vain to engineer a meeting with her, during which time his infatuation with her bordered on the outright deranged. He bombarded her with love letters, which the probably terrified Smithson studiously failed to answer. His unrequited ardour eventually turned sour. It is this phantom relationship which inspired the Symphonie fantastique.

The Symphonie was written in 1830, and first performed in December of that year. By this time Berlioz's attentions had transferred from the unresponsive Smithson to Camille Moke, a talented young pianist who proved rather more susceptible to his overtures. All the bitterness at his failure to woo Smithson was poured into the symphony. Although he felt compelled to turn to an instrumental form in imitation of Beethoven, Berlioz's dramatic instincts remained paramount, and he wrote a programme to explain what the symphony depicted for the first performance. The main theme, described by Berlioz as an "idée fixe", recurs throughout all five movements. It represents the woman with whom the hero of the drama has become besotted. He encounters her through a variety of situations, culminating in an opium-fuelled fantasy in which he is executed and then witnesses a gathering of witches and other monstrosities jeering at his funeral. The autobiographical element in this is not hard to discern.

The first performance, attended by some of the leading musicians of the day including Liszt, was a great if not uncontroversial success, and marked a turning point in Berlioz's fortunes. He had also just been awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome after many unsuccessful attempts, and his composing career finally appeared to be going somewhere. Unfortunately the conditions of the Prix required him to spend two years in Italy. Berlioz was loathe to leave Paris just as he was making progress there, but after a lengthy and unsuccessful appeal, he travelled to Italy in 1831. While there he received news that Camille Moke had broken off their engagement to marry Camille Pleyel, son of the famous piano maker. Initially he vowed to return to Paris and murder Camille, her mother and her new fiancé (a tale told at great and hilarious length in his memoirs); however, as he recovered from a serious illness his resolve wavered, and he decided that his “survival”, both of his illness and his emotional trauma, would inspire a sequel to the Symphonie fantastique entitled Le retour a la vie (later retitled Lélio).

In an improbable turn of events, the Paris performance of Lélio in tandem with the Symphonie in 1832 led to his finally meeting Harriet Smithson, whom he married after a short and bizarre courtship. By now her popularity was on the wane and she was heavily in debt, which may have been a factor in her decision to marry. Many might doubt whether a marriage born of such circumstances could possibly end in anything other than disaster, and such people would be entirely correct: the relationship soon collapsed in acrimony and the pair separated in 1844. Berlioz nevertheless continued to support Smithson financially until her death in 1854. After her death, Berlioz revived Lélio and rewrote the accompanying programmes to both works to make it appear that both were about Smithson, and that all the artist’s antics depicted in the entire symphony, rather than just the last two movements, were an opium-induced fantasy.

The audience at the first performance of the Symphonie fantastique would been struck by Berlioz’s original approach to orchestral writing. On the other hand, they would have been very familiar with the kind of melodramatic scenario described in the accompanying note. Here it is in full:

The composer has aimed to develop, as far as they may be musically, various situations in the life of an artist. The plan of the instrumental drama, lacking the assistance of words, needs to be explained in advance. The following programme should be considered as the spoken text of an opera, serving to lead one to the musical movements, of which it explains the character and expression.

Part 1: REVERIES – PASSIONS
The author imagines that a young musician, affected by that moral malady a certain writer calls the tide of passions, sees for the first time a woman who embodies the ideals of his imagination, and is insanely infatuated. By a curious quirk, this comely creature is connected in the man’s mind with a musical motif, in which he finds that same certain passionate, but also noble and shy, character that he attributes to the object of his affections.

This melodic reflection and its model pursue him unceasingly as a double idée fixe. This is the reason for the constant appearance, throughout all the movements of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first allegro. The passing from this state of melancholy reverie, interrupted by bouts of baseless bliss, to one of delirious desire, with its fits of fury, of jealousy, its returns to tenderness, its weeping, its religious consolations, is the subject of the first movement.

Part 2: A BALL
The artist is placed in the most varied circumstances of life, in the middle of the pandemonium of a party, in the peaceful contemplation of nature’s beauties; but everywhere, in the town, in the country, the beloved image haunts him and troubles his soul.

Part 3: SCENE IN THE COUNTRY
Finding himself one evening in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds who pipe in dialogue a ranz des vaches. This pastoral duet, the vista, the soft swishing of trees gently stirred by the wind, the hopes he has conceived, all conspire to give his heart an unaccustomed calm, and to give his fancies a more cheerful colour. He reflects on his solitude; he hopes soon no longer to be alone. ….But if she were to be unfaithful!... This fusion of faith and fear, these fancies of fortune fermented by frightful forebodings, form the subject of the Adagio. At the end, one of the shepherds sounds again the ranz des vaches; the other no longer responds… Distant rumble of thunder…. solitude… silence…

Part 4: MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD
Now certain that his love is unrequited, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of the drug, too dilute to deliver him death, plunges him into a sleep beset by the most terrible vision. He dreams that he has killed she whom he loves, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his own execution. The procession proceeds to the sounds of a march sometimes sombre and fierce, sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a muffled sound of sober steps cedes suddenly to stentorian surges. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear, like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part 5: DREAM OF A WITCHES’ SABBAT
He sees himself at the Sabbat, surrounded by a terrifying troupe of spectres, sorcerers, all manner of monsters, gathered for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries to which other cries seem to respond. The beloved melody appears once more, but has lost its nobility and shyness; it is now nothing more than a despicable dance ditty, trivial and grotesque; She has come to the Sabbat… Howling of joy at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy. Funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae*. Rondo of the Sabbat. The Rondo of the Sabbat and the Dies Irae together.

*Hymn sung in the funeral rites of the Catholic Church.

Liszt: Totentanz

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Totentanz


There were virtuosi before Liszt; but when we think of a superstar performer now, we are really thinking of the persona that Liszt created. His father was a musician in the service of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, who knew Haydn and Beethoven personally. He began teaching his son piano at 7, and Franz soon began to compose as well. Aged 11 he had his first composition published, one of 50 variations on a waltz by Diabelli that formed part 2 of Diabelli’s Vaterländischer Künstlerverein anthology (Part 1 consisted of Beethoven’s epic set of variations on the same theme). In 1832 Liszt saw Paganini perform, and determined to bring the same level of virtuosity to his piano playing. His career thereafter is the stuff of legend; a scandalous affair, an induction into the priesthood, and a punishing concert schedule in which he became the first musician to perform entire concerts by himself. Brahms declared that as far as piano playing went, ‘He who has not heard Liszt play really cannot speak on the subject. He leads the way, and then, a long way behind, there is no one else.’ The scenes of “Lisztomania” at his performances in the 1840s were unprecedented, in which audiences succumbed to the levels of hysteria that would later greet Elvis Presley and the Beatles. He was so successful that after he was 35 he never performed for money again, donating all his fees to charity.

Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of Death) is in effect a bravura concerto. He first planned it in 1838, and revised it twice before it reached its final form in 1859. It received its first performance in 1865, when the soloist was Liszt’s son-in-law Hans von Bülow. The theme of the “Dance of Death” was a popular one in the 19th century, as the burgeoning Romantic movement developed a taste both for the medieval period and the macabre. Liszt’s piece is a set of variations on the “Dies Irae” plainchant that also appears in the finale of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, the first performance of which in 1830 Liszt had attended. The other inspiration was Francesco Traini’s fresco “The Triumph of Death” in the Campo Santo, Pisa, which Liszt visited in 1838 when he eloped to Italy with his mistress the Countess d’Agoult. A second theme, based on the opening of Mozart’s Requiem, appears in the middle and is the subject of a subsidiary set of variations before the “Dies Irae” returns to conclude the piece.

The piano part of the Totentanz is remarkable even now, and must have been truly shocking at the time. Instead of the smooth lyrical lines of most contemporary music, Liszt presents a violent, angular and percussive score which anticipates nothing so much as the music of Bartók - indeed the work was a mainstay of Bartók’s own repertoire as a soloist.

Musorgsky: St John's Night on Bare Mountain (Orginal Version)

Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881)
St. John’s Night on Bare Mountain (original version)

Of the group of composers who congregated around Balakirev in the 19th century to forge a new Russian music, Musorgsky is among the most famous, and yet little heard. Although many of his titles are well-known, the music itself is very rarely heard as the composer intended. Pictures at an Exhibition is much more familiar in Ravel’s orchestral adaptation, while the 1867 tone poem St. John’s Night on Bare Mountain (or Night on the Bare Mountain as it is more widely known) was never performed in his lifetime, nor even published until 1968. The version usually heard is a posthumous rewrite by Rimsky-Korsakov, and so utterly different in its conception as to constitute an entirely different work that happens to use some of the same themes.

The roots of Bare Mountain lie as far back as 1858, when Musorgsky made tentative plans to compose an opera on Gogol’s short story St. John’s Eve. No trace remains of this, but two years later he wrote to Balakirev that he was working on a libretto by Georgy Mengden called The Witch. This too is lost, but apparently contained “a whole act to take place on Bare Mountain... a witches’ sabbat... I already have some material for it; it may turn out to be a very good thing.” In 1866 Musorgsky heard Liszt’s Totentanz, which made a great impact on him. Inspired by that and by a book on witchcraft he had recently read, he began to plan a new work, initially titled The Witches. In July 1867 he wrote to Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov to announce the completion on St. John’s Eve of St. John’s Night on Bare Mountain.

If Musorgsky hoped for enthusiasm from his teacher, he was disappointed: Balakirev was harshly critical of the piece and refused to perform it. Musorgsky revised the work twice: in 1872-3 he reworked it as a chorus for the collaborative opera Mlada. This version is lost, but was almost certainly the basis for the second revision, intended for his unfinished opera Sorochintsy Fair. It was this version that served as the basis for Rimsky-Korsakov’s reimagining of Night on Bare Mountain.

Musorgsky’s original is considerably more raucous than Rimsky's smoother rewrite (in particular the familiar quiet ending is entirely absent), and in its adventurous and aggressive harmonies it is a good 30 years ahead of its time. In a letter to Rimsky, Musorgsky identified four sections to the work: “(1) Assembly of the witches, their chatter and gossip; (2) cortege of Satan; (3) unholy glorification of Satan; and (4) witches’ sabbat.” Musorgsky is often considered not to be an effective orchestrator, but the cautiousness he exhibits in later music is perhaps a result of the criticism of Bare Mountain by Balakirev. Certainly in his first major work for orchestra he is gloriously unconstrained by any sense of propriety, and the result is a relentless and thoroughly exciting slice of devilry.