music 1a - introduction to music
dan mitchell | music department | creative arts division | de anza college |

Symphonie fantastique

Hector Berlioz (1830)

The program

A young musician of extraordinary sensibility and abundant imagination, in the depths of despair because of hopeless love, has poisoned himself with opium. The drug is too feeble to kill him but plunges him into heavy sleep accompanied by weird visions. His sensations, emotions, and memories, as they pass through his affected mind, are transformed into musical images and ideas. The beloved one herself becomes to him a melody, a recurrent theme (idee fixe) which haunts him continually.

Berlioz' Symphony fantastique is a program symphony in five movements.

1. Reveries, Passions
2. A Ball
3. Scene in the Country
4. March to the Scaffold - Allegro non troppo:

   "He dreams that he has murdered his beloved, that he has been condemned to death and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now somber and fierce, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sounds of heavy steps give way without transition to the noisiest outbursts. At the end the idee fixe returns for a moment, like a last thought of love interrupted by the death blow."

5. Dream of Witches' Sabbath - Larghetto; Allegro:

   "He sees himself at a witches' sabbath in the midst of a hideous crowd of ghouls, sorcerers, and monsters of every description, united for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries, with other cries seem to answer. The melody of the beloved one is heard, but it has lost its character of nobleness and timidity; it is no more than a dance tune, ignoble, trivial, and grotesque. It is she who comes to the sabbath!... A howl of joy greets her arrival... She participates in the diabolical orgy... The funeral knell, burlesque of the Dies irae. Witches' dance. The dance and the Dies irae are combined."