23-year-old music student Hector Berlioz
has gone to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Now he doesn’t understand what’s going on because it’s all in English
but he’s captivated by Harriet Smithson
the Irish actress playing the role of Ophelia.
Not just captivated...
COMPLETELY INFATUATED
He turns into the ultimate stage-door Johnny
inundating Smithson with impassioned love letters.
They tell her nothing her army of adoring male fans haven’t already said -
that she’s so charismatic
that she oozes the charm of Ophelia herself
and blah blah blah...
How very original Hector!
His letters aren’t even in English so Harriet doesn't understand what he’s on about.
But lustful lunatic Berlioz steps up his game.
He rents rooms next to Harriet’s so that he can spy on her.
He 'accidentally' bumps into her on the street and rambles gibberish at her
still in his own language.
But then comes the worst news imaginable;
she’s been having an affair with her manager.
OF COURSE...
Now when Berlioz gets upset
we're not talking a few tears here and there.
We’re talking severe mental breakdown
uncontrollable mood swings
diabolical nightmares.
Nowadays, you’d see a shrink for this stuff.
Perhaps dial a hotline.
But Berlioz deals with painful emotions in perhaps not the healthiest of ways.
He gets engaged to the next woman who pops along.
He gets hammered on opium
and he channels his despair into an autobiographical symphony.
Now all the talk of 1827 is about Beethoven
Europe’s greatest composer
who has recently died.
JUST when Berlioz was getting into him.
What a bummer...just imagine missing out on Beethoven live in concert.
Berlioz loves the way the German genius channelled his emotions through his symphonies.
For Beethoven took music out of the Classical era and into the Romantic age.
Berlioz wants to take things further that that.
He wants to write a psychological thriller of a symphony that viscerally moves the listener.
He wants to tell an epic, cinematic story.
The full Tarantino treatment, you know?
He even insists that audiences read his detailed programme notes to understand
exactly what the music’s depicting.
This was unprecedented.
Just as unprecedented was the size of the orchestra,
the largest ever assembled for a symphony.
He completed the Symphonie fantastique in 1830.
It is in five movements spanning almost an hour.
In the first movement, eerie woodwinds introduce us to a lovesick young artist.
The tentative music frequently pauses as though time is slowing down.
For our artist is dreaming and we’re about to enter his world of melancholy.
Waves of passion swell and hush.
So we’ve got this young artist with roller-coaster emotions...
Remind us of anyone?
Yes, this is a self-portrait of Berlioz.
We then hear what Berlioz called the idee fixe or fixed idea
the central theme of the entire symphony.
It represents the object of the artist’s affection:
that beloved woman of his dreams
Harriet Smithson.
It leaps up longingly only to descend with a sigh of despair.
It floats flirtatiously over the orchestra
which pulses in imitation of the artist’s quickening heartbeats.
It explodes with joyous passion
before returning to tender, painful dejection.
The vulnerable romantic is represented by his own motif.
It weaves in and out of the idee fixe
as though he’s chasing his beloved in his dream.
He follows her lingering perfume trail
her seductive on-stage gestures
her beguiling voice.
But the idee fixe overpowers the artist
for she obsesses but eludes him.
He becomes agitated
frustrated by the failed love affair.
He turns to religious prayer to quell his depression
and we hear the strings chanting 'Amen' in accordance.
The second movement starts with two shimmering harps
their first use in a symphony orchestra.
In Berlioz’s time, you’d more often hear the harp at a grand domestic soiree.
Which is exactly where the artist now imagines he’s wound up.
He’s at a ball in town.
Couples waltz elegantly across the dancefloor.
Yards of silk swirl behind them.
But the glittering scene fails to distract him from memories of his beloved.
For the haunting idee fixe returns as he catches sight of her on the dancefloor.
Her theme interweaves with the waltz
but he soon loses her amongst the twirling dancers.
When they come face-to-face on the dancefloor again, the artist freezes up.
He just doesn’t know what to say to her!
We’ve all been there right?
Just as Berlioz was unable to sustain Harriet’s attention
so is the artist’s beloved swept into the arms of another.
Depressed about this whole episode, the artist ventures into the countryside for solace.
Berlioz now draws on his own childhood growing up in a small French town near the Alps.
For in this third movement we hear a ranz des vaches –
a simple melody traditionally played by shepherds on the Swiss alpenhorn.
A cor anglais engages in a call and response with an oboe
which Berlioz cleverly places offstage.
So it sounds as though it is two shepherds communicating across a vast distance.
Cellos, violas and bassoons play a theme representing
the artist’s inner thoughts and feelings.
For he contemplates the beauty of nature and discovers a sense of inner calm.
Perhaps, he hopes, his loneliness may soon be over.
This was much-inspired by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony of twenty years previously.
But unlike that symphony, there’s no peace to be found in this artist’s countryside escape.
For oboes and flutes haunt him AGAIN with a return of the idee fixe.
Just what he needed!
The idee fixe up high conflicts with HIS wandering theme down low.
The two themes jar uncomfortably.
As he becomes increasingly agitated, we hear tremolo strings.
That’s really fast and furious bowing to express the volatility of his emotions.
Berlioz wonders: what if he WERE to unite with his beloved
only for her to betray him for someone else?
Jesus, Hector, you’ll go crazy if you keep thinking like this!
I mean, you don’t just go up to a woman and say
"So you’d never betray me, right?”
before asking “Oh so you live opposite me yeah?”
Gotta play the game, Hector!
Play the game.
Anyway, we hear again that shepherd calling out his ranz des vaches.
But this time, that other shepherd doesn’t reply.
Instead, we hear the distant sound of thunder played by a quartet of timpani,
totally revolutionary orchestration for the time.
It’s a metaphor for the passing storm of emotions that torments our artist.
Haunted by these torturous dreams of unrequited love
the artist poisons himself with opium.
But the dose is too weak to kill him.
It merely plunges him into a series of even WILDER delusions.
He hears marching footsteps.
Four baying bassoons announce a procession of soldiers.
They’re escorting a prisoner to the scaffold for a public execution.
And to his horror, he hallucinates that it is HE who is the prisoner
HE who has been convicted of murdering his beloved so that no-one else can have her.
A bit far-fetched?
Well...no actually.
As we know, Berlioz WAS a man of extreme gestures.
A year after he wrote the symphony,
Berlioz discovered his fiancée was having an affair with some sugar daddy.
So he bought poisons, pistols and a disguise
hatching an elaborate plan to murder both parties and himself.
Thankfully, he never followed through
but it’s these episodes that explain why the subject came so naturally to him.
In fact, Berlioz wrote this extraordinary fourth movement in a single night.
A brass band strikes up a military march typical of those heard at the
public executions that took place Berlioz’s Paris.
The artist steps up to the scaffold and in the last moment of his life
suddenly remembers his beloved.
Solo clarinet plays the idee fixe only to be cut short by the slam of the guillotine.
His head bounces down the steps to the sound of pizzicato strings.
Drums roll and the crowds roar in celebration.
The final movement continues the psychedelic opium trip.
The artist imagines a black sabbath.
We’re not talking Ozzy Osbourne here.
We’re talking witches at a black mass for the artist.
OK, maybe that IS Ozzy Osbourne.
Strange groans, whispers, bursts of laughter, distant cries -
the artist lies dead on the altar before these wicked weirdos.
And then the chief witch enters.
And WOULD YOU KNOW, it’s none other than...
...his murdered beloved!
She’s come to preside over his funeral.
Shrill clarinets and vulgar piccolos play her idee fixe.
This time it’s no longer a shy and noble theme.
It’s now reduced to a grotesque tavern tune,
for Berlioz has transformed the artist’s beloved into a whore in hell.
This was his ultimate revenge on Harriet Smithson for running off with that manager of hers.
A bell chimes the death knell to start the sinister rite.
The devilish cohort sing the medieval hymn Dies irae:
the plainchant of the dead.
It’s played on tubas though Berlioz originally wrote the
part for an unusual now-extinct instrument called an ophicleide,
a cross between a bassoon and saxophone.
Time for a merry witches’ round dance as the gathered cackle over their bubbling cauldrons.
Berlioz wrote this bit as a fugue;
a sort of complex puzzle in which several musical ideas develop independently of each other.
It is what we call counterpoint.
Fugues had to follow strict rules
so fugue-WRITING was an academic exercise that
tortured Berlioz when he was studying at the Paris Conservatoire.
What better way to represent hell
than with a fugue?!
Berlioz instructs the violins and violas to play col legno
meaning to beat the strings with the wooden backs of the bow.
The witches’ dance combines with the Dies irae.
Just imagine how controversial this was - Berlioz essentially parodying the Catholic Mass
by placing it in the context of a satanic orgy.
The piece ends bombastically with the artist’s beloved gloating over his soul in damnation.
Symphonie fantastique premiered in 1830 to a mixed reception.
Free-thinking Liszt hailed Berlioz a genius.
Revolutionary Wagner thought him a worthy successor to Beethoven.
But gentle Mendelssohn was shaken to the core by the symphony’s excesses.
Love or loathe it, no-one was unmoved.
Symphonie fantastique was the epitome of Romanticism: unabashed psychological melodrama
straight from the heart and soul of the composer.
That Berlioz put something so personal into his music was shockingly novel.
But did it catch the attention of Harriet Smithson?
Well...sadly not.
Berlioz moved heaven and earth to assure her attendance
but he’d have to wait another two years to get her along as a guest of a third party.
On that occasion in 1832, she was not warned of the music on the programme
nor was she aware that Berlioz himself would be there.
But he’d given her the best box seat tickets, a mere ten feet away from him.
Countless celebrities were in the audience: Liszt, Chopin, Paganini, Victor Hugo.
But it was Harriet who, without even knowing it, had inspired the entire evening.
As she read Berlioz’s programme notes very carefully
she realised that Symphonie fantastique was all about her.
She was the idee fixe.
Harriet agreed to meet Berlioz but would she marry him?
Well, it’s a bit tricky after you’ve just heard a symphony that says
“Erm...I had a dream about you where I killed you because you didn’t return my love."
"Oh and I also turned you into a devil-whore because of your betrayal.”
In typical Berlioz manner, the composer eventually got what he wanted.
He swallowed a lethal dose of opium right in front of her eyes.
At this point, hysterical Harriet could only consent to marry him.
Oh...and five minutes later he conveniently produced the antidote from his pocket.
You scoundrel Berlioz!
He’d given hope to stalkers everywhere.
Perseverance and a little bit of genius will get you there in the end.
But in a strange twist of fate, the couple started to act out in REALITY
what the Symphonie fantastique had only imagined.
For what Berlioz didn’t know was that this wasn’t the same Harriet Smithson of six years previously.
She was now an alcoholic with a declining career who’d only married him for his money.
She soon lost her looks and Berlioz’s obsession faded.
The marriage grew bitter.
They couldn’t even argue in the same language.
They separated only a few years later,
Harriet unable to live up to the woman his symphony had idolised.
So the moral of the story?
Be careful what you wish for.
Oh and also: don’t do drugs kiddos.