Something a little different this week: our symphony is Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a piece that lays legitimate claim to adjectives such as “revolutionary”, “radical” and “unprecedented” perhaps as much as, or even more than any other piece in this series so far. This jaw-dropping work was made by a 26-year-old composer who had already become a famous, indeed notorious, figure in Parisian musical life. But Hector Berlioz also happened to be one of the most brilliant writers on music; and in his letters he reveals the genesis of this diabolically and passionately inspired work.

The following is a collection of vivid fragments from Berlioz’s own words, and some contemporary commentators, which chart Berlioz’s state of mind just before he was writing the piece, his musical ambitions, his personal hopes and dreams, and the reality of putting on this uniquely challenging symphony. (A performance planned and rehearsed in May 1830 was cancelled, so its premiere had to wait until December.) A couple of ideas to bear in mind when you’re reading these blazing bits of Berlioziana: this music is simultaneously the most subjective symphony ever composed, in writing out Berlioz’s hallucinogenically morbid fantasies and unrequited love for the actress Harriet Smithson (whom he married thanks to a later performance of the Symphonie, but at the time of its composition was only an object of far-off longing and terrible desire). Yet it’s also one of the most objective, since Berlioz is capable of analysing his emotions with all the cold-hearted dispassion of a scientist observing life forms through a microscope, as his biographer David Cairns puts it. I’m indebted to Cairns’s still-essential biography, and to Michael Rose’s brilliant Berlioz Remembered for the following extracts:

11 January 1829. The composer, writing to a friend about his hopes for Harriet – and for the new musical discoveries that are inseparable from his feelings for her:

“Oh if only I did not suffer so much! … So many musical ideas are seething within me … Now that I have broken the chains of routine, I see an immense territory stretching before me, which academic rules forbade me to enter. Now that I have heard that awe-inspiring giant Beethoven, I realise what point the art of music has reached; it’s a question of taking it up at that point and carrying it further – no, not further, that’s impossible, he attained the limits of art, but as far in another direction. There are new things, many new things to be done, I feel it with an immense energy, and I shall do it, have no doubt, if I live. Oh, must my entire destiny be engulfed by this overpowering passion? … If on the other hand it turned out well, everything I’ve suffered would enhance my musical ideas. I would work non-stop … my powers would be tripled, a whole new world of music would spring fully armed from my brain or rather from my heart, to conquer that which is most precious for an artist, the approval of those capable of appreciating him. Time lies before me, and I am still living; with life and time great events may come to pass.”

Three weeks later:

“For some time I have had a descriptive symphony … in my brain. When I have released it, I mean to stagger the musical world.”

19 February, to his father (he still hasn’t started work on the piece):

“I wish I could … calm the feverish excitement which so often torments me; but I shall never find it, it comes from the way I am made. In addition, the habit I have got into of constantly observing myself means that no sensation escapes me, and reflection doubles it – I see myself in a mirror. Often I experience the most extraordinary impressions, of which nothing can give an idea; nervous exaltation is no doubt the cause, but the effect is like that of opium [which Berlioz, in all probability, knew directly!]. Well, this imaginary world is still part of me, and has grown by the addition of all the new impressions that I experience as my life goes on; it’s become a real malady. Sometimes I can scarcely endure this mental or physical pain (I can’t separate the two) … I see that wide horizon and the sun, and I suffer so much, so much, that if I did not take a grip of myself, I should shout and roll on the ground. I have found only one way of completely satisfying this immense appetite for emotion, and this is music.”

A fortnight later, to the pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller:

“Can you tell me what it is, this capacity for emotion, this force of suffering that is wearing me out? … Oh my friend, I am indeed wretched – inexpressibly! … Today it is a year since I saw HER for the last time … Unhappy woman, how I loved you! I shudder as I write it – how I love you!”

And yet, six weeks after that letter, he has exposed and expunged his passion in writing the first version of the symphony: those weeks must have been an extraordinary torrent and torment of activity for Berlioz. He tells another close friend, Humbert Ferrand, what the symphony is about:



“I conceive an artist, gifted with a lively imagination, who … sees for the first time a woman who realises the ideal of beauty and fascination that his heart has so long invoked, and falls madly in love with her. By a strange quirk, the image of the loved one never appears before his mind’s eye with its corresponding musical idea, in which he finds a quality of grace and nobility similar to that which he attributes to the beloved object. [This is the symphony’s idée fixe, the melody that appears in all five movements.] After countless agitations, he imagines that there is some hope, he believes himself loved. One day, in the country, he hears in the distance two shepherds playing a ranz des vaches to one another; their rustic dialogue plunges him into a delightful daydream. [This is the ‘Scene in the country’, which we now know as the third movement; at this stage, Berlioz had his hero go to the country before ‘The Ball’, which we now know as the second movement.] The melody [of the beloved] reappears for a moment across the themes of the adagio. He goes to a ball [now the second movement]. The tumult of the dance fails to distract him; his idée fixe haunts him still, and the cherished melody sets his heart beating during a brilliant waltz. In a fit of despair he poisons himself with opium [the fourth movement, the March to the Scaffold]; but instead of killing him, the narcotic induces a horrific vision, in which he believes he has murdered the loved one, has been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution. March to the scaffold; immense procession of headsmen, soldiers and populace. At the end the melody reappears once again, like a last reminder of love, interrupted by the death stroke.





The next moment [and the fifth movement, the Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath] he is surrounded by a hideous throng of demons and sorcerers, gathered to celebrate Sabbath night … At last the melody arrives. Till then it had appeared only in a graceful guise, but now it has become a vulgar tavern tune, trivial and base; the beloved object has come to the sabbath to take part in her victim’s funeral. She is nothing but a courtesan, fit to figure in the orgy. The ceremony begins; the bells toll, the whole hellish cohort prostrates itself; a chorus chants the plainsong sequence of the dead [the Dies irae plainchant], two other choruses repeat it in a burlesque parody. Finally, the sabbath round-dance whirls. At its violent climax it mingles with the Dies irae, and the vision ends.”

Friedrich Zelter, composer and Mendelssohn’s teacher, presents one side of the critical opinion of Berlioz’s work: he’s talking about Berlioz’s Huit scènes de Faust, which the composer had sent to Goethe, and Goethe passed to Zelter for his assessment.

“There are some people who can only make their presence felt and call attention to their activities by means of noisy puffing, coughing, croaking, and spitting. One such appears to be Herr Hector Berlioz. The smell of sulphur surrounding Mephistopheles attracts him, so he must needs sneeze and snort till all the instruments of the orchestra leap around in a perfect frenzy – only not a hair stirs on Faust’s head … I shall certainly find an opportunity when I am teaching to make use of this poisonous abscess, this abortion born of horrible incest.”

Zelter’s opinion of the Symphonie Fantastique is not recorded, but the composers and musical luminaries in the audience for the first performance of the piece, when it finally happened on 5 December – including Meyerbeer, Spontini and the 19-year-old Franz Liszt – were entranced. As was this anonymous reviewer.

“I accept that this symphony is of an almost inconceivable strangeness, and that the schoolmasters will no doubt pronounce an anathema on these profanations of the ‘truly beautiful’. But for anyone who isn’t too concerned about the rules I believe that M. Berlioz, if he carries on in the way he has begun, will one day be worthy to take his place beside Beethoven.”

There could be no higher praise for Berlioz; the wild alchemical mixture of Faustian diabolism, his extension and expansion of Beethovenian sonic possibility, the unflinching, opiate extremity of his musical imagination, and the essential catalyst of his incomparably intense emotional life, made – and still make – the Symphonie Fantastique an experience that turns all of us into its exalted, executed and eviscerated hero.



Andrew Davis conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique at the BBC Proms on Tuesday 19 August.

Five fantastics

These performances are as wild and diverse as Berlioz’s symphony. Plunge into them for their joy and their dangerous, diabolical intensity!

Marc Minkowski/Les Musiciens du Louvre

John Eliot Gardiner/Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

Colin Davis/Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Mariss Jansons/Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Charles Munch/Boston Symphony Orchestra





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