All right, let's take a look now at the program symphony.
Remember this could be...
it is going to be a multiple movement piece but the number of movements
is going to vary depending on the story.
The piece that we're going to look at is probably the most famous of the works within this
particular genre,
and that is Hector Berlioz's
Symphonie Fantastique.
If nothing else,
people know it because some of it was used in Fantasia. So, Walt Disney, we
thank him for
sharing a lot of great music with people who didn't know they were getting great
music.
So let's talk about Berlioz a little bit before we look at this piece.
He was a French composer
and
he was supposed to have been studying to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it was that his
father wanted him to do,
but he thought it was a lot more interesting to spend his time going to the theater.
He particularly liked to go watch Shakespeare plays.
So, it happens as he's going to the play there was a woman named Harriet Smithson
who was starring in this
Shakespeare production
and
he was just
infatuated with this woman. He was obsessed with her.
This would be like today if one of us watched some movie and just fell in
love with one of the actors. We're determined to meet this person.
Well, he did eventually
get to meet her.
In the meantime, he has won this big prize called the Prix de Rome and the reward you get
for this
is that they send you off
to Rome
and put you up in this lovely villa
and your whole responsibility there is to work on your art; so if you're a
composer
you compose,
if you're a painter, you paint, and they pay you to do that.
And it's like a three-year thing. So this is a really good deal if you're
an artist.
So, while he's there, you know, he's met Harriet.
Things are, you know, not working out particularly well yet, they haven't got together
So he
writes this piece
that's based on his
obsession with Harriet Smithson
and that's what becomes the Symphonie Fantastique.
So in the story--he creates his own story so he's not taking it from literature or
someplace else, he's actually created his own story.
Basically, the whole
thing
is one big drug-induced dream.
During this period of time, opium use was pretty common
and so the main character in this-- who is sort of
Berlioz but not, because he's
writing outside of himself--
and he's taking these drugs.
Every movement of the symphony
is some other iteration of what's happening
in his dreams.
So there's a part where he's
like out in a field
and he sees her, that sort of thing, and then there's a scene where they're at a ball
and just various
things like that.
The movement that people know
the best is the final movement, which is called
the Witches Sabbath movement.
Now, what do witches have to do with Harriet? Remember,
drugs, there are drugs involved here!
So what he dreams here
is that
there's this mountain and the witches are gathering
and
somehow, the woman--he doesn't call her Harriet in the thing either, that
would probably be bad form to
put the woman you love's name in this sort of horrifying piece of music--
but they always refer to her as the beloved.
That she's there with the witches and they're having all this carousing
and everything... so
this big dramatic movement
which is right up the romantic
ideal, this is
very...
we got supernatural, we got witches, we got a love story, we got a guy who's on drugs
You've got everything we could do here for this story.
So he's going to take all that
and put it into this movement.
Now what ties all these movements together besides the story
is a little melodic theme
that's known as the Idée Fixe,
which means fixed idea in French.
So the fixed idea always represents
the woman
but it doesn't appear in the same way every time it comes around.
So when it's talking about the lovely parts when they're out in the fields
or at the ball or whatever
it's a very lovely kind of melody that represents her.
But when we get to this point in the story
and things are sort of
going haywire,
then it becomes more of a parody of itself and it's sort of like "nana nana nana nana"
it's a "nana nana nana" kind of approach
to the same theme.
It's still recognizable if you've heard the entire
symphony; you would say, oh there's that theme again but listen to what he's done to it.
That ties it all together!
So we're going to work our way through
this movement
of the Symphonie Fantastique.
So in the beginning
our witches are gathering
we just have
what he describes in his description because he tells what we're
supposed to expect in each movement. He talks about unearthly groans and creaks and
things like that.
So think about,
you know. every horror film you've ever seen and what kind of music
that might be
as we listen to the opening
of the last movement of Symphony Fantastique.
All right, so you've listened to that opening section
and what you heard was
some sort of odd sounds.
Composers are doing different kinds of things with instruments here.
So he's got the string players doing
kind of chunky little sounds that you might not expect.
We have some really high-pitched
sounds from some of the woodwinds.
All those things that would make
witchy sort of sounds for us.
The theme,
the fixed idea,
appears, the clarinet usually plays it. The clarinet sort of ties it all together
as well.
And it's still fairly straightforward here because bad things have not really
started to happen in this particular scene.
So we'll hear a clarinet, and then you hear it in the E-flat clarinet, which is a smaller
version of it
that plays
really high,
and you don't hear it very often because it's kind of an
acquired taste,
the sound of the E-flat clarinet.
But it's perfectly appropriate
for what he's trying to do here
in terms of creating
that scary
sort of sound.
So we have a lot of this building up and everything is going on
and
we have all these little
bits building together
to create that sense that we are now about to have something exciting happening on
our mountain.
All right, so our witches are now
really getting ready for the big party;
suddenly we have silence
and we hear chimes
and the score tells us that
those chimes are supposed to be off stage,
so what he's trying to create here is the effect of
bells off in the distance.
So if you think about witches and what they represent
you might think that those are the church bells in town
tolling,
not in a pleasant way, it's sort of a dark
sort of sound.
And then
this is where he introduces something
that we heard when we listened to
the mass. He's going to throw in
the "Dies Irae" theme
(singing the theme)
And he puts it down in these big
bass instruments so it's a very ominous
very powerful. It tells us that
the bad things
are about to happen.
Listen now to that section of the piece.
OK, so in this opening we hear
lots of unearthly groaning sorts of sounds created by various instruments.
We have the string players playing with mutes which is a little device
that sort of slides on to the strings and makes it softer or so we can get a
spookier sort of effect. We will hear
woodwind instruments in really high ranges to get the sort of screaming effect
that we might expect,
and then the clarinet's going to come in and bring us
the
fixed idea
because now we need to introduce the beloved into the scene.
But it's already not
a happy scene.
So what we have here is basically a parody of that
fixed idea.
So it's (singing da dum da dum)... it has a very bouncy kind of thing.
It doesn't sound
at all romantic anymore and you don't think of that as being a love theme or associated with
somebody that
you care about.
He's showing us that she is now involved
in a different kind of place.
So we hear that on the clarinet, we hear it on E flat clarinet
and we're really getting
set up now for this beloved being taken in
by all the witches.
So listen to that segment of the piece.
Alright so now you've heard the dies irae theme incorporated in here in a
fairly straightforward kind of way. We're in the Romantic Period now and so Berlioz
has at his disposal
a tuba. So we have this big big sound that we can also add
to our Dies irae. So now that we've introduced it and people in the audience
would know that this was the theme
from the requiem mass, and therefore death is somehow involved,
he can mess with it. So in this next section what happens is that he takes that
same theme
and he does it twice as fast, so instead of bom... bom... we now have...
Bom Bom Bom Bom Bom Bom Bom Bom...
which creates a whole new set of tension and
and movement toward whatever's going to happen next.
So what is going to happen next? These witches are
getting ready to party now. This is time! This is the dance part! This is the
dance of the witches' Sabbath.
Here's the dancing part. So we have a theme that's obviously a dance-like theme,
it has all the things we think of dancing, you know, the kind of movements
and
rhythmic structures that we think of but
they're witches! So it's going to be
a very different kind of tonal center, you know we're not going with
happy major keys for a witches dance! So now go listen
to see how he takes that dies irae and double times it and leads that into the
dance of the witches.
All right, the last segment of the piece takes all the things we've had
so far and sort of combines them so we get a...
a very polyphonic kind of approach to the structure here. So we've got the dies irae
theme going,
we've got the dance theme going and they're going to work together so
it's just this big chaotic sound going on. They're dancing, there's
bell chiming and all sorts of crazy sounds
that really get us that sense of
frenzy and chaos and wildness that we would associate
with a bunch of witches dancing in the moonlight or in the darkness.
So that's how he's going to tie all those bits together that we've been
working with through the entire symphony,
and then somehow we have to end this thing!
Right? Something has to happen to finish up
the dance! What's going to happen? Maybe the Sun comes up, maybe
somebody interrupts, but being romantic... we've got to have a good ending on it.
So I want you to go back now and listen to the rest of
the "Dance of the Witches' Sabbath" from Hector Berlioz's
"Symphonie fantastique."