Symphonie Fantastique Music Analysis

Symphonie Fantastique

By Lorenz Erl G. Paez G9 Newton



Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d'un artiste … en cinq parties (Fantastical Symphony: Episode in the Life of an Artist … in Five Sections) Op. 14, is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is an important piece of the early Romantic period. The first performance was at the Paris Conservatoire on 5 December 1830. Franz Liszt made a piano transcription of the symphony in 1833.

Leonard Bernstein described the symphony as the first musical expedition into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature, and because history suggests Berlioz composed at least a portion of it under the influence of opium. According to Bernstein, "Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.

In 1831 Berlioz wrote a lesser-known sequel to the work, Lelio, for actor, soloists, chorus, piano, and orchestra.

What is Symphonie Fantastique
Symphonie fantastique is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless, unrequited love. Berlioz provided his own preface and program notes for each movement of the work. They exist in two principal versions – one from 1845 in the first score of the work and the second from 1855. From the revised preface and notes, it can be seen how Berlioz, later in his life, downplayed the programmatic aspect of the work.

In the first score from 1845, he writes:

The composer's intention has been to develop various episodes in the life of an artist, in so far as they lend themselves to musical treatment. As the work cannot rely on the assistance of speech, the plan of the instrumental drama needs to be set out in advance. The following programme must therefore be considered as the spoken text of an opera, which serves to introduce musical movements and to motivate their character and expression.

In the 1855 preface, a different outlook towards the work's programmatic undertones is established by Berlioz:

The following program should be distributed to the audience every time the Symphonie fantastique is performed dramatically and thus followed by the monodrama of Lelio which concludes and completes the episode in the life of an artist. In this case, the invisible orchestra is placed on the stage of a theatre behind the lowered curtain. If the symphony is performed on its own as a concert piece this arrangement is no longer necessary: one may even dispense with distributing the program and keep only the title of the five movements. The author hopes that the symphony provides on its own sufficient musical interest independently of any dramatic intention.