Judge Dennis Davis
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, The First Psychedelic Symphony

Judge Dennis Davis - Berlioz: Symphony Fantastique, The First Psychedelic Symphony

- Well, good evening or afternoon to everybody. It’s good to be back. Bearing in mind that I’m not really an expert on France, when I was asked if I could make a contribution, there were a few odds and bobs that I thought I could do. But one of them which was particularly enthused me, and I’m pleased that Trudy agreed, was to talk about Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which is what our lecture is tonight. Can I just start by making a preliminary remark? I know that previously, particularly in late October when I did a whole series, quite a few people legitimately complained or observed that the quality of the sound wasn’t very good, which is probably due to me because you have to understand that your lecturer tonight is probably the most technologically illiterate of anybody listening to this lecture. So I wanted to just say that my purpose was… I can’t give you the kind of sound that obviously that I would love if we were all sitting together in a lecture hall, and it’d be so much easier to do this. My purpose is to use the music, and there’s a lot of it tonight, to illustrate the fabric and nature of the Berlioz symphony, and if the quality isn’t as good as it should be, it’s not too bad, obviously my object is that you’d be so enthusiastic to go and listen or re-listen or re-listen re-listen to this extraordinary piece of music perhaps in the light of some of the comments that I will make.

I have titled this lecture, of course, “The First Psychedelic Symphony,” which is not an original title at all. It’s the title given to the symphony by Leonard Bernstein, and he’s right for all sorts of reasons that I will come to as we go along. And it is an extraordinary work for another reason. You must remember that when Hector Berlioz wrote the symphony, he was 26 years old, which is really quite breathtaking when you think of the magnitude of the symphony. It was three years after Beethoven’s death, six years after Beethoven had composed the “Ninth Symphony.” Clearly these influences were there, but Berlioz obviously didn’t quite have the same anxiety, such as, as I’ve indicated in the previous lecture, Brahms had in, sort of, following upon the giant Beethoven. And in many ways therefore, this work pushes symphonic music just a stage further and was doubtless then borrowed by all sorts of people who came thereafter, including somebody who I have lectured on and I intend to again go over him later next year, which, of course, is Gustav Mahler. But let’s start, if I may, with the background to the symphony. On September the 11th in 1827, Hector Berlioz went to the Paris Odéon for performance of “Hamlet” by an English company. The younger female roles were taken by one Harriet Smithson, a 27 year old actress who had actually been brought up in Ireland. Berlioz fell instantly and wildly in love with her, excuse me, he spoke no English.

But the violent effect that this had on him created all sorts of interesting existential disturbances. He had a vivid recollection of the play from his reading of the translation, and, as far as Ophelia was concerned, there was a sort of sheer, sort of erotic power. He wrote to Harriet Smithson repeatedly, but they did not meet. He heard gossip about an affair between her and her manager, which broke his heart, but also providing distance to enable him to plan and begin a work on a symphony whose design he described in detail. And the symphony was essentially designed as a result of this erotic fantasy that he had developed of Harriet Smithson. Just to complete the story in this particular connection, of course, at the first performance of the “Fantastique” in 1830, she was not there, but two years later when Berlioz actually introduced the revision, he made absolutely every effort to get Harriet Smithson to the concert in December of 1832, where she finally did meet him. And before long, they were married in 1833. Trouble was that her French was roughly as bad as his English. So it was a complete disaster, and they separated some 11 years later, should have done so much sooner than that. By then, she had lost her looks. Her career was over, and she died in 1854 as an alcoholic and paralysed.

By the way, just for the sake of completion, Hector Berlioz supported her right throughout her life. But the point of the story is, of course, that this love of Harriet Smithson, which had been stoked by watching this performance of Hamlet back in 1827, produced this extraordinary symphony written by a 26 year old. What’d he say about it? And if, Emily, you could play the first clip, that would be fantastic. I mean, the text, sorry, yeah. This is what Berlioz said about his symphony. “‘An artist, gifted with a vivid imagination, falls in love with a woman who embodies the ideal of beauty and fascination that he has long been seeking. In a fit of despair, he poisons himself with opium, but the narcotic, instead of killing him, induces a horrible vision’ in which he believes that, having killed his beloved, he’s now condemned to death and witnesses his own execution. After death, he ‘sees himself surrounded by a foul assembly of sorcerers and devils. His beloved is now only a prostitute, fit to take part in such an orgy.’” And that little text there gives you an idea of how Berlioz through five movements, in a sense, captures all of this that he’s written here. And of course, when I quoted Bernstein to the effect that this was a psychedelic symphony, and as Bernstein points out, 130 years before the Beatles I might add, he wasn’t, of course, inventing this because Hector himself had spoken about the narcotic, which had been taken by the artist and which effectively influenced all of the work that comprises the “Symphonie Fantastique.” I’m going to try to explain the symphony in two ways.

I want to spend quite some time talking about the introduction, the first movement, because there is something in the first movement which is absolutely critical to the understanding of the entire symphony. But then I will also comment about some of the other movements that I intend to play. I intend to play extracts from the second, fourth, and fifth movements. I can’t do it all. The symphony itself is almost an hour. The symphony, I should tell you, when Berlioz composed a symphony, it was composed for around about 130 players in the orchestra. Interesting enough, he wanted over 200, so it was supposed to be for a huge orchestra. It’s also significant that given my comments about Beethoven, Berlioz favoured expression over form, a lot of the classical and romantic forms, which he’d inherited through the lineage, which culminated in Beethoven. Basically, he abandoned that and let the programme of the music govern how the movements played out. And each of the five movements then has a particular narrative all on its own. Starting off with reveries and passions, moving on to a musical depiction of a ball, then a more rustic and rural scene in the fields, then, as is indicated by, condemned to death, the “March to the Scaffolds,” and by the last line there, what is called the “Dream of the Night of the Sabbath.”

So each of these movements essentially is infused by the themes that I’ve been speaking about. Now, let’s look at the first movement. In the ordinary course if I could have, and this is because of my, again, Luddite abilities, I would’ve tried to cut up what the first six or seven minutes that I play of the first movement and illustrate as I go along. But I’m going to just give you an introduction to it. Then I’d like you to listen, and I’ll recap a little bit because it’s so important. When you listen to the first movement, the introduction begins in a very slow classical sonata style. Note the gentle longing in the music. There’s a melancholia, There’s a sadness. And then the orchestra sort of is reflecting a dream-like condition as the artist reflects on precisely this notion of the woman who he dreams about. Berlioz chooses the key, a C minor, which of course is always there, the minor key, to reflect pathos or melancholia. And the music then is very uneven. And it’s uneven because the music has tried to reflect, and maybe we’ve all gone through this in our lives at one point or another, some level of infatuation that you’ve had for another person and therefore the idea of both ecstasy and melancholia kind of combining, and the music does that. We will then hear at some point just a falling sigh.

And this anticipates two notes, which we’re going to hear later and which I’m going to explain in the moment, called the idée fixe. And the idée fixe, if you hold that thought for a moment, is absolutely crucial understanding the whole symphony because an idée fixe is the musical idea that obsessively portrays a character, in this case the artist’s vision of the ideal woman. He remembers her before their first meeting. He remembers the despair. He remembers the love for the actress. All of these emotions are captured in this section called the idée fixe, which repeats itself over and over in different guises and forms through the five movements. And we see the music building up to this idée fixe, all sorts of strange changes of mood, rhythm and tempo. And finally, we get this 40 bar idée fixe, and I want to… It comes at the end of the six minutes. So what I’ve done really quickly is to explain the first part, which then gives rise to this idée fixe, which you will hear towards the end of the six minutes or roughly that I’m going to play you and which I want to then discuss with you once you’ve heard it. So here, a wonderful recording by the great Mariss Jansons, one of the really great contemporary conductors. Trudy and I had the almost tragic, I think I’ve mentioned this before as a situation, of hearing him in his last concert when he was clearly very, very ill. And he died a few days later.

It was at Carnegie Hall, but I think we also heard performance he did with Leningrad, not with the Leningrad, the Leningrad Symphony, the Shostakovich Seventh, which was absolutely out of this world. Here he is at the Proms doing the first part of the first movement of the Berlioz. And if we can have clip one, Emily. So if you watch and listened to the last couple of minutes, you get the flutes coming in with this idée fixe. You’ll see what happens there, which is so remarkable, is the way it goes up and up the music. In other words, it starts with a rising arpeggio, followed by a falling scale. It then rises further, it rises further, and then it starts to collapse. And of course all the time there’s something behind it, a disturbance by parts of the orchestra. And that whole process, that yearning, which goes up and up in desperate attempt for the love that he shows to his beloved, and then it all collapses, that’s the idée fixe that comes back over and over in the symphony. It’s the central theme of the entire symphony.

And essentially, of course, what I tried to explain to you earlier was just the background to getting there. It’s probably true to say that, you know, it shows both a sense of passion, optimism and then despair of music, which is quite extraordinary in relation to reflecting one fundamental theme, which we all know is what he’s on about, which is this theme of the inability to actually capture that which he wants, which was just beloved in this case. Of course it is autobiographical. It is Smithson, but that’s neither here nor there. What I wanted you to hear was that process of music, which of course then finally collapses towards the end as the full orchestra is heard. And that ultimately, again if you get that, then the entire symphony then unlocks itself in a wonderful fashion. So for example, this idée fixe sort of comes back in the first movement in various guises. Eventually, the music turns into C major contrasting with the minor introduction to which I’ve mentioned, but ultimately the obsession with love, which is reflected in this idée fixe. It’s the musical representation of the artist’s ideal form of love, never far away. Now let’s observe that in the second movement, The second movement, the artist is now dreaming that he’s at a ball, and at some moment he is going to see his beloved.

Now, watch how the music unfolds here. What happens is he’s dreaming that he’s at a ball. There are lots and lots of people. So Berlioz composes a waltz type theme, which basically characterises the second movement. Suddenly we hear again that theme we’ve just spoken about, the idée fixe, but it’s totally crushed as the beloved disappears, and the noise of the crowd then overwhelms it, and we get the kind of waltz type music coming back. Now in this particular case and in the last three clips that I’ve got, since I must get this correct because last time I was rebuked for this, ‘cause I know he liked to call himself Bernstein and not Bernstein. Sorry for being so South African, but each of them is a recording of Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic. Let’s have a look at Bernstein’s recording of the second movement. Just illustrate exactly what I’m talking about and the relationship in the worlds in the idée fixe as Berlioz composes it. So you can see there exactly what I was trying to suggest. That what he does in this movement is the artist is now at this ball. And of course the way Berlioz paints it is by these various measures of a waltz theme. In a sense, creating the glitz and the glamour of a large scale ball. And then all of a sudden, of course the artist sees he’s beloved, which was why, and I’ll probably pronounce this completely wrongly 'cause I don’t speak French, the idée fixe or fixe comes back.

The theme. The theme that runs right through. And as I said earlier, you can’t understand the symphony unless you grasp that point. That kind of longing theme just comes back long enough for Berlioz to picture his beloved in the ball. And then of course suddenly she disappears because there far too many people. And two other aspects about this to observe, there was some debate earlier when he composed the first version of this, that the artist had only had opium in the last two movements. But by the time he recomposed in 1832, the idea was that the artist was full of opium from the commencement. Hence the point that Bernstein makes with regard to psychedelic quality of the symphony. And you can see the music, it’s kind of more and more frenetic. And one of the issues that if you observe it technically, it has lots of changes of both mood and tempe. And the result is really to get a really good recording, which these are obviously because Bernstein and Mariss Jansons were great exponents of it, is not necessarily is always available to one. Certainly I’ve heard recordings in Cape Town that certainly are not quite standard that they should be. The third movement, which I’m going to a lied over because I want to concentrate finally on the last two.

But just to fill you in, the third movement is much more a rural picture. It’s called “Scenes in the Field.” The artist finds himself in the country at evening. He hears in the distance shepherds playing a particular tune. popular to Swiss herdsmen. There’s a pastoral duet. There’s a scenery, quiet rustling of the trees. It’s a very rural kind of picture almost, and one knows of course that whilst Berlioz did not… I’m not sure that he actually ever heard the Beethoven Nine. He was certainly acquainted with the earlier Beethoven symphonies, including the Pastoral. But then of course, all of a sudden, the same theme comes back again, the idée fixe, and what one then sees the music transmogrify into a mixture of both hope and fear, happiness and desperation. By the end of the scene, and interesting enough, there’s distant sounds of thunder of a thunderstorm and then suddenly silence. And that then leads us to the fourth movement, which is quite remarkable. It’s called “March to the Scaffold.” And again here what has happened is the opium, which the artist has poisoned himself with, might be too weak to kill him, but essentially the sleep that he now, as it were, falls into, provides him with terrible visions. And he dreams that he’s killed the woman. He’s killed his beloved.

And now he’s condemned, led to the scaffold, and he witnesses his own execution. And so what we see musically here, which is really very interesting, is we see in this movement the depiction of the fact that he’s dreamt that he’s killed his beloved. We then see music replicating the kind of bands that Berlioz would’ve known about, which accompanied people being taken to the guillotine during the revolution in France. Cellos and basses play a menacing tune. They’re accompanied by four bassoons, which is a typical Berlioz ploy, the four bassoons. And then we get a sound of what appears to be a military band, which accompanies the prisoner towards his execution. All of that’s happening, and then the brass come in representing the speed with which the execution is about to take place. Suddenly, miraculously, in all of this military and other bands, he’s lying there about to be executed and he remembers his beloved. And we again hear the sounds of the idée fixe before the blade falls, which is incredibly well-depicted in music. And that’s the end of our hero, or so we thought. Let us hear now, Emily, if we can, the third clip, which is the fourth movement. Again, Bernstein. What an extraordinary musical depiction of a dream of your own execution and the amazing way in which the overarching theme comes in just suddenly and then boom, the depiction of his head being chopped off in the guillotine. But Berlioz wasn’t yet finished. And very briefly, as we come to the end of this lecture, I’d like to just refer you to the fifth movement because by now our narcotic artist is dead, and now he’s dreaming about that death.

And that means that in the fifth movement we will hear, but I’m not going to play it all, we will hear again the overall the idée fixe theme. But what you will hear in what I want to play for you is a sort of strange sound. He reflects upon his death. The chilling cries of witches and monsters emerging. All sorts of terrifying pictures in this narcotic-induced brain of the artist. We then hear church bells, and then a parody of the Dies irae, which which is all part of this reflective dream. I’m now dead, and I’m now reflecting on my death. Let’s just hear the last clip, just a little brief introduction to the fifth movement. Okay, Emily, I think we can end that. It gives you an idea of, you know, this extraordinary, almost terrifying picture which he pictures at the end. And I want to end by quoting a reviewer, an anonymous reviewer, apparently from the time that the symphony was first performed back in 1830, which I should tell you, where the audience included Meyerbeer, Spontini and a very young Franz Liszt.

And this is what the anonymous reviewer said, “I accept that the symphony is of an almost inconceivable strangeness, and that the schoolmasters will no doubt pronounce an anathema on those profanations of the 'truly beautiful.’ But for anyone who isn’t too concerned about the rules, I believe that Monsieur Berlioz, if he carries on the way he’s begun, will one day be worthy to take his place beside Beethoven.” And in many ways you could say that this remarkable symphony apart from other work that he did quite obviously, really perhaps confirmed what that anonymous reviewer said back in the day. For a 26 year old composer to write a symphony of this kind, to push the boundaries in symphonic music and to incorporate the narrative that I’ve thought to allude to and do it in a way which is centred round one animating theme, is utterly and completely remarkable. And I just want to say that there’re lots and lots of great recordings of this, but just to give you a few, there’s one by John Elliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire, which is brilliant. There’s one, there are a number, but one, particularly one, by Colin Davis with the Concertgebouw. And there is one by Jansons, which was on a CD, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. They’re all worth listening to because this is a really remarkable piece of work and it allows us, in many ways, to understand the developments in symphonic music, which went beyond it by all sorts of people. I’ll just check whether there’s anybody who said anything that I need to reply to.

Q&A and Comments:

Paula, thank you very much. Yes, it’s nice to be back.

I have corrected the pronunciation Bernstein. I do apologise.

Thank you to you, Rita, and to Hannah.

Yeah, as I say, there is a… Barbara, you make the point about the Schulte and the Chicago Orchestra. I’ve not heard that recording, but I’m sure a Schulte recording’s worthwhile.

And Marjorie, you write about Colin Davis. I see it’s idée fixe. Well I’m sorry about that.

And thank you very much, Rita, and to Jillian.

All have a good evening, and do take care.