Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique is one of the greatest works of classical music ever written, but did you know that it was born out of the composser's obsession with an actor he'd seen on stage in Paris? This is a story of a composer desperately wanting the attention of a woman – but when she missed the premiere performance, he simply went home with another woman. How very predictable.
Symphonie fantastique: an infatuation set to music
In 1827 the French composer Hector Berlioz went to see a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Paris. It was a life-changing experience: he was bowled over by the Bard’s drama and became completely besotted with the Irish actress playing Ophelia, Harriet Smithson. Berlioz went on to write various works inspired by Shakespeare, including Roméo et Juliette and Béatrice et Bénédict, and his infatuation with Smithson inspired his great Symphonie fantastique.
Berlioz's obssession with Smithson grew. He rented rooms near her and sent her letters – but to no avail. So he then embarked on the ultimate romantic gesture: writing an orchestral symphony for her. The first performance of the Symphonie fantastique was arranged for 5 December 1830, to mark her return to Paris, but although the work was well received, she was not present. She didn’t hear the work until two years later.
Symphonie fantastique: a tale of tormented love
‘A young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair.’
With those words, Berlioz introduced his Symphonie fantastique at its Parisian premiere in 1830, and listeners were left with little doubt that the ‘young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament’ was Berlioz himself.
The Symphonie fantastique tells the autobiographical story of the composer’s love for Harriet Smithson, and his wrenching emotional torment. In the opening movement, the protagonist of the piece - a young musician, what do you know - first sees the woman of his dreams. Her image haunts his imagination, presented as a musical theme, or idée fixe.
This is transformed in the following movements, as he experiences a festive party, a stroll in the countryside, opium hallucinations, and a witches’ sabbath. For Berlioz, it seems there was no real distinction between the real Smithson and one of Shakespeare’s heroines. He often referred to her as Ophelia, Juliet or Desdemona.
What happened to Berlioz and Harriet Smithson?
After Smithson missed the 1830 premiere, Berlioz had a fling with pianist (deep breath) Marie-Félicité-Denise Moke, which led to a disastrous and brief engagement. When Berlioz returned to Paris in 1832, he stayed at an apartment in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Marc and, amazingly, discovered that it had just been vacated by Harriet Smithson.
Spurred on by his renewed obsession he arranged a second performance of the Symphonie fantastique. This time the actress was in attendance and she was won over by the work. Despite opposition from both families the couple were married in October 1833.
Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t work out. Their son Louis was born the following year but the couple separated. Smithson’s career was on the rocks and she was an alcoholic. Berlioz took up with a singer, Marie Recio, and they married after Smithson's death in 1854.
The enduring success of Symphonie fantastique
Symphonie fantastique has an enduring popularity and gives us a musical memoir of Berlioz’s infatuation with Smithson. 'Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love,' wrote the composer.
Four great recordings (and one to avoid)
The five movements of the Symphonie fantastique follow a novel-like journey from despair and longing, through a hallucinatory ball scene and intense loneliness amid nature. Then the dream turns sour: the artist imagines he has murdered his beloved and witnesses his own execution, after which a coven of witches dances on his grave.
Yet for all this rampant pictorialism, the Symphonie fantastique is also a symphony. So a great performance has to balance these contradictory demands: it must tell an emotive, sensational story, but convince as a musical argument, too.
Berlioz Symphonie fantastique: the best recording
Sir Colin Davis (conductor) / London Symphony Orchestra (2001)
LSO Live LSO 0007
Berlioz’s greatest interpreter of modern times, Colin Davis recorded the Symphonie fantastique three times, but this most recent version is the most gripping and satisfying, deftly treading a fine line between self-revelation and self-indulgence.
The volcanic outpourings of feeling are as intense as they should be, yet in the quieter moments – especially in the central ‘Scene in the Country’ – Davis achieves a wonderfully expressive pianissimo, in which every detail seems to convey meaning, all caught splendidly by the live recording.
Each appearance of the idée fixe – the theme that stands not so much for the beloved as the artist’s febrile obsession with her – is strikingly or subtly different.
We sense the progress of the ‘vision’ from adoration, through horror, to release. The first and third movements have a nobility amid the mood-swings, then the moment at the end of the ‘Scene in the Country’, where the shepherd’s piping is answered not by a distant oboe but by menacing rumbles of thunder, is a finely calculated psychological turning point.
The last two movements are pure Hammer Horror gothic, especially the astonishing, acridly scored moment when the idée fixe waltzes grotesquely back onto the stage. The final witches’ round dance is a splendid ghoulish knees-up, but it’s also a colossal act of emotional purgation.
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Three more great recordings
John Eliot Gardiner (conductor) Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique (1993)
Philips 434 4022
John Eliot Gardiner has given us the outstanding ‘period instrument’ version of the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. The word that comes to mind repeatedly during the driven but crisply articulate first two movements is ‘dashing’.
Gardiner is excellent at long crescendos: well controlled build-ups, then the emotion boiling over at the climax. It isn’t just in the big outpourings of feeling that he scores: at the beginning of the central lonely pastorale, the flavoursome 19th-century French oboe and cor anglais are two voices calling to each other across wide spaces, in the background a sense of growing unease.
Discomfort and deliciously grotesque orchestral colouring grow splendidly during the ‘March to the Scaffold’. The finale is a sinister spine-tingler, with Gardiner’s anachronistic recorded cathedral bells the only disappointment.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor) Rotterdam Philharmonic (2010)
BIS BIS-SACD-1800
In Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Fantastique the story is above all emotional. Nézet-Séguin doesn’t wallow in ‘sensitivity’, but there is plenty of feeling. It sounds beautiful – full credit to the BIS engineering team – yet at the same time we’re always aware of movement.
This Fantastique is never static: if it isn’t surging forward then it’s in a state of expectant transition, ready to move at the next musical stimulus. The pictorial element is less vivid – this is more Berlioz on the therapist’s couch, reliving his emotions, than a diary-like record of a vivid dream.
But the final round dance features some splendidly athletic witches, and the sense of having emerged from something at the end – the worst of the delusion is past – is uplifting.
Pierre Boulez (conductor) Cleveland Orchestra (1997)
DG 453 4322
A strong counterbalance to both Gardiner and Nézet-Séguin. The turbo-charged potential of the modern orchestra is released here with Pierre Boulez’s usual expert control.
The transition from the first movement’s desolate introduction to impetuous Allegro is typical: pregnant stillness, then growth, then surging current. Hans Keller famously accused Boulez of ‘non-phrasing’. But as Berlioz introduces his idée fixe, Boulez does a splendid job of conveying both her shapeliness and the feelings that arouses.
Boulez’s sense of symphonic shape is compelling: nobody makes a better case for Symphonie fantastique as a musical structure. If it does sound a little detached emotionally, there’s a feeling of playful irony – also a very Berliozian quality – which makes that detachment credible.
And one to avoid...
Sample Riccardo Muti’s recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra at any point and you might conclude this is the kind of no-holds-barred performance the Symphonie fantastique needs.
There are terrific moments: in the ‘March to the Scaffold’ you can picture the baying mob and the ‘beloved’ leering out of the crowd before the blade descends. But this performance can also be, pardon the pun, ‘hectoring’.
This work can also be subtle and delicate, but from this version, you’d never guess.
