Date of composition: 1830
Premiere: 05 December 1830 in the Paris Conservatory, conductor: Antoine Habeneck
Duration: 54 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
First performed on 27 February 1885 conducted by Karl Klindworth
The programme that Hector Berlioz published for his Symphonie fantastique evokes the plot of a particularly grisly opera: a young musician falls madly in love with a woman, and after she gives him the cold shoulder at a dance, he retreats from the city to the countryside. There, having “poisoned” himself with opium, he hallucinates the murder of his beloved – a crime for which, by the end of the fourth movement, he is executed. In the epilogue, the fifth movement, the protagonist is mocked at a wild witches’ sabbath.
As the “content” of a purely instrumental symphony, such subject matter must have appeared revolutionary in 1830, the year of the work’s successful premiere. The sources of inspiration for the piece were both personal and artistic in nature, though the composer – only twenty-seven years old at the time – hardly distinguished between art and life. In his memoirs, Berlioz describes how, in 1827, during a guest performance by an English theatre company, he fell in love both with Shakespeare’s tragedies and with the actress Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia. Smithson, who left the composer’s passionate love letters unanswered for a long time, is considered the model for the unattainable female figure in the symphony’s programme.
Yet beneath the work’s novelty, more traditional aspects are also discernible. Robert Schumann, in his impressively precise review, which he published just five years after the premiere, pointed out similarities between the first movement of Berlioz’s composition and that of a classical symphony: a slow introduction is followed by a more animated main section with the presentation of themes, which are developed and then recapitulated at the close. Even the waltz of Berlioz’s second movement finds its counterpart in the dance movements of the traditional symphony.
A reference to Beethoven is also evident – Berlioz idolised him, and it was only in the 1820s that French audiences had become acquainted with Beethoven’s symphonies. Beethoven’s Sixth, the “Pastorale”, likewise consists of five movements, and Berlioz, in his central movement with its enchanting dialogue between cor anglais and oboe, nods to Beethoven’s depictions of nature.
Schumann’s references to tradition were linked to a general unease with instrumental programme music. From the very beginning, critics claimed that the genre lacked internal musical cohesion. As Schumann put it, it could only be properly understood “with a slip of paper in one’s hand.” Such criticism overlooks the fact that the programme not only inspired Berlioz to compose music of unprecedented feverishness, agitation and psychological suggestiveness, but also contributed to formal coherence. Unity is ensured by the theme which the composer called the “idée fixe” – a motif symbolising the beloved, appearing in each of the five movements in different guises. Even during its first appearance, this theme, as it were, comes under pressure from the outside: the melody, whose notes are to swell and diminish abruptly, is commented upon in irregular outbursts from the orchestra, which have been interpreted as the artist’s pounding heart. In the finale, the beloved appears to the protagonist as a witch – and the high clarinet plays the “idée fixe”, now ornamented by trills, in a distorted, mocking version.
The composer Pierre Boulez once remarked that Berlioz was searching for the “meeting point at which imaginary concert and imaginary theatre merge.” In this sense, the Symphonie fantastique allows us to experience how sounds turn into images – and images turn into sounds.