(Allegretto)

3. SERENADE OF A MOUNTAINEER OF THE ABRUZZI TO HIS MISTRESS

(Allegro assai)
(Allegretto)

4. ORGY OF BRIGANDS; RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PRECEDING SCENES

(Allegro frenetico)

Upon the romanticists in France—"the heroic boys of 1830," as William Ernest Henley called them—the influence of Byron was gripping and profound. To Berlioz, in particular, "greedy of emotion, intolerant of restraint, contemptuous of reticence and sobriety, ... and prepared to welcome, as a return to truth and nature, inventions the most extravagant and imaginings the most fantastic and far-fetched," this prince of romanticists must have seemed a poet after his own heart. Yet, singularly enough, there are in his writings comparatively few references to the author of "Manfred" and "Don Juan."

The manner in which the "Harold" symphony came to be written is related by Berlioz in his Memoirs. His Symphonie fantastique had been played at a concert at the Paris Conservatory (December 22, 1833), with conspicuous success. "And then," says Berlioz, "to crown my happiness, after the audience had gone out, a man with a long mane of hair, with piercing eyes, with a strange and haggard face, one possessed by genius, a colossus among giants, whom I had never seen and whose appearance moved me profoundly, was alone and waiting for me in the hall, stopped me to press my hand, overwhelmed me with burning praise, which set fire to my heart and head: it was Paganini!... Some weeks after this vindicatory concert of which I have spoken, Paganini came to see me. 'I have a marvellous viola,' he said, 'an admirable Stradivarius, and I wish to play it in public. But I have no music ad hoc. Will you write a solo piece for the viola? You are the only one I can trust for such a work.' 'Yes, indeed,' I answered, 'your proposition flatters me more than I can tell, but, to make such a virtuoso as you shine in a piece of this nature, it is necessary to play the viola, and I do not play it. You are the only one, it seems to me, who can solve the problem.' 'No, no; I insist,' said Paganini; 'you will succeed; as for me, I am too sick at present to compose; I cannot think of it.'

"I tried then to please the illustrious virtuoso by writing a solo piece for the viola, but a solo combined with the orchestra in such a manner that it would not injure the expression of the orchestral mass, for I was sure that Paganini, by his incomparable artistry, would know how to make the viola always the dominating instrument....

"His proposal seemed new to me, and I soon had developed in my head a very happy idea, and I was eager for the realization. The first movement was hardly completed, when Paganini wished to see it. He looked at the rests for the viola in the allegro and exclaimed: 'No, it is not that: there are too many rests for me; I must be playing all the time.' 'I told you so,' I answered; 'you want a viola concerto, and you are the only one who can write such a concerto for yourself.' Paganini did not answer; he seemed disappointed, and left me without speaking further about my orchestral sketch. Some days afterwards, suffering already from the affection of the larynx which ultimately killed him,[17] he went to Nice, and returned to Paris only at the end of three years.

"Since I then saw that my plan of composition would not suit him, I set myself to work in another way, and without any anxiety concerning the means to make the solo viola conspicuous. My idea was to write for the orchestra a series of scenes in which the solo viola should figure as a more or less active personage of constantly preserved individuality; I wished to put the viola in the midst of poetic recollections left me by my wanderings in the Abruzzi, and make it a sort of melancholy dreamer, after the manner of Byron's 'Childe Harold.' Hence the title, Harold en Italie. As in the Symphonie fantastique, a chief theme (the first song of the viola) reappears throughout the work; but there is this difference: the theme of the Symphonie fantastique, the 'fixed idea,' interposes itself persistently as an episodic and passionate thought in the midst of scenes which are foreign to it and modifies them; while the song of Harold is added to other songs of the orchestra with which it is contrasted both in movement and character and without any interruption of the development."