To sum up, then, we find that Berlioz had no precedent in reputable music for a sustained work of a close descriptive nature. Works of picturesque quality, which specifically do not ‘depict events’—like the ‘Pastoral’ symphony—are not program music in the more exact sense. Isolated bits of description in good music, like the famous ‘leaping stag’ and ‘shaggy lion’ of Haydn’s ‘Creation,’ offer no analogy for sustained description. And the supposed pieces of sustained description, like the fashionable ‘battle’ pieces, had and deserved no musical standing. The Fantastique, as we shall see, was detailed and sustained description of the first rank musically. The gap between the Fantastique and its supposed ancestors was quite complete. It was bridged by pure genius.
As for the leit-motif, it is even more Berlioz’s own invention. The use of a particular theme to represent a particular personage or emotion was, of course, in such program music as had existed. But only in a few isolated instances had this been used recurrently to accompany a dramatic story. Mozart, in Don Giovanni, had used the famous trombone theme to represent the Statue, first in the Graveyard scene and later in the Supper scene. Weber had somewhat loosely used a particular theme to represent the devil Samiel in Der Freischütz. We know from Berlioz’s own description[98] how this work affected him in his early Parisian years and we may assume that the notion of the leit-motif took hold on him then. But the leit-motif in Mozart and Weber is hardly used as a deliberate device, rather only as a natural repetition under similar dramatic conditions. The use of the leit-motif in symphonic music, and its variation under varied conditions belongs solely to Berlioz.
True to romantic traditions, Berlioz evolved the Fantastique out of his own joys and sorrows. It originated in the frenzy of his love for the actress, Henriette Smithson. He writes in February, 1830:[99]
‘Again, without warning and without reason, my ill-starred passion wakes. She is in London, yet I feel her presence ever with me. I listen to the beating of my heart, it is like a sledge-hammer, every nerve in my body quivers with pain.
‘Woe upon her! Could she but dream of the poetry, the infinite bliss of such love as mine, she would fly to my arms, even though my embrace should be her death.
‘I was just going to begin my great symphony (Episode in an Artist’s Life) to depict the course of this infernal love of mine—but I can write nothing.’
Why, this is very midsummer madness! you say. But the kind of madness from which came much good romantic music. For the work had been planned in the previous year, not long after Miss Smithson had rejected Berlioz’s first advances.
But the composer very soon found that he could write—and he wrote like a fiend. In May he tells a friend that the rehearsals of the symphony will begin in three days. The concert is to take place on the 30th. As for Miss Smithson, ‘I pity and despise her. She is nothing but a commonplace woman with an instinct for expressing the tortures of the soul that she has never felt.’ Yet he wished that ‘the theatre people would somehow plot to get her there—that wretched woman! She could not but recognize herself.’
The performance of the symphony finally came off toward the end of the year. But in the meantime a new goddess had descended from the skies. The composer’s marriage was to depend on the success of the concert—so he says. ‘It must be a theatrical success; Camille’s parents insist upon that as a condition of our marriage. I hope I shall succeed.
‘P. S. That wretched Smithson girl is still here. I have not seen her.’