Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and the Dream of a Sabbath

Paris, 1830: an artist in love, a fixed idea and a witches' sabbath with the Dies irae. The history and symbols of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.

Hector Berlioz was twenty-seven when, on 5 December 1830, the orchestra conducted by François-Antoine Habeneck gave the first performance of his Symphonie fantastique in the hall of the Paris Conservatoire. The subtitle was Episode in the Life of an Artist. For the first time a symphony was presented to the public with a written programme, a real story to be read before listening, which culminated in an infernal vision: the witches' sabbath the protagonist witnesses as if in a dream.

A Love and a Fixed Idea

At the origin of the symphony there is a real passion. In 1827 Berlioz had seen the Irish actress Harriet Smithson in Paris playing Ophelia, with an English company presenting Shakespeare in the original language. He fell desperately in love with her, without being loved in return, and poured that feeling into the score. Years later, in 1833, he married her, but the marriage was not a happy one.

In the symphony the beloved is represented by a melody, which Berlioz calls the idée fixe, the fixed idea. It returns in all five movements, transformed according to the protagonist's state of mind: anxious in the opening reveries, elegant during a ball, distant in the country scene. This procedure anticipates the techniques of thematic transformation that Liszt and Wagner would develop.

From the March to the Scaffold to the Dream

According to the programme, the desperate artist tries to poison himself with opium, but the dose does not kill him and casts him into a sleep full of visions. In the fourth movement he dreams that he has killed his beloved and is being led to the scaffold. The march to the scaffold advances amid menacing brass; at the last moment the fixed idea reappears, cut off sharply by the stroke of the blade.

The fifth movement, Dream of a Witches' Sabbath, carries the artist among witches, ghosts and monsters gathered for his funeral. Here Berlioz breaks every convention of the classical symphony: shrill sounds, grotesque laughter, effects of strings played with the wood of the bow. The fixed idea returns, but degraded into a vulgar dance given to the small E flat clarinet: the beloved has become a witch taking part in the orgy.

The Bells and the Dies Irae

Then funeral bells toll, and ophicleides, today replaced by tubas, and bassoons intone the Gregorian melody of the Dies irae, the medieval sequence of the Mass for the dead on the day of judgement. Using it in a sabbath was a provocation: a sacred chant becomes parody, as in traditional depictions of the sabbath as an inversion of the liturgy.

Then comes the Sabbath Round, built as a fugue, and in the finale Berlioz superimposes the witches' dance and the Dies irae, combining them in a single storm of sound. It is one of the boldest orchestral passages of the early nineteenth century, and it still produces an effect of great violence today. Schumann, who studied it from Liszt's transcription, devoted a long critical essay to it.

The Symphonie fantastique opened the way to programme music and the symphonic poem. Liszt made a piano transcription of it in 1833, which helped to spread it. With it the sabbath, until then the subject of demonological treatises, trials and engravings, entered the concert hall for good. In 1832 Berlioz added a sequel, Lélio, in which the artist awakens and returns to life.