Berlioz and his "Fantastique"; Revenge May Be Best Served Cold, But Hector Ordered a Side Dish of Panache With His Meal
Holde-Quiz
Here’s a quiz:
What is the best way to exact revenge on a woman whose very existence torments you with pangs of jealous obsession?
a) Be a creep and put compromising pictures of her on the internet.
b) Pull an “O.J.”
c) Keep a stiff upper lip and show that you can handle yourself with dignity; show her who’s the adult.
d) Compose one of the greatest and most original symphonies in history.
Made your choice?
If you happen to be Hector Berlioz, the answer you choose is “d”. By the way, the option least likely to be chosen if you’re Berlioz is “C”, not withstanding that internet access was quite rare in 1830.
Here is a second quiz:
What is the best way to exact revenge on your professors, those pompous nincompoops who are so blind as to not recognize your genius, and instead choose to bore you with dull admonitions about your faulty counterpoint?
a) Slash the tires of their cars in the teacher’s lot.
b) Scrawl scatological insults on their blackboards.
c) Vow to work harder to improve your counterpoint, and subsequently become recognized as a greater contrapuntal expert than they are.
d) Write one of the greatest and most original symphonies in history, and portray your profs as slobbering demons in Hell dancing orgasmically to the notes of their beloved counterpoint.
Don’t give up — you can do it! Take a deep breath…
If you happen to be “You Know Who”, the answer again is “d”. And by the way, the least likely option to be exercised if you are in the habit of putting “H.B.” monograms on your pistol cases is “c”, not withstanding the fact that very few professors of music at the Paris Conservatory in the 1820s drove their cars to work.
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique;
Excerpts from Lélio
“The Tilson Thomas
Symphonie fantastique is the
cream of a very, very good crop
of recordings.” (John Gibbons)
It is also a potentially tenable notion that Berlioz was turning Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony upside down in a similar vein to that in which he turned Beethoven’s Ninth upside down in Harold en Italie; like the Big Man’s 5th, the Fantastique travels from c minor to C major, ends in cathartic triumph (albeit for the ghouls, just as it was the brigand’s triumph in “Harold”), has a scherzo that is yoked to the finale, even to the point of representing a transitional state emerging into the finale, as in Beethoven’s 5th, and has passages (a descending minor passage in the low strings in the “March to the Scaffold”, and an optimistic C major scaler horn call figure in the Witch’s Sabbath) that are suspiciously similar to passages in the Beethoven work, at equivalent structural junctures.
Extra Credit!
Here’s a third little quiz. Which photo below is of Hector Berlioz — and which one is of Jefferson Davis?
Hope you earned your motarboard!
Pilgrim's Music By Berlioz and Wagner
There are at least two moments of indisputable greatness in Wagner’s Tannhauser: The act 2 intervention by Elizabeth to save Tannhauser’s life from the likes of Biterolf and his cruel and cowardly cohorts, and Tannhauser’s act 1 epiphany in the valley of the Wartburg, with the unforgettable, immortal counterpoint of the shepherd boy’s lovely melody, fresh as May: “Der Mai! Der Mai!”- (Wagner pretended that he was quoting an authentic tune but this is not so. He made his own melody. Can you even conceive of some folk ditty being anywhere near as beautiful as what Wagner could contrive?) and the dolorous, guilt-laden strains of the pilgrims.
Only Henry Tannhauser doesn’t know who he is. The pilgrims know who they are, the shepherd boy knows who he is, but Tannhauser is lost. This stunning passage is the existential heart of this profound opera (a much deeper work, by the way, than Lohengrin, which aside from its incredible prelude is merely the greatest German Romantic opera).
Wagner created some of history’s greatest music for his pilgrims. This music’s chromaticism is a perfectly calculated expedient for representing the pressures of guilt, the opening rising octave is the very epitome of yearning, and the orchestration, essentially restricted to a “walking bass” in pizzicato violas and cellos proves that less can be more. Wagner, one of the most disciplined artists in history, frequently finds simple and elegant devices like this splendid pizzicato.
I had to retrieve the score of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie to recall his pilgrim tune, for the purpose of humming it while writing this essay. I couldn’t forget Wagner’s tune if I tried. And I sure ain’t gonna try.
Some points about Berlioz’s score:
1. Rey Longyear, in his mediocre survey, “Nineteenth Century Romanticism in Music” says that Harold is neither a symphony nor a concerto, but a little bit of both. He further claims that Berlioz has only one symphony really deserving the title. He’s wrong, I think. My immediately previous entry deals, albeit superficially, with this issue. David Cairns has it right. Harold is not a concerto. No way. It’s not even close to being a concerto, especially when you consider what a concerto was in 1834 (consider works by Mendelssohn, Paganini, Liszt, and Chopin). Want a viola concerto? Hindemith wrote a great one (I mean the Schwanendreher), and Bartok and Walton wrote good ones. Berlioz composed a work that is obviously a symphony, with a viola obbligato that simply represents the voice of Byron’s Harold in propria persona.
2. Berlioz copies the scheme of recollections of previous movements coined in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But Beethoven’s finale leads to an affirmation of universal brotherhood, and Berlioz introduces a riotous orgy. Both Harold and the Fantastique end with orgies, by the way. My feeling is that if you’re gonna ironically turn Beethoven on his head, you better have better music up your sleeve than Berlioz had for his noisy finale.
3. The middle movements are salon pieces for orchestra, if there can be said to be such a thing. The pilgrim’s march and the Abbruzian serenade are every bit as relevant and necessary as the flute and harp serenade to the Christ child in L’Enfance Du Christ or the Rakoczi march in Damnation of Faust, if you take my meaning.
4. The idee fixe is a remarkable and expressive melody, the best part of this flawed score; melancholy, haunting, lyrical…but it only superficially unifies the piece, it doesn’t function in a symphonically developmental manner. In other words, Berlioz just throws it the heck in there when he wants Harold to comment on the action.
5. Just about every page of the Fantastique has some creative, surprising, or emotionally stimulating passage or at least detail; Harold frequently offers tired cliches, even in the orchestration.
I’m surprised at the critical and public sympathy for this piece. I revere the Requiem and Les Troyens and really want to like this piece as well, but perhaps just don’t get it. Oh, well, vive le differance!
Ernest Newman said that this piece is “Perhaps the best orchestral work through which to approach the study of Berlioz, for it reveals everywhere the individual nature of his musical mind…Harold himself is not a character undergoing psychological or circumstantial mutations like the Don Quixote of Strauss or the Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles of Liszt and Wagner, but simply a mood, a melancholy mood and nothing more.” Maybe so. Not every piece can be “fantastique”!
Mea Culpa: Berlioz and His Four Symphonies
Berlioz has four symphonies.
1. Symphonie Fantastique (1830)
2. Harold in Italy (with obbligato viola) (1834)
3. “Dramatic Symphony” Romeo et Juliette (with chorus) (1839)
4. Symphonie Funebre et Triumphale (giant wind band) (1840)
The Romeo et Juliette has moments of searching profundity that makes Tchaikovsky’s, Gounod’s, and Prokofiev’s settings of the story seem trivial. (Maybe not Leonard Bernstein’s, however: West Side Story is justifiably iconic. The greatest “musical”. Bernstein discusses the Berlioz opus with great sensitivity, by the way, in his Norton lectures, The Unanswered Question).
So why in the world would I be preparing a session in my upcoming symphony class on Berlioz’s three symphonies?
I’ll let David Cairns, the grand pooh-bah of Berlioz scholars (along with Hugh McDonald) explain:
“In Berlioz’s third symphony, Romeo and Juliet (1839), the drama has become more explicit and more openly reflected in the form, but the form remains symphonic, for all its bold extension of the genre. It can be argued that the recent failure of his opera Benvenuto Cellini (which ended the hopes of an entree to the Paris Opera by which he had set so much store) forced him against his will to cast the next dramatic work in concert form, from which confusion a hybrid resulted, fascinating and beautiful in its parts, incoherent and unsatisfactory as a whole. This is a possible argument; but it is rather the argument of one who looks at the work from without, from a somewhat nice (my italics-JG) notion of symphonic proprieties and, seeing the unusual attempt to absorb techniques properly belonging to opera or oratorio into the symphony, expects it to fail. Berlioz did, much later, contemplate writing an opera-a totally new work-on the play, and it was age and ill health that stopped him, not the existence of a “dramatic symphony” on the same subject.” This is taken from “The Symphony: 1. Haydn to Dvorak” publ. by Penguin, 1966.
Mea maxima culpa. The last thing I want to do is to be nice, believe me. (for those who know me this will not stretch their credulity). This great work will be included in the lesson plan, of course…when I hear of music teachers excluding it, I can only snort with derision…those benighted reactionaries with their prim-and-proper symphonic proprieties!
Berlioz and the Listener: Frames of Reference
The first thing I thought of after recently finishing Frank Norris’s 1899 novel, McTeague, was that the book was seemingly derived from Balzac, especially Pere Goriot, and the plot was a sort of cross between Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and Prevost’s Manon Lescaut; actually, I was thinking of the operas by Massanet and Puccini, not having read the novel. I also mentally compared the dialogue style to that of Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. And I wasn’t even hired by the publisher to write the afterword.
What do Balzac, et al. have to do with “McTeague”? Not too much, but readers of novels and listeners of classical music feel obligated to compare works as a means to achieve critical understanding; often as the principal means to achieve critical understanding, and in fact numerous “afterwords” published in Signet or Penguin editions, for instance, consist of little more than a string of comparisons, in place of a real analysis of the text.
In his truly great book, “The Romantic Generation”, Charles Rosen throws out this bon mot in reference to Berlioz: “It’s not his genius that is in question, it’s his competence.” Rosen goes on to discuss the “absurd” notion of “an incompetent genius” which is in the last analysis, oxymoronic. Many listeners and critics (who should know better) are uncomfortable with Berlioz because they don’t know his antecedants or are otherwise unable to fit Berlioz into a context. To some extent, those puzzled by or dismissive of Berlioz have my sympathies, he doesn’t make it easy to reconcile his work with the best known composers, and his formal innovations are sui generis. Works like L’enfance du Christ and Romeo et Juliette are absolutely unique. In Berlioz’ screamingly entertaining memoirs he discusses contemptuously the lack of critical understanding of L’enfance.
I was surprised and pleased recently, when teaching a class on the choral repertory, that the class was palpably moved by the magnificent music at the end of this piece. The combination of tenderness and austerity in the final chorus is particularly moving (it seems that the union of tenderness and austerity is uniquely Berliozan; consider Les Nuits d’Etes, for instance, or some of the quieter passages in the Requiem, or even the majestic music for Cassandra in the first scene of Les Troyens). I had put the piece in the curriculum with some trepidation, because its quirkiness, its gentleness, its weird formal attributes might not seem relevant to the students, and in any case, we had already devoted a session to Berlioz’ Requiem (Grand Messe des Morts) which could be considered sufficient coverage of Berlioz within the time limits of the class. I didn’t expect the piece to be a hit, hence my surprise. Discussing Gluck and Renaissance polyphony, on one side, and Medelssohn’s Elijah on the other, and quoting extensively from Berlioz himself, did the trick. But I needed to say relatively little about the Brahms or Verdi Requiems, those pieces were more or less immediately understood in their essence. Everyone recognized that the Brahms is music’s greatest song of consolation, and the anti-ecclesiastical mode of the Verdi was obvious to everybody.
I’m looking forward to discussing three of Berlioz’ symphonies in my upcoming symphony class. Symphonie Funebre et Triumphale (which is really bathetic, I must say), Harold in Italy, and of course, the Fantastique.
Berlioz is in the weird position of being especially popular with relatively less experienced listeners, or else popular with exceptionally knowlegable listeners, rather than with the more typical sort of listener who is somewhere in between. Berlioz will not be understood by comparing him with his peers, or attempting to accommodate him within the mainstream central European tradition. The “Afterword” writers for Signet and Penguin will have a hard time with Berlioz. They may actually have to look at the work innocently, or else do some homework, God forbid.
Related Class:
The Symphony Since
Beethoven
Begins September 18
Gleacher Center
Downtown Chicago