There I was 20 minutes ago, relaxing after a bike ride. A bike ride where I broke my chain, blindly rode toughing out the painful hail, scurried across the intercoastal on a causeway divinely avoiding lightening (thanks be to God…and also with you), and stopped at two cafés adding 1.5 hours to a 1.5 hour bike ride.
I was relaxing in the Jacuzzi tub my house came with…STOCK!. Bubble bath, Harry Connick, Jr. in the vacant-sounding other room, sunflower seeds and pretzels, magazines, and soaking up the ambiance of the incense candle burning.
I switched from Spin magazine to the CD jacket of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Op.14.
I always used to say, ‘when I’m feeling down and want to feel worse, I listen to Symphonie Fantastique.’ You’ll read why; the symphony’s story is pasted below. Recently Matt, Mare’s Nest guitarist, and I were discussing the band’s message. The band’s theme, BTW, is inherent in the band name. I expressed my desire, especially as a non-lyricist, to portray our message musically as well as lyrically. My example, Symphonie Fantastique.
Sitting in Mr. Bubble’s warmth, I got chills rereading Berlioz’s symphony program notes. What a story… Upon first listen, the layperson will not HEAR what s/he READS. After listening to the symphony about 15 times, I’m hearing new characters/figures/ideas every time.
There are sites like http://members.aol.com/fausttiger/fantastique.html, that have cheesy midi versions of the piece. That site hyperlinks midi files amongst the writeup so one can more easily discern what Berlioz was conveying. I’m not thrilled with this synopsis, but it gives you the point:
The symphony is a piece of program music which tells the story of "an artist gifted with a lively imagination" who has "poisoned himself with opium" in the "depths of despair" because of "hopeless love." There are five movements, instead of the four movements which were conventional for symphonies at the time:
0. Rêveries - Passions (Dreams - Passions)
0. Un bal (A Ball)
0. Scène aux champs (Scene at the Country)
0. Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
0. Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (Dream of a Witches' Sabbath)
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First movement: "Rêveries - Passions"
The movement is radical in its harmonic outline, building a vast arch back to the home key, which, while similar to the Sonata Form of classical composition, was taken as a departure by Parisian critics. It is here that the listener is introduced to the theme of the artist's beloved, or the idée fixe. Throughout the movement, there is a simplicity of presentation of the melody and themes, which Schumann compared to "Beethoven's epigrams", ideas which could be extended, had the composer chosen to. In part, it is because Berlioz rejected writing the very symmetrical melodies then in academic fashion, and instead looked for melodies which were, "so intense in every note, as to defy normal harmonization", as Schumann put it.
The theme itself was taken from Berlioz's scène lyrique "Herminie", composed in 1828.
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Second movement: "Un bal"
The second movement takes a rather plain waltz theme, again, derived from the idée fixe at first, and then transforming it. It is filled with running ascending and descending figures. While one critic called it "vulgar"[citation needed], the intent was to portray a single lonely soul amidst gaiety, as Berlioz wrote while composing it.
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Third movement: "Scène aux champs"
The third movement opens with the English horn and offstage oboe tossing back and forth a characteristic melody meant to evoke the horns in the mountains. The English horn represents the artist and the oboe his beloved. The melodies of these instruments represent the artist and his beloved calling back-and-forth. This intent, to evoke a spirit of the country side inhabited by, not mere rustics, but people who were one with their place is part of Romanticism and can be traced back to the ideas of such writers as Goethe. The idée fixe comes back. The movement swells to a peak, as if the artist is pushing away the idea of his beloved, the dramatic sounds fall away. The sound of distant thunder comes, in an innovative passage for four timpani players on two sets of timpani: it ends without resolution.
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Fourth movement: "Marche au supplice"
The fourth movement, which Berlioz claimed to have written in a single night (but which he actually took from an unfinished project, the opera Les Francs-juges), is filled with blaring horns and rushing passages, and scurrying figures which would later show up again in the last movement. The movement describes a dream, in which the artist is executed for killing the love of his life. It uses a grotesque version of the theme by Berlioz's extraordinary technique of orchestration, mixing string pizzicato, woodwind staccato, brass chords and a single loud stroke of percussion, forming a highly unusual series of tone colors. The scene ends with a single short fortissimo G-minor chord that represents the fatal blow: the dropping of the trap door, or perhaps the guillotine blade; the series of pizzicato notes following can be seen to represent the rolling of the severed head into the basket. Immediately prior to the musical depiction of the beheading, there is a brief, nostalgic recollection of the idée fixe in a solo clarinet, as though representing the last conscious thought of the executed man; after his death, the final nine bars of the movement contain a victorious series of tutti G major chords, seemingly intended to convey the cheering of the onlooking throng.
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Fifth movement: "Songe d'une nuit de sabbat"
The last movement, often played as a tone poem by itself, has a brooding opening, the sound of spirits marching through the graveyard. There follows, in turn, a familiar E-flat clarinet solo presenting the idée fixe as a vulgar dance tune; the call of church bells; a burlesque of a famous plainchant, the Dies Irae; and a fugue meant to represent, as Berlioz privately admitted, a giant orgy. There are a host of effects (including eerie col legno playing in the strings), from the bubbling of the witches' cauldron to the blasts of wind. The climactic finale of the symphony combines the somber Dies Irae melody with the wild fugue of the Ronde du Sabbat (Sabbath Round).
