Symphonie Fantastique

With its French title and opening twitterings, Oiseaux Bleus et Sauvages nods in the direction of Olivier Messiaen, although here the avian connection seems more rhythmic than melodic. Listen for Morlock’s jumpy pulses that mirror the questing, wary movements of foraging corvids. 

The pulse and overall arc of the piece evokes the business of the natural world during the spring and summer months. Different instrument groups carry out their unique tasks to complete their own cycles, all in melodic and rhythmic harmony to create a lovely body of sound. At one point you will hear nightfall, as the density of activity slows, and may hear fireflies and dewdrops before the early morning birds slowly start up again.

Erica Miller

Mozart's 4th Violin concerto is in D major, a bright-sounding key normally associated with trumpets and drums. But neither of those instruments appear—instead Mozart establishes an assertive mood with fanfares for horns and oboes. In the first movement Mozart uses the violin’s full range, from very high notes to the singing low register, and taunts listeners with drastic shifts in volume. The slow movement is marked Andante cantabile—calling for an easy tempo and, especially, a fluid, singing character—and adopts a serious, contemplative tone. The finale begins with what sounds like a slow introduction. But this turns out to be the recurring dance theme, its gentle, graceful character alternating with lively, playful episodes before one final surprise: the concerto dies away to a subdued ending.

Erica Miller

Genius never really springs fully armed, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter (although Schumann made that extravagant claim for the young Brahms). Even Beethoven’s genius is a logical and clear extension of Haydn’s effervescent originality. But the young Berlioz stands practically alone in music history. There were barely any composers who influenced him directly although Gluck, Spontini, Beethoven and Le Sueur (his own teacher) impressed him immensely. And none followed. He was alone, iconoclastic, rebellious, reviled (especially by the critics in Paris) and – eventually – revered (especially in London). There is very little about Berlioz that could be described as normal, or ordinary. Even his approach to falling in love was the epitome of the Romantic ideal – a fusion of head and heart that seemed to operate quite independently of the love object. His passions, while total in their conceptual embrace, took years to fulfill themselves in any physical sense, and usually ended in disillusionment. Enter Harriet Smithson. In 1827 she arrived in Paris from England as part of a troupe of Shakespearean actors. Berlioz attended the first performance of Hamlet. Miss Smithson played Ophelia. Berlioz swooned. He pined. He had a brilliant idea. He would write a symphony to commemorate this self-induced, fantastical, emotional tidal wave in his life. Then came allegations, unfounded as he later discovered, against the virtue of Miss Smithson. This news induced such a state of frantic despair that he transported his beloved to a witches’ sabbath in the fifth movement – and essayed his own execution for precipitating her imagined death in the fourth movement. As I mentioned, Berlioz did not operate in the ‘ordinary’. After all, how could reality ever expect to match the fevered imaginings of Berlioz’s muse? The year was now 1830 (only six years after Beethoven’s Choral Symphony had astonished Viennese audiences). Gone was the nicely balanced concept of the Classical symphony that even Beethoven had, more-or-less, adhered to. Here was program music writ large (though, again, Beethoven got there first in 1808 with his Pastoral Symphony). Yet there was no mistaking that this epic outpouring from the young Berlioz was symphonic in concept. Conscious of how far from the norm he was straying, Berlioz provided his audience with a detailed synopsis of the events that he had imagined as he wrote in a white heat of inspiration: A young musician with a morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The drug, too weak to kill him, induces a heavy sleep accompanied by strange visions during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical ideas and images. The beloved herself has become a melody to him, an ‘idée fixe’; that he encounters and hears everywhere.

I Rêveries -passions

First he recalls that soul-sickness, that ‘vagues des passions’ those groundless depressions and joys, that he experienced before he first encountered the woman he loves; then the volcanic love that she inspired in him, his delirious suffering, his jealous rages, his return to tenderness, his religious consolations. After a quiet, melancholy, introduction laced with hints of the idée fixe theme, there is a great deal of excited, but unfocussed activity in the strings (those vagues des passions) before we reach the Allegro where the flute and violins finally introduce the entire idée fixe theme. It is not underpinned with appropriately romantic harmony but with a throbbing accompaniment from the lower strings – “I hear my heart beat, and its pulsations shake me as though they were the piston strokes of a steam-engine” (as Berlioz wrote to a friend in 1830). Frenzied passages from the strings and tender ones in the woodwinds follow – Berlioz’s “delirious suffering”. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that this movement does not closely follow Classical sonata form. Berlioz was more interested in letting the music create its own logic rather than trying to stuff it into some pre-packaged form. Thus there is not a second subject to speak of. Neither can the development be described as formal. It begins with a sequential treatment of the first three bars of the idée fixe theme in the lower strings, each entry becoming increasingly distorted. The musical emotions again become agitated. Then without warning we hear a new expressive theme from the oboe – the “return to tenderness” – that Berlioz records in his program note, although even this is accosted by the idée fixe in the violas and cellos. But there is a recapitulation. It, however, is somewhat overshadowed by a series of codas that crank up the voltage one last time before the orchestra finally runs out of steam and pretends to be an organ in the final section marked Religiosamente. It suggests that Berlioz’s “religious consolations” were somewhat abbreviated and inconsequential.

II A Ball

During the tumult of a brilliant Ball, he encounters his beloved again. A ball, therefore a waltz? Indeed – after some roulades from two harps. Again the orchestration shows breathtaking originality. The accompaniment is given to the lower strings the first time around. But on its second appearance the waltz has each beat coloured by different sections of the orchestra, the strings get the first beat, the harps the second, and the woodwinds the third. It creates a magical effect. Then, with a downward chromatic scale, the cellos head for cover. The flute and oboe begin to sing the idée fixe, which evokes off-beat palpitations from the basses and cellos. The beloved has appeared in the arms of another! The waltz theme reappears, now divided between the strings and woodwinds, and rises to a crescendo. Suddenly, all we hear is the solo clarinet intoning the idée fixe. It is a last glimpse of the beloved before the orchestra, fortissimo and energetic, whirls the movement to its conclusion.

III In the Country

On a summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds piping to each other a ‘ranz des vaches’ (a traditional Swiss shepherd tune); this pastoral duet, the scenery, the quiet rustling of the trees gently stirred by the wind, his hopes for his beloved, all combine to soothe his heart with unaccustomed calm. But then she appears again – he feels his heart tighten, painful presentiments disturb him – what if she were to deceive him? One of the shepherds takes up his simple tune again, but the other does not answer. The sun sets – distant sound of thunder – loneliness – silence.

IV March to the Scaffold

He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march, sombre and fierce, brilliant and solemn. The muffled sound of heavy steps gives way without transition to the noisiest clamour. At the end the ‘idée fixe’ returns, like a last thought of the beloved before the death blow.

V Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath

He sees himself at a Witches’ Sabbath surrounded by a frightful group of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, which have come together for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, bursts of laughter, distant cries which other cries seem to answer. The beloved’s melody appears again, but it has lost its character of nobility and shyness; it is no more than a dance tune, mean, trivial, and grotesque: it is she, coming to join the sabbath – A roar of joy at her arrival – She takes part in the devilish orgy – Funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. Dance of the Witches. The dance and the Dies Irae are combined.

© David Gardner