![]() The end of the fourth movement, March to the Scaffold, paints the gruesome scene of the hero’s execution. (Here Berlioz introduces a spacial dimension to the music that Mahler would later develop with his own offstage instruments). A dialogue between two shepherds can be heard in the English horn and offstage oboe. The sound of distant thunder echoes from hillsides. In the third movement, we find ourselves in a country pasture. The i dée fixe now degenerates into a vulgar, grotesque parody of itself.īerlioz’s music evokes dramatic scenes. Witches and hideous monsters shriek, groan, and cackle amid quotes of the Dies Irae (the ancient chant evoking the Day of Wrath). At this moment in the third movement you might miss it, unless you’re tuned into the woodwinds. The fifth movement, Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath, depicts the Hero’s funeral. Listen to the way it gradually creeps into the strings in this passage from the end of the first movement. We hear the i dée fixe pop up in unexpected places. In the first movement, subtitled Passions, this vague hero “sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her.” This passion is represented by the i dée fixe, a musical idea (first heard at this moment in the first movement) which returns and develops throughout the Symphony. Symphonie fantastique’s form is driven by its drama, like an opera without words. Over the course of five movements, a “young musician” descends into the despair of unrequited love. Foreshadowing Freud, Symphonie fantastique takes us on a deeply psychological journey. What emerges after we enter this hallucinogenic dreamscape is both fascinating and frightening. It deals with the pain of unrequited love, yet this is clearly an immature vision of love, idealized and illusory. It’s a work of full-blown Romanticism, more concerned with the moment than with traditional formal structure. It may have been written to impress a girl (Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom Berlioz saw in a production of Hamlet in 1827, leading to an infatuation and ultimately short-lived marriage). Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, first heard in 1830, shares some surprising similarities with a teenager’s rock music: It’s shocking, rebellious, and at least partially drug-induced (Berlioz was under the influence of opium).
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