This blog is mostly read by A level students studying this work (well, the first movement), so what can we say here that is useful beyond his obsession with Harriet?
It was composed in 1830, and he rewrote the programme notes in 1845 and in 1855.
It’s the 1855 that prove the most useful:
The following programme should be distributed to the audience every time the Symphonie fantastique is performed dramatically and thus followed by the monodrama of Lélio 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 programme 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.
It’s the 1855 programme note for the first movement that gives us the real understanding of what this sonata-form-with-an-idee-fixe-squished-in is trying to achieve, particularly in the scenes and structure:
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her.
By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.
This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro.
The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.
It’s worth comparing performances by Eliot Gardiner – in the original venue, using Berlioz’s seating plan for the orchestra and historic instruments – with the more dramatic staged version by Aurora Orchestra.
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