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Hector Berlioz: Composers
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With the Symphonie fantastique Berlioz turned away from the conventions of the classical symphony that had been established by Austrian composers Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Instead of providing the expected four movements in contrasting moods, tempos, and forms, Berlioz constructed a musical drama in five parts with a recurrent musical theme. Originally titled Episodes in the Life of an Artist, the Symphonie fantastique contained autobiographical elements chiefly surrounding the composer’s obsessive love for Irish actress Harriet Smithson. With the symphony he hoped to gain her attention and win her love.
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Berlioz the composer was a full-blown Romantic, whose infatuation-at-first-sight with a pretty, British ingénue named Harriet Smithson influenced his Fantastic Symphony. Miss Smithson came to Paris to play Shakespeare, Berlioz's hero (along with Virgil, Goethe, Gluck, Beethoven, Lord Byron, and Victor Hugo). Harriet was "The Beloved" of his programme fantastique. "A young musician of morbid sensibility...in a paroxysm of lovesick despair" attempts suicide, but takes only enough laudanum to induce hallucinations, in which his Beloved appears as a recurring melody with several personalities, finally as a bacchante at a satanic ritual. Despite the lurid scenario, Berlioz's five-movement structure owes more to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony than anyone seems to have noticed at the time, or, for that matter, since. Where Beethoven whipped up a storm, Berlioz created a mob scene that concludes with the protagonist's death: his decapitated head bounces into a waiting basket pizzicato.
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Barely understood in his day, Berlioz is now seen as the blazing torch that first illuminated a path towards a 'new' music. The composer was no sensation-seeking iconoclast, rather a visionary seeker of eternal truths. He wrote to a friend: "There are many new things to be done and I shall achieve my aims." Few people today would deny that he succeeded, his genius finally recognised.
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It is not only as a composer that the life of Berlioz is full of interest, although in this respect his achievement is singularly significant for the comprehension of the modern spirit in music. But it is as the symbol of French romanticism in the whole domain of aesthetic perception that his preeminence has come to be recognized. His Mémoires (begun in London in 1848 and finished in 1865) illustrate this romantic spirit at its highest elevation as well as at its lowest depths. Victor Hugo was a romantic, Alfred de Musset was a romantic, but Berlioz was romanticism itself. As a boy he is in despair over the despair of Dido, and his breath is taken away at Virgil's "Quaesivit coelo lucem ingemuitque reperta." At the age of twelve he is in love with "Estelle", whom he meets fifty years afterwards.
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The "Harold" music was now finished and Berlioz advertised both this and the Symphonie Fantastique for a concert at the Conservatoire, December 16, 1838. Paganini was present, and declared he had never been so moved by music before. He dragged the composer back on the platform, where some of the musicians still lingered, and there knelt and kissed his hand. The next day he sent Berlioz a check for twenty thousand francs.
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Colin Davis adored Berlioz's music, and in the late 1950s he began to emerge as one of the composer's finest and most vital advocates. Before long the conductor was spearheading a new movement of worldwide interest in Berlioz; his activities were one of the most important factors in the composer's very belated rise to popularity. Gradually Davis took on almost all of Berlioz's orchestral, choral and operatic oeuvre; his performances were acclaimed for their blend of sensitivity and delicacy with brilliance and fire. Yet that passionate intensity was always underpinned by meticulous control, revealing the disciplined classicism as well as the wild romanticism in Berlioz's art.
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