Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Flute and clarinet begin quietly, repeating their notes as other wind instruments join them. Muted violins take up a melody with pauses, its phrases separated by fermatas. The strings play and fall silent several times.

Before leaving for Paris, Berlioz burned his early compositions, but he kept one melody in his memory. He had written it to words from Florian’s Estelle while grieving over his own adolescent love. Years later it became the violins’ melody in this introduction.

Berlioz’s programme gave the artist a “soul-sickness”, with melancholy and joys without cause, before he had ever seen her. It took the name for this, le vague des passions, from “a famous writer” whom it left unnamed. The writer was Chateaubriand.

In 1828 Habeneck’s new Conservatoire concerts brought Beethoven to Paris. Berlioz wrote that Beethoven “opened a new world in music”. After the C minor Symphony, Berlioz’s teacher Lesueur hurried out red-faced and said he was so shaken that he thought he could not find his head to put his hat on.

In September 1827 Berlioz saw Harriet Smithson act Shakespeare in Paris, and he fell in love with her before they had met. By 1830 he was writing a symphony about an artist obsessed with his beloved. Smithson heard the revised work in December 1832.

The flute and first violins play the idée fixe, the fixed idea or obsession, which Berlioz’s 1845 programme identified with the beloved. Its opening G is tied across the barline before the melody rises. Long notes and new starts extend the phrase well beyond four bars.

On 5 December 1830 Habeneck conducted the première at the Paris Conservatoire. The players gave their services free and had only two rehearsals for the new symphony and Berlioz’s cantata Sardanapale. Three movements caused a sensation; the countryside scene barely registered.

In the development the long melody is broken into shorter phrases. The strings begin a figure and the woodwinds reply. Under a held chord the lower strings keep moving, and fragments of the beloved’s melody return throughout.

The idée fixe first appeared in Herminie, the cantata Berlioz wrote in 1828 for the Prix de Rome. In the symphony he gave the vocal melody to the orchestra. It returns later in the waltz, the march to the execution and the witches’ dance.

In the late Allegro, quick string phrases run against broad wind and brass chords. Trumpets and cornets join the horns, and the violins climb high above them. The dynamic rises from forte to fortissimo.

Woodwinds, horns and strings hold broad chords, marked pianississimo, and the trumpets and cornets rest. The restless string figures stop. Berlioz’s programme ends its account of the movement with the artist’s religious consolation.

The strings play a tremolo while two harp parts enter in turn with rising broken chords. The sound grows louder. Then the first violins begin the waltz.

The waltz opens softly in A major. First violins play the tune, while cellos and double basses pluck the first beat of each bar. The melody rises and turns above this pizzicato bass.

Berlioz’s programme places the artist at a brilliant party, where he sees his beloved, as he also sees her in the countryside. The ballroom has its own music. With her comes the melody heard since the start of the symphony.

Flute and oboe play the beloved’s melody, now recast in three beats to the bar. Beneath it the strings keep the waltz going, with soft chords above running figures in the cellos and basses. A clarinet then takes up the theme.

In Florence in April 1831, Berlioz reorchestrated the movement and wrote a new coda. The waltz had already pleased the audience at the Paris première.

The waltz returns in A major, after the central idée fixe. Its tune passes between strings and woodwinds, and the harps add rippling figures and chords.

The strings stop. A solo clarinet begins the idée fixe again, accompanied by a brief flute phrase, quiet horns and harp chords. After a few bars the dance returns and the melody breaks off.

Tempo primo con fuoco, the first tempo, with fire. The strings return at speed and the woodwinds join them, with chords from both harp parts. The dance ends emphatically in A major.

A cor anglais and a distant oboe exchange slow phrases. The oboe is marked lontano (far away). In Berlioz’s programme the two players are shepherds, and at first they play without accompaniment.

This Adagio cost Berlioz more than three weeks of work, and he put it aside and returned to it two or three times. In his Mémoires he set this against the march to the scaffold, which he wrote in a single night.

The flute and first violins play a broad melody in F major in unison. Plucked strings join beneath them.

In Berlioz’s programme, the evening, the shepherds’ ranz des vaches, trees stirred lightly by the wind and a few new hopes bring the artist “an unaccustomed calm”. He thinks of his isolation and hopes not to be alone much longer.

F major is the key of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, and this scene is an homage to it. From bar 67, after the main melody, there are discreet allusions to the birdsong that closes the “Pastoral”’s slow movement.

The middle episode has shorter wind phrases, and the strings grow more restless. The idée fixe enters in the woodwinds and, in altered form, in the basses (bars 87–⁠102). In Berlioz’s programme the artist fears at this point that his beloved is deceiving him.

The pastoral music returns at Tempo I, and the woodwinds play quietly. From bar 119 a solo clarinet takes the tune above pizzicato second violins and divided violas. The flute echoes it, and the strings continue pizzicato.

The pastoral tune first appeared in the Gratias of Berlioz’s Messe solennelle, written in 1824–⁠25. Berlioz moved it from E major to F major for the symphony. The Mass was lost for generations, and the borrowing became known only when it was rediscovered in 1991.

At the première in December 1830 this movement made little impression, and Berlioz resolved to rewrite it. His friend Ferdinand Hiller offered advice. The long countryside scene was among the revisions Berlioz made over several years.

The cor anglais plays its call again, and the distant oboe does not reply. Beneath it, four timpanists play rolls that rise and fade to represent thunder. Berlioz asked for soft sponge-headed sticks.

Berlioz ended this scene in his 1855 programme with a few broken phrases: “The sun goes down … distant thunder … solitude … silence.” In the programme, the second shepherd does not reply.

After the silence, the 1845 programme turns to the artist’s despair. Sure that his love is unrecognised, he takes opium. The dose is too weak to kill him but brings strange visions, in which he is led to the scaffold.

Timpani begin softly, struck with sponge-headed sticks. Stopped horns enter above plucked cellos and basses. Berlioz’s programme described an opium-dazed musician who dreams that he has murdered his beloved and is being led to execution.

Cellos and double basses play the descending tune of the opening march in unison, over a pizzicato accompaniment in the upper strings. The tune moves down through G minor, stopping and starting between sharp orchestral replies.

The second march is in B♭ major. Woodwinds and brass play its square, emphatic tune over the strings and timpani.

Habeneck conducted the first performance at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830, after only two rehearsals. The march overwhelmed the audience. In his Mémoires Berlioz recorded its success and the failure of the countryside movement to make an impression.

The descending march returns in G minor, carried by bassoons and low strings. The timpani are played with wooden sticks, and bass drum and cymbals join.

Berlioz wrote in his Mémoires that he composed the Marche au supplice in a single night. The slow countryside movement of the same symphony had taken him more than three weeks. He went on revising both, and the other movements, for several years.

The march stops and a solo clarinet plays, marked dolce assai ed appassionato — very sweetly and passionately. It begins the beloved’s melody in G major, unaccompanied, in bars 164–⁠168. Berlioz’s programme calls the phrase a final thought of love.

A full-orchestra chord cuts off the clarinet. Two short pizzicato notes follow, then the drums roll and the movement ends on full chords in G major.

Muted violins and violas play tremolo high above the cellos and basses, whose quick figures rise from the low register. Soft timpani strokes interrupt them. In Berlioz’s programme, the artist dreams that witches and monsters have gathered for his funeral.

The idée fixe returns in the clarinets, ornamented with trills and grace notes. After a first statement on C clarinet, the E♭ clarinet plays it as a fast dance. In Berlioz’s programme, the beloved has joined the sabbath.

On 2 February 1829 Berlioz told his friend Humbert Ferrand that “a descriptive symphony of Faust” was fermenting in his head, and that he meant it to strike the musical world with terror. In the finished symphony the link with Goethe’s Faust is in the last movement, which echoes the Walpurgis Night scene.

Bassoons, cellos and basses fall to a long, soft note. Deep bells enter offstage, sounding C and G. Between their strokes the strings play fragments of the dance that follows.

Four bassoons and two ophicleides play the Dies irae, the chant from the Mass for the Dead, in long notes moving together above the bells. Later statements shorten the note values and pass the tune to higher wind and brass instruments.

Cellos and double basses begin the witches’ round. Violas enter next, then violins, each group starting while the earlier players continue. The subject is built from quick rising notes and a turn.

In 1845 Berlioz required that the audience receive his programme before hearing the symphony. In 1855 he allowed the symphony to be performed without the explanation. In the later version the opium dream covers the whole work.

The day before the première, the nineteen-year-old Franz Liszt called on Berlioz, whom he had never met. Berlioz talked about Goethe’s Faust, which Liszt admitted he had not read; he soon came to love it as much as Berlioz did. At the concert Liszt applauded so loudly that the whole hall noticed him.

From bar 414 the wind and brass hold the Dies irae in long notes while the strings play the witches’ round beneath it at speed. Berlioz names both tunes in the heading above the score.

Late in the movement the violins and violas strike their strings with the wood of their bows: col legno. They play high repeated notes. Woodwinds trill above pizzicato cellos and basses.

The woodwinds play a short passage alone. The strings then return to bowing, fortissimo, joined by brass chords and timpani. The last pages move towards C major, and the full orchestra plays the closing chords.