Hector Berlioz. Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Performed by the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra (BSO), led by Music Director Dr. Beverly Everett, at its Chance Chants concert, held at Bemidji High School Auditorium on October 8, 2017. Includes commentary by Dr. Everett.
PROGRAM NOTES
In 1827, while Berlioz was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a typically all-consuming passion for Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom he saw perform a number of works by Shakespeare. His attempts to communicate with her came to nothing. This unhappy experience inspired him to compose Episode in the Life of an Artist - Grand Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts. He did so partly at the call of his brilliant creative imagination, partly for a more practical reason:
he hoped it would win him the kind of reputation that would impress Harriet Smithson. In it, he broke new compositional ground by synthesizing events from his life with purely imaginary ones. Smithson’s stage company returned to Paris in 1832; Berlioz made sure she heard the piece he had written for her. One thing led to another, and they were married the following year. Their relationship, alas, proved not to be a happy one.
“A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair,” the final revision of the Symphony’s published program begins. “The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe (fixed idea) as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.”
After the first movement’s brooding introduction, the violins introduce the beloved’s recurring melody, the idée fixe. Its attractive yet nervous character sets the tone for the balance of this section, a portrait in sound of the hero’s tempestuous emotions. An elegant Waltz follows. At a fancy party, the composer spies his beloved across a crowded ballroom, only to lose her in the crush of swirling dancers.
Next, he retires to the country to rest, but is troubled by doubting thoughts regarding his lady love. Berlioz provides a picturesque rustic idyll, complete with shepherds piping to one another across the fields, an image achieved by placing the oboe soloist behind the stage and having him (or her) engage in a call-and-response dialogue with the on-stage English horn player. At the end of the movement, no fewer than four timpani players are called into action to provide the sounds of distant thunder.
In the fourth movement, to the strains of an alternately sinister and pompous March, the hero is led to the guillotine and beheaded for the murder of his beloved. Finally, at a witches’ Sabbath held at his own funeral, he encounters his beloved for the last time. Transformed into a fiendish spirit (and accompanied by a suitably twisted version of the idée fixe), she leads a mob of demons in a frenzied, mocking round dance. Berlioz makes brilliant use of the medieval Plainchant melody, Dies irae (Day of Wrath), which he introduces through the awe-inspiring sound of two tubas.
(Program notes are from the Bemidji Symphony Orchestra’s 2017-18 concert program, p. 9. and were written by Dr. Patrick Riley.)
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This activity was funded, in part, by a grant from the Region 2 Arts Council funded by an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the State’s General Fund.
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