The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hector Berlioz · Épisode de la vie d’un artiste, a symphony in five parts, Op. 14, with the composer’s programme · large orchestra with four bassoons, two cornets, two ophicleides, four timpani, two harps and bells · about fifty to fifty-five minutes in performance
Mode
Programme symphony; five movements for large orchestra, told in the first person, with a printed programme and one theme carried through all five
Mythos
The descent: an artist poisoned by his own hand passes from the ball and the field to the scaffold and the sabbath, and meets his beloved there as a witch
Phase
One opium dream in five scenes; C, A, F, G and C, two falling thirds, then the dominant and home
Presentation
Concert music; a symphony in five titled movements with the composer’s programme, in his revised score
Register
From the idée fixe’s long rising arch and the harps of the waltz to four timpani in chords, the Dies irae in the low brass and violins struck with the wood of the bow
Scale
One mind and one night’s dream; a large orchestra; about fifty to fifty-five minutes
Governing Proposition
A young musician in despair over love poisons himself with opium, survives the dose, and dreams five scenes in which his beloved comes to him only as a melody: at a ball, in a field, at his own execution, and at a witches’ sabbath where she has become a common dance. The wager of the work is that a symphony can tell a story in the first person, and that one theme carried and bent through every movement can show obsession from the inside: the image adored and the image degraded are one movement of the same mind.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The programme comes first, and it is part of the work. A young musician, in despair over love, poisons himself with opium. He survives the dose, and sleeps, and dreams, and the dream is the five movements. In it the beloved never appears as a person. She comes to him as a melody, which the programme calls the idée fixe, and the melody returns, as she returns to him, wherever he is. The occasion is documented. Berlioz had seen the Irish actress Harriet Smithson as Ophelia and as Juliet in Paris in 1827, and his passion for her is the matter of the work. He composed it in Paris in the first half of 1830, at twenty-six. They married in 1833.
The first movement opens with a Largo in C minor, hesitant, and its melody is older than the symphony: a romance Berlioz wrote in his youth, laid into the new frame. Then the Allegro in C major, and in flute and first violins the idée fixe in its first statement, a long rising arch after the Largo’s hesitations. It too was made for another work. Berlioz took it from Herminie, the cantata he wrote for the Prix de Rome in 1828. In its new place it has a new office: it is no longer a tune in a cantata but the beloved herself, and every later movement will be measured by what has become of it.
The rest of the Allegro is agitation more than argument. It repeats and circles; its sonata plan is loose, its development diffuse, and its passions are given as a state rather than built as a case. It is the longest movement but one, about a quarter of the work, and it holds the plan of the whole in small: a theme that will not leave the mind, returning in new surroundings. What it does not yet do is change the theme. The change is the work’s discovery, and it is kept for the dream’s later scenes, where the surroundings stop being a backdrop for the melody and start to act on it.
Movement II
The second scene is a ball, and the second movement is a waltz in A major, carried by harps and strings: a dance of the composer’s own city and decade set as a symphonic movement, one of the work’s departures from the form it inherited. The key falls a third from the first movement’s C, and it is the first step of a plan the whole work completes: C, A, F, G and C again, two falling thirds, then up to the dominant and home. The plan of the symphony, taken whole, is a cadence, and the dream that seems to wander is closed from the start.
In the middle of the dance the idée fixe breaks in. The waltz gives way to it, then closes over it again, and the beloved is glimpsed across a crowded room and lost. This is the first transformation the dream makes: the melody is heard inside a scene where it has no place, because the mind that carries it cannot keep it out. The movement is a dance with the beloved sewn into its centre, and that is both its charm and its charge. It is the shortest movement but one, about an eighth of the work.
The score includes an optional cornet obbligato for the movement; most performances leave it out, and the work is read here without it. What the waltz shows is the method of the whole at its lightest. The scene is social, bright and ordinary; the theme is private. Wherever the dreamer goes the beloved is there before him, not as a person in the room but as an idea in his head, and the room is only the place where the idea happens to sound. The ball is the first of the social orders the work holds, and it is held as the dreamer sees it: as scenery.
Movement III
The third movement is the longest, an Adagio in F major taking nearly a third of the work, and it is the work’s hinge. It opens with a call across a distance: a cor anglais in the field, and an oboe offstage answering, two shepherds piping to each other. The scene comes from Beethoven’s Pastoral, which had a scene in the country, a storm and titled movements, and this is where Berlioz’s road leaves that one. Beethoven’s country is a place. Berlioz’s is a state of mind, and the field is where doubt enters.
The idée fixe returns in the woodwind, and with it the turn from love to dread. The calm is troubled by the theme, not by the weather: what the dreamer fears is in the melody he carries. The movement is long for its argument, and the charge stands. But the length is also the material of its ending, which needs a long calm to empty, and the slow tempo lets the listener hear the pastoral sounds as what the dreamer has around him and cannot enter.
At the end the cor anglais calls again, and no oboe answers. Only four timpani answer, played in chords: distant thunder. It is a passage with few equals in its century for emptiness, a slow movement whose subject is absence, and it is made almost entirely of orchestration: the instrument chosen to call, the instrument withheld from answering, and four drums tuned to sound a harmony. The sublime of solitude here needs no programme to be heard. Remove this movement and the work would pass from the ball to the scaffold with nothing between, and the descent would have no hinge.
Movement IV
In the fourth movement the dreamer is marched to his own execution. It is a march in G minor, in the low brass, with a crowd, and its exposition is repeated as printed. The music was not made for this symphony: Berlioz took it from Les francs-juges, an opera he had abandoned. It obeys the story from its first bar, but it does not carry the theme. The march is a borrowed march, and the idée fixe is not in it until its last bars, which is the plainest of the work’s seams.
Then the theme enters on solo clarinet, a last thought of the beloved, and a chord from the full orchestra cuts it off. Pizzicato strings fall after it, heard since as the head falling, and the crowd’s G major chords close the movement. Timing is the whole art here: the clarinet’s phrase lasts just long enough to be known. It is the one place in the work where the theme is not transformed but interrupted, and the interruption is the blade. Remove the march and the dream has no crime to answer, and the finale no damnation to follow.
Here the work’s division about its own meaning is plainest. The artist has made himself the hero of his own execution, and the music, with its low brass and its triumphant crowd, takes his side. The disclosure the work makes, that obsession loves an image and that the image turns, is real, and sound carries it. But in the march the work believes its own pose and does not see through it. The finale will; the march does not, and that is the tenth by which the disclosure falls short of the gate.
Movement V
The finale is a witches’ sabbath, from C minor to C major. The beloved arrives at it as the idée fixe on the E flat clarinet, turned into a trivial dance: the long arch of the first movement made shrill and common. This is the work’s disclosure stated in sound. The image was always the lover’s and never the beloved’s, and the mind that idealised her is the mind that now degrades her; the two are one movement. Here the work sees through its artist, and the parody is turned on him.
Then bells, and the Dies irae, the chant of the Mass for the dead, in ophicleides and bassoons, then faster and faster in diminution. Its shape is the opposite of the idée fixe: a narrow figure moving by step and falling, where the beloved’s melody was a long rising arch. A Ronde du sabbat starts up as a fugato, driven and rough as counterpoint, and the two are combined, chant and dance at once, with the violins playing col legno, struck with the wood of the bow. The liturgy is parodied by the orchestra that plays it, the grotesque is turned to grandeur, and the movement closes the plan’s cadence in C major.
The symphony was first performed on 5 December 1830 in the hall of the Paris Conservatoire under François-Antoine Habeneck, five months after the July Revolution. Berlioz revised it in 1831 and 1832, during and after his stay in Rome, and gave it again on 9 December 1832 with its sequel, Lélio, which is not part of the work. Liszt’s piano transcription appeared in 1834, Schumann reviewed the symphony at length in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835 from that transcription, and Fétis attacked it. From this score came the symphonic poem, thematic transformation, and an orchestral method that ran through Berlioz’s treatise of 1844 to Wagner, Strauss and Rimsky-Korsakov. What it brought into the open holds without the biography: obsession loves an image, not a person, and the image, being the lover’s, can be made to dance at his damnation.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan resists the subtractive test. Remove the march and the dream has no crime to answer; remove the finale and the crime has no damnation; remove the Scène aux champs and the turn from love to dread has no hinge, for the field is where doubt enters and the thunder answers. The idée fixe binds every movement to the plan. The test finds give in the parts. Three main melodies were made for other works: the Largo’s romance, the idée fixe from the cantata Herminie, and the march from Les francs-juges, which takes the theme only in its last bars. The waltz is a dance with the beloved sewn into it. Length is not charged; the loose joins are.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Obsession does not love a person; it loves an image, and the image, being the lover’s and not the beloved’s, turns. The idée fixe is the beloved reduced to a melody: it intrudes on the ball, troubles the field, is cut off by the blade, and returns on the E flat clarinet as a vulgar dance at the sabbath. Idealisation and degradation are one movement of one mind, and the self-pitying artist casts himself as the hero of his own execution. Held a tenth below the gate because the programme tells much of what the music should find, and because the work believes its own pose as often as it exposes it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height comes often, in several kinds. The sublime of dread: the march in the low brass, its crowd, and the chord that cuts the beloved off; the finale’s bells and the Dies irae in ophicleides and bassoons, then in diminution, then set against the Ronde, the grotesque turned to grandeur. The sublime of solitude: the end of the Scène aux champs, the cor anglais calling and only four timpani answering, with few equals in its century for emptiness. Beauty: the idée fixe’s first long arch, and the waltz with its harps. Four of the five movements rise. Held below Otello (9.4) and Winterreise (9.3) because the first Allegro is more agitation than elevation, and some of the finale’s height is effect.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Myth is built, not only evoked. The archetype is a descent: an artist poisoned by his own hand passes from the ball and the field to the scaffold and to hell, and his beloved meets him there as a witch. The descent is the order of the movements, and the idée fixe carries the beloved down through it as the soul’s image. The Dies irae makes the last judgment present as sound. The particulars stay particular: a ball, a cor anglais in a field, a crowd at an execution. Held a tenth below the gate because the myth is assembled from the furniture of its decade, Faust’s Walpurgis night, Hugo’s condemned man, the Gothic sabbath, and leans on the programme to be told.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the Viennese symphony, three years after Beethoven’s death, and his Pastoral above all: five movements, a scene in the country, a storm, titled movements. The departures: a symphony told in the first person with a printed programme; one theme carried through every movement as a character and changed by the story; a waltz as a symphonic movement; a slow movement whose subject is absence; a finale that parodies the liturgy and sets chant against a fugato; the orchestra as a new instrument. The stake was real: a man of twenty-six with no standing, who had failed the Prix de Rome repeatedly, mounted it himself. Held off the top by the Pastoral, the road this swerve leaves from, and by Weber’s Wolf’s Glen behind the finale.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. What it knows is obsession, and the recurring theme is obsession’s form: an idea that returns whatever its surroundings and is changed by them. Recast as a suite of five pieces without the idée fixe, the work becomes picturesque scenes; recast as an opera, the beloved becomes a singer with a will, when the point is that she is only an image. A wordless symphony with a printed frame is the right form for a dream told in the first person. Held below the top because the shapes inside the movements are often containers: the first movement’s sonata plan is loose and its development diffuse, the waltz is a waltz, and the march is a borrowed march.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence, not promise. The work has been argued over since Schumann’s long review of 1835 and Fétis’s attack, through Liszt’s transcription, Edward T. Cone’s Norton Critical Score (1971) and the New Berlioz Edition. The questions stay open: how far the programme is the work, or a frame Berlioz later loosened; whether the symphony is confession, irony or theatre; how the first movement’s form should be heard; what the transformations of the idée fixe mean. Performance is unsettled too: the cornet obbligato, ophicleides or tubas, the repeats, period instruments. Held well below Op. 131 (9.5) because much of the return is to the orchestral surface and the biography, and once known the music yields less on fresh hearing than the deepest works do.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation: a symphony made able to tell a story in the first person, a recurring transformed theme made a structural principle across a whole symphony, and orchestration made a means of thought. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Liszt transcribed this score and built the symphonic poem and thematic transformation in its line; Berlioz’s Grand traité d’instrumentation (1844) carried its orchestral method to Wagner, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov and the Russian school; the programme symphony, the tone poem and the grotesque finale of Mussorgsky, Saint-Saëns and Mahler follow it; film scoring inherits its method. The leitmotif’s debt to the idée fixe is debated. Discounted a little because much of the reach runs through Berlioz’s whole output and Liszt’s advocacy.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in Berlioz’s revised score, with no lost or doubtful part; the revisions are his own. Presence over about 196 years is wide: for a century the work has been among the most often performed and recorded symphonies, in every orchestral culture, a standard of the repertory. Its first decades were uneven, more scandal and Liszt’s piano than the concert hall, and that holds it from the widest figure. The fabric carries a small charge: the ophicleide is obsolete, and its parts are played on tubas. What dates is the surface fixed to its moment, the programme’s opium and its Romantic pose, which have aged more than the music.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, to the same anchors as every desk. In orchestration the command is near the ceiling and load-bearing: four timpani in chords for thunder; the cor anglais answered by an offstage oboe; harps in the waltz; the low brass of the march; the E flat clarinet’s parody; bells and col legno violins in the finale; the timing of the guillotine chord. The orchestra is the argument. The cost lies elsewhere. Berlioz’s harmony is personal and often powerful, but parts of the bass and voice-leading are awkward beside his German contemporaries, the first movement’s development is weakly argued, and the finale’s fugato is rough counterpoint. Against the Goldberg Variations (9.7) and Otello (9.5) a score this uneven stands lower. The orchestration alone would support 9.6.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the waltz of the ball and the Dies irae of the sabbath. One law governs both: everything is the dreamer’s perception, and the beloved’s melody is the measure of each scene. At the ball it intrudes, at the sabbath it is degraded, and both times it is the same theme bent by the mind that carries it. The tonal plan closes as a cadence, C to C by two falling thirds and the dominant. The range governed is wide: salon, pasture, public execution, the infernal. The law sounds less clearly where the materials were borrowed: the march obeys the story but not the theme until its last bars, and the Largo’s romance belongs to another life. One physics, with the seams showing.
Score: 8.6 / 10
More orders than a wordless symphony usually holds, and held by the idée fixe and the programme, not listed: consciousness, in reverie, drug and dream; love, as obsession; society, in the ball; the natural order and rural labour, in shepherds’ calls, the field and the storm; the state and the crowd, at a public execution; the sacred, as parody, in the Dies irae and the bells; death and damnation. The same theme passes through them all. What holds the axis, the lowest of the twelve, is depth of hold: the social orders are scenery seen by the dreamer, the family is absent, and history appears only as the furniture of the decade. One mind’s dream of the world, more than the world.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Made at 9.2. A symphony made to tell a story in the first person, with one theme carried through it as a character and an orchestra used as a new instrument; a score that carried the programme symphony, thematic transformation and a new orchestral method into the century after it; and an orchestration that is the argument, from the four timpani’s thunder to the wood of the bow at the sabbath.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: many orders held by one theme, but the social orders are scenery seen by the dreamer, the family is absent and history is only the furniture of the decade. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, held by three main melodies made for other works and the loose joins where they are laid in, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4: a meaning the programme tells more than the music builds, and a descent assembled from the furniture of its decade.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3 and The Imperishable at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 each fall short of it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. The aggregate is 8.8, below 9.0, so the work would stand below the summit even with the gate met.
Basis · the score of the Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14, in Berlioz’s revised version as published and played today, with his programme in its familiar form, the opium dream governing all five movements, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, programme text or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The second movement is taken without the optional cornet obbligato, as most performances give it, and the fourth with its exposition repeat as printed. The programme is part of the work; Berlioz revised it more than once, and it is read here in the form that governs all five movements. Lélio, the sequel given with the symphony in 1832, is not part of the work, and no performance is the object. The programme is in French; only titles and terms are quoted, and every English gloss is the desk’s own. The tonal plan and the shape of the Dies irae were set out by script. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the tempo headings, the date and publisher of the first full score, the number of Les francs-juges the march comes from, the source of the Largo’s romance, the later changes to the programme, the substitutes Berlioz allows for some instruments, and the date of Fétis’s attack. The leitmotif’s debt to the idée fixe is stated as debated. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.