“PROGRAMME OF THE SYMPHONY
“A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments, 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 which he finds and hears everywhere.
“Part I
“DREAMS, PASSIONS
“He first recalls that uneasiness of soul, that vague des passions, 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 II
“A BALL
“He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fête.
“Part III
“SCENE IN THE FIELDS
“One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a 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 and to impart a more cheerful coloring to his thoughts; but she appears once more, his heart stops beating, he is agitated with painful presentiments; 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 IV
“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 outburst. At the end, the fixed idea reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought interrupted by the fatal stroke.
“Part V
“WALPURGISNIGHT’S DREAM
“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 to which other shrieks seem to reply. The beloved melody again reappears; but it has lost its noble and timid character; 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 Iræ. Witches’ dance. The Witches’ dance and the Dies Iræ together.”
In a preamble to this programme, relating mostly to some details of stage-setting when the Épisode de la vie d’un artiste is given entire, Berlioz also writes: “If the symphony is played separately at a concert ... the programme does not absolutely need to be distributed among the audience, and only the titles of the five movements need be printed, as the symphony can offer by itself (the composer hopes) a musical interest independent of all dramatic intention.”
The score is dedicated to Nicholas I of Russia.
The symphony begins with a slow introduction, Largo, C minor, 4-4. Two measures of soft preluding lead to a plaintive theme played by the strings, pianissimo. This theme is a melody of romance composed by Berlioz in his youth and recurs in modified form in each movement. “Strange to say,” wrote Berlioz of the imagined artist, “the image of the loved one never comes into his mind without the accompaniment of a musical thought in which he finds the characteristic grace and nobility attributed by him to his beloved. This double idée fixe—obsessing idea—constantly pursues him; hence the constant apparition in all the movements of the chief melody of the first allegro.”
The symphony is scored for two flutes (and piccolo), two oboes (and English horn), two clarinets and E flat clarinet, four bassoons, four horns, two cornets-à-pistons, two trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, two pairs of kettledrums (three players) bells, snaredrum, bass drum, cymbals, two harps, and strings.
What was the origin of this symphony? Who was the woman that inspired the music and was so bitterly assailed in the argument sent to his friend Ferrand? Boschot describes her as she looked in 1827: “Tall, lithe, with shoulders rather fat and with full bust, a supple figure, a face of an astonishing whiteness, with bulging eyes like those of the glowing Mme de Staël, but eyes gentle, dreamy, and sometimes sparkling with passion. And this Harriet Smithson had the most beautiful arms—bulbous flesh, sinuous line. They had the effect on a man of a caress of a flower. And the voice of Harriet Smithson was music.”[13]
Harriet Constance Smithson, known in Paris as Henrietta Smithson, born at Ennis, Ireland, March 18, 1800, was seen as Ophelia by Berlioz at the Odéon, Paris, September 11, 1827, after engagements in Ireland and England. She appeared there first on September 6 with Kemble, Powers, and Liston. Her success was immediate and overwhelming. She appeared as Juliet, September 15 of the same year. Berlioz saw these first performances. He did not then know a word of English: Shakespeare was revealed to him only through the mist of Letourneur’s translation. After the third act of Romeo and Juliet he could scarcely breathe; he suffered as though “an iron hand was clutching” his heart, and he exclaimed, “I am lost.” And the story still survives, in spite of Berlioz’s denial, that he then exclaimed: “That woman shall be my wife! And on that drama I shall write my greatest symphony.” He married her, and he was thereafter miserable. He wrote the Romeo and Juliet symphony. To the end he preferred the “Love Scene” to all his other music.
Berlioz has told in his Memoirs the story of his wooing. He was madly in love. After a tour in Holland, Miss Smithson went back to London, but Berlioz saw her always by his side; she was his obsessing idea, the inspiring muse. When he learned through the journals of her triumphs in London in June, 1829, he dreamed of composing a great work, the Episode in the Life of an Artist, to triumph by her side and through her. He wrote Ferrand, February 6, 1830: “I am again plunged in the anguish of an interminable and inextinguishable passion, without motive, without cause. She is always at London, and yet I think I feel her near me: all my remembrances awake and unite to wound me; I hear my heart beating, and its pulsations shake me as the piston strokes of a steam engine. Each muscle of my body shudders with pain. In vain! ’Tis terrible! O unhappy one! if she could for one moment conceive all the poetry, all the infinity of a like love, she would fly to my arms, were she to die through my embrace. I was on the point of beginning my great symphony (Episode in the Life of an Artist), in which the development of my infernal passion is to be portrayed; I have it all in my head, but I cannot write anything. Let us wait.”
He wrote Ferrand on April 16, 1830: “Since my last I have experienced terrible hurricanes, and my vessel has cracked and groaned horribly, but at last it has righted itself; it now sails tolerably well. Frightful truths, discovered and indisputable, have started my cure; and I think that it will be as complete as my tenacious nature will permit. I am about to confirm my resolution by a work which satisfies me completely.” He then inserted a description of the work. “Behold, my dear friend, the scheme of this immense symphony. I am just writing the last note of it. If I can be ready on Whitsunday, May 30, I shall give a concert at the Nouveautés, with an orchestra of two hundred and twenty players. I am afraid I shall not have the copied parts ready. Just now I am stupid; the frightful effort of thought necessary to the production of my work has tired my imagination, and I should like to sleep and rest continually. But if the brain sleeps, the heart keeps awake.”
He wrote to Ferrand on May 13, 1830: “I think that you will be satisfied with the scheme of my Fantastic symphony which I sent you in my letter. The vengeance is not too great; besides, I did not write the Dream of a Sabbat Night in this spirit. I do not wish to avenge myself. I pity her and I despise her. She’s an ordinary woman, endowed with an instinctive genius for expressing the lacerations of the human soul, but she has never felt them, and she is incapable of conceiving an immense and noble sentiment, as that with which I honored her. I make today my last arrangements with the managers of the Nouveautés for my concert the 30th of this month. They are very honest fellows and very accommodating. We shall begin to rehearse the Fantastic symphony in three days; all the parts have been copied with the greatest care; there are 2,300 pages of music; nearly 400 francs for the copying. We hope to have decent receipts on Whitsunday, for all the theaters will be closed.... I hope that the wretched woman will be there that day; at any rate, there are many conspiring at the Feydeau to make her go. I do not believe it, however; she will surely recognize herself in reading the programme of my instrumental drama, and then she will take good care not to appear. Well, God knows all that will be said, there are so many who know my story!” He hoped to have the assistance of the “incredible tenor,” Haizinger, and of Schröder-Devrient, who were then singing in opera at the Salle Favart.
The “frightful truths” about Miss Smithson were sheer calumnies. Berlioz made her tardy reparation in the extraordinary letter written to Ferrand, October 11, 1833, shortly after his marriage. He too had been slandered: her friends had told her that he was an epileptic, that he was mad. As soon as he heard the slanders, he raged, he disappeared for two days, and wandered over lonely plains outside Paris, and at last slept, worn out with hunger and fatigue, in a field near Sceaux. His friends had searched Paris for him, even the morgue. After his return he was obstinately silent for several days.
At last Berlioz determined to give a grand concert at which his cantata Sardanapale, which took the prix de Rome, and the Fantastic symphony would be performed. Furthermore, Miss Smithson was then in Paris. The concert was announced for November 14, 1830, but it was postponed till December 5 of that year. But Miss Smithson was not present; she was at the Opéra at a performance for her benefit, and she mimed there for the first and last time the part of Fenella in Auber’s Muette de Portici. The symphony made a sensation; it was attacked and defended violently, and Cherubini answered, when he was asked if he heard it: “Ze n’ai pas besoin d’aller savoir comment il né faut pas faire.”
After Berlioz returned from Italy, he purposed to give a concert. He learned accidentally that Miss Smithson was still in Paris; but she had no thought of her old adorer; after professional disappointments in London, due perhaps to her Irish accent, she returned to Paris in the hope of establishing an English theater. The public in Paris knew her no more; she was poor and at her wit’s end. Invited to go to a concert, she took a carriage, and then, looking over the programme, she read the argument of the Fantastic symphony which with Lélio, its supplement, was performed on December 9, 1832. Fortunately, Berlioz had revised the programme and omitted the coarse insult (“She is now only a courtesan worthy to figure in such an orgy”) in the programme of the Sabbat; but, as soon as she was seen in the hall of the Conservatory, some who knew Berlioz’s original purpose chuckled, and spread malicious information. Miss Smithson, moved by the thought that her adorer, as the hero of the symphony, tried to poison himself for her, accepted the symphony as a flattering tribute.
Tiersot[14] describes the scene at this second performance in 1832. The pit was crowded, as on the great days of romantic festival occasions—Dumas’s Antony was then jamming the Porte Saint-Martin—with pale, long-haired youths, who believed firmly that “to make art” was the only worthy occupation on the earth; they had strange, fierce countenances, curled mustaches, Merovingian hair or hair cut brushlike, extravagant doublets, velvet-faced coats thrown back on the shoulders. The women were dressed in the height of the prevailing fashion, with coiffures à la girafe, high shell combs, shoulder-of-mutton sleeves, and short petticoats that revealed buskins. Berlioz was seated behind the drums, and his “monstrous antediluvian hair rose from his forehead as a primeval forest on a steep cliff.” Heine was in the hall. He was especially impressed by the Sabbat, “where the Devil sings the mass, where the music of the Catholic church is parodied with the most horrible, the most outrageous buffoonery. It is a farce in which all the serpents that we carry hidden in the heart raise their heads, hissing with pleasure and biting their tails in the transport of their joy.... Mme Smithson was there, whom the French actresses have imitated so closely. M. Berlioz was madly in love with this woman for three years, and it is to this passion that we owe the savage symphony which we hear today.” It is said that, each time Berlioz met her eyes, he beat the drums with redoubled fury. Heine added: “Since then Miss Smithson has become Mme Berlioz, and her husband has cut his hair. When I heard the symphony again last winter, I saw him still at the back of the orchestra, in his place near the drums. The beautiful Englishwoman was in a stage box, and their eyes again met: but he no longer beat with such rage on his drums.”
Musician and play actress met, and after mutual distrust and recrimination there was mutual love. She was poor and in debt; on March 16, 1833, she broke her leg, and her stage career was over. Berlioz pressed her to marry him; both families objected; there were violent scenes; Berlioz tried to poison himself before her eyes; Miss Smithson at last gave way, and the marriage was celebrated on October 3, 1833. It was an unhappy one.
“A separation became inevitable,” says Legouvé.[15] “She who had been Mlle Smithson, grown old and ungainly before her time, and ill besides, retired to a humble lodging at Montmartre, where Berlioz, notwithstanding his poverty, faithfully and decently provided for her. He went to see her as a friend, for he had never ceased to love her, he loved her as much as ever; but he loved her differently, and that difference had produced a chasm between them.”
After some years of acute physical as well as mental suffering, the once famous play actress died, March 3, 1854. Berlioz put two wreaths on her grave, one for him and one for their absent son, the sailor. And Jules Janin sang her requiem in a memorable feuilleton.