Berlioz: “Symphonie fantastique”—Audio | Adella

HECTOR BERLIOZ Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 I. Reveries — Passions: Largo — Allegro agitato e appassionato assai II. A Ball: Allegro non troppo III. In the Country: Adagio IV. March to the Scaffold: Allegretto non troppo V. Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath: Larghetto “One has only to read Berlioz’s letters from 1829 to glimpse the torment of a composer whose mind was bursting with musical ideas and whose heart was bleeding. The object of his passion was Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom Berlioz had seen on the stage two years before in the roles of Juliet and Ophelia. Since then, he had viewed her only at a distance, while she was still unaware of his existence. How was this all-consuming passion to be expressed? The dilemma was resolved early in 1830 when he suddenly realized he could represent this dramatic episode in his life as a program symphony, with a demonic, orgiastic finale in which both he and she are condemned to hell. The symphony was speedily written down in little more than three months and performed for the first time later that year. Even after Berlioz had, by a strange irony, met and married Smithson three years later — it was not a happy union, however — the symphony’s dramatic program remained. All five movements contain a single recurrent musical theme, the idée fixe, or obsession, which represents the artist’s love and is transformed according to the context in which the artist finds his beloved. After a slow introduction (Reveries), the idée fixe is heard as the main theme of the opening movement’s Allegro section (Passions). In the second movement (A Ball), the artist glimpses his beloved amidst a crowd of whirling dancers. Throughout the third movement (In the Country), two shepherds call to each other on their pipes, with the music depicting the stillness of a summer evening, the artist’s passionate melancholy, and his agitation caused by the beloved’s appearance. In his despair, the artist has poisoned his beloved and is condemned to death. The fourth movement portrays the March to the Scaffold, as he is led to the guillotine before the raucous jeers of the crowd. In his last moments, he sees the beloved’s image before the blade falls. In the final movement (Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath), the artist finds himself a spectator at a sinister gathering of specters and weird, mocking monsters of every kind. The idée fixe appears — horribly distorted by the high-pitched E-flat clarinet — bells toll, and the religious Dies irae (Day of wrath) chant is coarsely intoned by bassoons and tubas. The witches’ round-dance gathers momentum before the symphony ends in a riot of brilliant orchestral sound.” —Hugh Macdonald The Cleveland Orchestra Franz Welser-Möst, conductor