Classical Music | Orchestral Music

Recorded on 12/31/1969, uploaded on 12/19/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

In September 1827, Hector Berlioz attended a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Paris. The role of Ophelia was played by a young English actress named Harriet Smithson. For Berlioz, it was love at first sight. Following the performance, he wrote numerous love letters to the actress but received no response. A few years later in 1830, after still having none of his letters returned or even meeting Smithson, Berlioz composed his Symphonie fantastique as a musical outlet for his unrequited love. Modeled on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the Symphonie fantasique likewise had five movements. Yet, whereas Beethoven, in his own words, stated that the Pastoral Symphony was more “the expression of feeling than painting”, Berlioz devised an elaborate narrative to accompany the Symphonie fantastique, so much so that he provided program notes that were to be considered as the spoken part of an opera.

Given Berlioz’s literary inspirations—Lord Byron and Shakespeare—the narrative of the Symphonie fantastique is undoubtedly tragic. In the first movement, titled “Reveries – Passions,” the “artist,” as Berlioz calls himself, is introduced to the object of his affection. He describes her as “a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her” and that the thought of her is always “associated with a musical idea.” This musical idea Berlioz called the idée fixe and it recurs, in various guises, throughout the whole of the symphony.

In the following movement, “A Ball,” Berlioz’s protagonist “finds himself in the most diverse situations in life,” yet the image of his beloved is always hauntingly before him. The idée fixe is transformed into a graceful waltz tune. The next movement, “Scene in the Fields,” is an Adagio beginning with “two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their ‘ranz des vaches.’” This pastoral scene, however, is disturbed by the artist questioning the faithfulness of his beloved. At the conclusion of the movement, the sound of distant thunder, eloquently emphasizing the turmoil of the protagonist, is heard in the timpani.

In tormented dreams, the artist imagines that he has murdered his beloved and is a spectator witnessing his own fatal march to the scaffold. This fourth movement displays Berlioz’s penchant for imaginative and descriptive orchestration, particularly in the end when the artist meets with his untimely demise. The horrific dream continues in the finale, “Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath.” The artist sees himself condemned at a Witches’ Sabbath and his beloved returns as one of his denouncers. The once beautiful melody that represented her is now mocking and vulgar. As if sealing his fate, the Gregorian chant Dies irae is heard, first by itself, and then in competition with the motif of the Witches’ Sabbath. The later ultimately wins and the artist is condemned to his own eternal torture.

Berlioz and Harriet Smithson were finally introduced a few days after a performance of the Symphonie fantastique in 1832. The following year, on October 3 and Franz Liszt as a witness, the two were wed. However, the marriage turned out to be a disaster, making Berlioz’s symphony eerily prophetic. As a reaction to his fateful love and doomed marriage, the idée fixe returned again in the La mort d’Ophélie in 1842.      Joseph DuBose