When one remembers that Beethoven had died only a few years before Berlioz wrote his symphony; that Schubert also had died; that Schumann and Wagner were not known as composers, one must regard this audacious work of Berlioz as nothing less than marvelous. No predecessor had given him hints for orchestration: he invented his own system; he thought and wrote orchestrally. Liszt, Meyerbeer, Wagner, Strauss, the Russian School, in fact, the musical world of the last century is indebted deeply to Hector Berlioz. Without him all would have been sadly at a loss.
One may smile in this matter-of-fact age at the frantic love of Berlioz for the Irish actress; at the programme of the Fantastic symphony, written when he was not twenty-seven years old. But there’s no denying the genius in this work, the genius that has kept this music alive in spite of a few cheap or arid pages; for there is the imagination, the poetic sensitiveness that we rightly associate with genius. If one would gladly shorten the “Scene in the Fields,” what is to be said against that masterpiece “The March to the Scaffold,” with its haunting, nightmarish rhythm, its ghostly chatter of the bassoons, its mocking shouts of brass? Or who does not find beauty in the first movement, brilliance in the second, and a demoniacal spirit in the finale?
Ernest Newman has wisely said that the harmonies of Berlioz suited exactly his aims; that however strange they may seem on paper, they are justified when they are heard. As for the charge of failure as a melodist, there are the songs; there is the pathetic air of Marguerite in The Damnation of Faust, the “Farewell of the Shepherds” in The Childhood of Christ, the grand arias in Les Troyens.
This symphony forms the first part of a work entitled Épisode de la vie d’un artiste (Episode in the Life of an Artist), the second part of which is a lyric monodrama, Lélio, ou le retour à la vie (Lelio; or, The Return to Life). Berlioz published the following preface to the full score of the symphony:
“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.