Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (BBC)

Manka Bros., Khan Manka, Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, BBC Symphony, Andrew Davis, Harriet Smithson, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, Robert Cowan, Eugene DelacroixHector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Davis – Conductor

Recorded live at Hitomi Kinen Kodo, Tokyo, on May 28, 1993 (BBC Music)

ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:

What to say about this version of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique that I didn’t say about the last one… oh, yeah… this one is better!

ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by Robert Cowan):

Manka Bros., Khan Manka, Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, BBC Symphony, Andrew Davis, Harriet Smithson, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, Robert Cowan, Eugene DelacroixBerlioz’s semi-autobiographical Symphonie Fantastique grew out of his burning infatuation for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. He had seen Smithson play Ophelia in 1827, and his Symphonie was completed three years later.

Berlioz himself stated in a programme note that it was his intention in the piece to ‘treat various states in the life of an artist, insofar as they have musical quality.’

It was the first major orchestral work to follow a detailed programme, and broke new ground by introducing the concept of an idee fixe, or recurring ‘motif,’ in this instance representing Harriet Smithson.

Wagner was to learn a great deal from Berlioz’s innovation and indeed his own ‘leitmotif’ is inconceivable without Berlioz’s inspired prompting.

A further revolutionary aspect of the symphony is its five-tier structure.

Manka Bros., Khan Manka, Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, BBC Symphony, Andrew Davis, Harriet Smithson, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, Robert Cowan, Eugene DelacroixEach movement has a subtitle that refers to a specific aspect of the programme: the first, ‘Daydreams – Passions,’ reflects wavering joys, fears and frustrations in the face of amatory obsession; the second, ‘A Ball,’ recalls happier times, but a chance encounter with the beloved deflates its high spirits; ‘In the Meadows’ opens to the pastoral piping of two shepherds and ends with distant thunder; the ‘March to the Scaffold’ reports the artist’s attempted suicide, his dreams of killing the woman he loved and his death by the guillotine; and ‘Sabbath Night’s Dream’ finds him among spirits, sorcerers and monster, preparing for his own funeral.

Berlioz’s original scoring included an ophicleide (an obsolete low brass instrument, commonly replaced nowadays by the tuba), bells (doubled, originally, by six pianos), an E-flat clarinet, and a pair of cornets, although the cornets aren’t always used in modern-day performances.

The Symphonie Fantastique, or five ‘episodes in the life of an artist,’ was premiered at the Paris Conservatoire on December 5, 1830, under the direction of Francois-Antoine Habeneck.

Another leading pioneer of musical Romanticism, Franz Liszt, was in the audience, and within three years he had undertaken the gargantuan task of transcribing the entire symphony for piano solo.

TRACK LISTING:

  • 1: Daydreams – Passions [15:05]
  • 2: A Ball [6:13]
  • 3: In the Meadows [15:52]
  • 4: March to the Scaffold [6:29]
  • 5: Sabbath Night’s Dream [9:57]

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Manka Bros., Khan Manka, Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, BBC Symphony, Andrew Davis, Harriet Smithson, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, Robert Cowan, Eugene DelacroixFINAL THOUGHT:

This whole bit about Berlioz writing this piece for some Irish actress chick was news to me. And they ended up marrying in 1833 (the liner notes should have mentioned that!). The marriage fell apart by 1840 after Berlioz started having an affair. Harriet Smithson moved out, suffered a form of paralysis that left her barely able to speak and died in 1854. Just another tragic tale from the Romantic era.

(I put pictures of Harriet Smithson in throughout the notes because she is more interesting looking that Hector Berlioz – sort of like Kristen Wiig in this one.)

Manka Bros., Khan Manka, Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Symphony No 4, Symphony No 5, Leornard Bernstein, Sir George Grove, Countess Therese Von Brunswick, Carl Maria Von Weber, Berlioz, Theater an der Wien, ERoica, Goethe, Faust, John McClure, Larry Keyes, Fred Plaut, Hank Parker

Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company)

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

Manka Bros., Khan Manka Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Classical Music, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra, John Willan, Michael Sheady, Fussli, James Agate, Hippolyte Chelard, Richard Wagner, Mozart, Haydn, James Harding, Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Beethoven, HummelHector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Symphonie Fantastique, Op. 14

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti – Conductor

Recorded in 1985 (EMI Records)

ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:

Symphonie Fantastique – it’s not just the creepy music from the insipid Julia Roberts movie “Sleeping With The Enemy.”

ORIGINAL LINER NOTES (by James Harding, 1984):

Fifty years ago Berlioz was out of fashion compared with today, and there were far fewer chances of hearing his music.

Writing in the mid-thirties, the English critic James Agate observed: “Two reasons why Berlioz is unpopular in this country – nine-tenths of musical critics have not the ears to hear him, and the public, not knowing whether to sound the “z” or not, is shy of mentioning him. It will be eighty years before the work of this composer ceases to be what the American book reviewer calls a “flop d’estime.”

Add to this the fact that there is, with the possible exception of Le Carnaval Romain, hardly a whistleable tune in the whole of Berlioz, and one can understand the neglect of his music. He has since, however, achieved his right place, and more quickly than Agate’s pessimism warranted.

Manka Bros., Khan Manka Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Classical Music, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra, John Willan, Michael Sheady, Fussli, James Agate, Hippolyte Chelard, Richard Wagner, Mozart, Haydn, James Harding, Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Beethoven, HummelYet, as always with this most paradoxical of composers, even his warmest admirers can find something to criticize.

Why didn’t he end the Symphonie Fantastique with the Marche au supplice?, Agate inquired. “Sheer composer’s vanity, of course, and some nonsense about finishing the story. Also because, like Wagner, he had no sense of the point at which, in the hearer, saturation is reached. The Marche is one of the most final things in music, in the sense of bringing a work to an end; there is no more going beyond it than you can go beyond the buffers at Euston station.”

Many other people have thought the same, among them the musician Hippolyte Chelard, a close friend of Berlioz, who believed the Marche au supplice, which the composer salvaged from his unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, to be the finest thing in the whole work.

What, though, would have been the reaction of an average middle-aged Parisian music lover in 1830 when the Symphonie Fantastique was first heard?

Remember, he would have been brought up on the classical symphonies of Mozart and Haydn. He would have thought Hummel a greater composer than Beethoven who had died three years earlier.

In any case, at that time, with no radio or gramophone records, music traveled much less fast, and a Beethoven symphony was still a novelty in Paris – or, rather, in the eyes of most, an aberration perpetrated by a madman.

Manka Bros., Khan Manka Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Classical Music, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra, John Willan, Michael Sheady, Fussli, James Agate, Hippolyte Chelard, Richard Wagner, Mozart, Haydn, James Harding, Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Beethoven, HummelHow would our average music lover have responded to the ‘programme’ which Berlioz insisted on distributing among the audience?

Imagine his puzzlement at being asked to believe that the music, an ‘episode in the life of an artist,’ represented the feelings of a young man who, hopelessly in love, takes opium and plunges into a sleep haunted by strange hallucinations.

The first movement, Reveries et passions, shows him dreaming of his beloved, an idee fixe which obsesses him.

Then, at a ball, he perceives her in a swirling waltz.

During the third movement, Scene au champs, he finds momentary peace in the countryside but is troubled anew by his unrequited love.

He dreams he has murdered her, and the Marche au supplice takes him to the scaffold.

The Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat features the motif which stands for his faithless love and distorts it into a Witches’ Sabbath where evil spirits gather to bury the artist’s headless corpse and intone a hideous parody of the Dies Irae.

Manka Bros., Khan Manka Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Classical Music, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra, John Willan, Michael Sheady, Fussli, James Agate, Hippolyte Chelard, Richard Wagner, Mozart, Haydn, James Harding, Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Beethoven, HummelThe views of our average music lover were doubtless echoed by composers of the time.

After studying the score Rossini is said to have murmured: “What a good thing it isn’t music.”

When the twenty-two-year old Mendelssohn heard it in 1831 he pronounced it “utterly loathsome.” He added that there was “nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, continued passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means….” The Symphonie Fantastique was “indifferent drivel” and “unspeakably dreadful… I have not been able to work for two days.”

Unlike the writer Stendhal, who in 1835 remarked that he had taken a ticket in a lottery which would bring him fame in 1935, Berlioz did not have quite so long a wait.

In his lifetime he was hailed by the poet Theophile Gautier as one of that great Trinity of Romanticism which also included Victor Hugo and the artist Delacroix.

Over the year the technical clumsiness of his scoring which so offended generations of purists has come to be seen as the price paid for a genius whose dazzling originality and fertile inventiveness are at last recognized as unique in music.

TRACK LISTING:

  • 1: Reveries – Passions [15:35]
  • 2: Un bal [6:09]
  • 3: Scene aux champs [16:02]
  • 4: Marche au supplice [6:44]
  • 5: Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat [9:43]

https://youtu.be/rQXtC6B3CKQ

FINAL THOUGHT:

While certainly not one of the greatest symphonies of all time (in my opinion), it certainly didn’t deserve the treatment or the reviews of Mendelssohn or Rossini. Do those talentless jerks seriously think they can do any better?

Manka Bros., Khan Manka Emily Sachs, Emily's Music Dump, Classical Music, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Riccardo Muti, Philadelphia Orchestra, John Willan, Michael Sheady, Fussli, James Agate, Hippolyte Chelard, Richard Wagner, Mozart, Haydn, James Harding, Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Beethoven, Hummel

Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company)