The Symphonie fantastique made and marked Berlioz’s reputation from the beginning. The work is most famous for its brilliantly imaginative orchestration and for Berlioz’s use of a single melody, which he called an idée fixe, in all five movements. Yet for all its renown as the great Romantic symphony, the Symphonie fantastique is really based on classical principals, organized in palindromic fashion around a slow movement at the center with two movements in characteristic dance meters (waltz and march) surrounding it, and large-scale fast movements at the beginning and end. Moreover the whole is laid out in a logical harmonic plan, though the logic is not lacking in surprises.

Berlioz was not interested in writing the kind of music that the average French concertgoer of his day—and even the average musician—of his day preferred: “soothing music,” he said in his memoirs, “not too dramatic, but lucid, rather colorless, safely predictable, innocent of unheard-of rhythms or harmonies or new procedures of any sort, modest in its demands on the intelligence and concentration of performer and listener alike.”

Probably no musical event of his life fired his energies more than his first exposure to music that was the very opposite of that description—the symphonies of Beethoven, which offered a vivid demonstration that instrumental music could have an expressive force far more profound than the vocal compositions he had heard up to that point. Without Beethoven, there would be no Symphonie fantastique.

Yet the Fantastique also required another impulse for its creation. This came on September 11, 1827, when the young composer simultaneously encountered Shakespeare and Harriet Smithson at a performance of Hamlet in which Miss Smithson played Ophelia. Shakespeare remained a lifelong literary idol. The influence of Harriet Smithson was more immediate. Berlioz conceived a hopeless infatuation for her and spent months trying to bring himself to the lady’s attention. Finally, sublimating his passion, he conceived a program symphony, which he called Episode from the Life of an Artist, but his emotional state made it impossible to compose. His condition became the subject of gossip until he heard a false rumor of a supposed affair that the actress was having. He began a new version of the original plan with a distinctly cynical ending: in the last scene, the witch’s sabbath, she was to appear as “a prostitute, fit to take part in such an orgy.”

Later Berlioz cooled off. Successive versions of the program softened the attack on the heartless woman who drove the protagonist to poison himself, becoming eventually a “fit of despair about love.” He compounded the highly colored plot from such diverse works as Goethe’s Faust, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Chateaubriand’s René.

A planned performance in May 1830 fell through after a single rehearsal. Berlioz undertook revisions and the work finally performed on December 5 was not the Symphonie fantastique we know today; much of it was reworked in the following two years while he was in Italy, having finally won the Prix de Rome. In the Eternal City he reworked a considerable part of the first three movements. The revised version was performed with its sequel, Lélio, or The Return to Life, on December 9, 1832; the symphony, at least, was a great success. Still later Berlioz added the “religioso” coda of the first movement.

During all this time, Berlioz continued to refine his literary program. At first he insisted that a copy should be handed out to the audience, since he considered the symphony “an instrumental drama,” for which the program was “the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce the musical movements, whose character and expression it motivates.” Yet, as he changed the “drama” by considerably toning down the attack on the faithless woman, he also became gradually more ready to let the music speak for itself without a text at all. By 1855 he had recast it so that the musician takes his dose of opium at the outset; thus the entire symphony is as an opium dream. He wished this version to be given to the audience whenever the Symphony fantastique is performed with Lélio. (Berlioz’s 1855 version is reprinted here in an abridged translation by William Foster Apthorp, the first program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.)

A young musician of morbid sensibility poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The beloved woman herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea [idée fixe] which he finds and hears everywhere.

PART ONE
DAY DREAMS, PASSIONS
He recalls that uneasiness of soul, those moments of causeless melancholy and joy, which he experienced before seeing her whom he loves; then the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him, his moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, his returns to loving tenderness, and his religious consolations.

PART TWO
A BALL
He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fête.

PART THREE
SCENE IN THE FIELDS
One summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds playing Ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scene around him, the light rustling of the trees gently swayed by the breeze, some hopes he has recently conceived, all combine to restore an unwonted calm to his heart; she appears once more, his heart stops beating, he is agitated; if she were to betray him! . . . One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him. The sun sets. . . . the sound of distant thunder . . . solitude . . . silence. . . .

PART FOUR
MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and led to execution. The procession advances to the tones of a march which is now sombre and wild, now brilliant and solemn, in which the dull sound of the tread of heavy feet follows without transition upon the most resounding outbursts. At the end, the fixed idea reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought interrupted by the fatal stroke.

PART FIVE
DREAM OF A WITCHES’ SABBATH
He sees himself at the witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, shrieks. The beloved melody again reappears; but it has become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the witches’ sabbath. . . . Howlings of joy at her arrival. . . . she takes part in the diabolic orgy. . . . Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies irae. Witches’ dance. The witches’ dance and the Dies irae together.

Though Berlioz took his cue from Beethoven, he was no obsequious imitator. Like all true originals, he could build on a forceful model and yet not be overpowered. Like Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Fantastique had a program of its own and ran to more than the traditional four movements. And like Beethoven, Berlioz put his “Romantic” program symphony into a “classical” framework with a symmetrical design of the movements. He derived some of the music from his earlier compositions, yet it would take a fine connoisseur who could tell, without foreknowledge, what was newly conceived what was reused.

The first movement’s introduction is derived from a romance that Berlioz had composed under the influence of a youthful infatuation. He found the melody given to the violins at the very beginning “exactly right for expressing the overpowering sadness of a young heart caught in the toils of a hopeless love.” It makes an effective introduction, in C minor, for a movement that will ultimately be in the major. The idée fixe (the term was the composer’s own) appears as the principal theme of the Allegro in the first movement, but it is derived from Herminie, a cantata he had written in 1828 in one of his unsuccessful efforts to win the Prix de Rome.

The Ball is quite simply the traditional ternary dance movement—here a waltz—with the idée fixe appearing as the trio. Two harps lend a wonderful splash of color to the ball, seconded by the bright woodwinds.

The “Scene in the Country” is a slow sonata form with the idée fixe appearing as the secondary theme. (This music is derived from an early Mass composition that Berlioz wrote at the age of twenty; its manuscript was lost until the early 1990s, when it was discovered in a Belgian church.) The movement is framed by a miniature tone poem, a dialogue between an English horn (on stage), and an echoing oboe (off stage). When the movement draws to its close, the English horn attempts to resume the dialogue, but the only response is a tense silence and—original stroke—menacing soft chords in F minor played by four timpani while the English horn attempts to sing the end of its song in F major.

The last two movements are musically linked in their scoring for large orchestra with a full brass ensemble. Berlioz claimed to have composed the “March to the Scaffold” in a single night—not so bold a claim as might appear, since he cannibalized the march from unperformed opera, Les Francs-juges, adding only the quotation of the idée fixe just before the fall of the guillotine.

The “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” concludes the symphony in tonally classical manner, returning to the C minor/C major of the opening movement. But in its powerful sonority, in the evocative use of tolling funeral bells and the Dies irae melody of the Requiem Mass (first in earnest and later parodied), Berlioz brings layers of extra-musical reference that had rarely been employed in a symphony before. The mysterious tritones, the grotesque parody of the idée fixe, the clanging of the funeral bells bringing in the low bassoons and tubas all come to be a kind of large introduction for the “sabbath round-dance,” which appears in a full-fledged fugal exposition. Both the Dies irae and fugue subject return together for the recapitulation, following which Berlioz unleashes the full energy of his large orchestra in the hair-raising coda. —© Steven Ledbetter