I come reeling tonight from a performance of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, performed by the Columbia University Medical Center Symphony Orchestra, through which, I had the wonderful opportunity to reignite a dormant love of playing clarinet (not played since high school!). I thought I'd share, below, the program notes I was invited to write for the program, which, as it happens in the spirit of this Synapse, suitably has its own art-science (music-medicine) link!
Hector Berlioz first traveled to Paris in 1821 to study not music, but medicine, in the footsteps of his physician father. He left after a year of study to become a composer, writing in his memoir, “The thought of being a doctor, of studying anatomy, of dissecting bodies...instead of surrendering body and soul to music, the sublime art whose grandeur I could already imagine! [...] No!” Yet despite his aversion to anatomy, perhaps the exposure predisposed him to a fascination with macabre and death—risqué elements in the revolutionary Symphonie Fantastique.
Berlioz intended his symphony to, as he described, “stagger the musical world.” Few would question that he did, indeed, succeed. Described by some as the most innovative piece of the 19th Century, the symphony exemplified and ignited the genre of program music—music which is intended to tell a story or series of events. The work was inspired by Berlioz’s smitten passion for actress Harriet Smithson after a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1827 (where Smithson played Ophelia). The then 26-year-old Berlioz wrote Smithson an impassioned love letter, to which she never replied, and which left him full of terrible desire and longing. Even a year after encountering Smithson, his feelings could not fail to be expressed:
“Can you tell me what it is, this capacity for emotion, this force of suffering that is wearing me out? … I am indeed wretched – inexpressibly! … Today it is a year since I saw HER for the last time … Unhappy woman, how I loved you! I shudder as I write it – how I love you!”
Six weeks after sending the letter containing these words to a friend, he had written his first version of the symphony. Was Berlioz as mad as his personified self, “the author,” described in his program notes (1845 version here), who took opium and dreamed of his beloved—to the point of murdering her and her bewitched transformation? (Berlioz did, in fact, take a lethal dose of opium in an attempt to gain Smithson’s hand in marriage. When she agreed, he drank an antidote stored in his other pocket.)
When Berlioz first set out the program notes in 1845, he wrote, “This programme...is indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic plan of the work,” likening the notes to “the spoken text of an opera.” But in an 1855 version, he wrote that the program notes could be dispensed of entirely (while retaining the titles of each movement), and that “The author hopes that the symphony provides on its own sufficient musical interest independently of any dramatic intention.”
If Berlioz had started to feel the bite of critics who scoffed at dramatism as kitschy or at the inclusion of extra-musical content as a crime against “pure music,” it was too late. The precedent had been set. One need only to think of the many celebrated pieces to come: Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Dukas' The Sorceror’s Apprentice, or the birdsong-like cries in Mahler’s symphonies, to name a few examples of programmatic influence.
Whether we choose to listen to the Fantastique with the program notes or without, we have much to appreciate in the evocative melodies, contrasting moods, and rich sonorities. Physician and musician Albert Schweitzer said, “Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.” It’s a good reminder for our world today. We have the chance to be taken away and transported.
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