Some of us wonder how we arrived at our current cultural predicament, where we sometimes have to look up to see the gutter. It didn’t happen overnight.
Robert Schumann, in founding his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik said that “if you do not attack the bad, you are only halfway defending the Good.” At the same time, he also said that he owed it to new composers, who had worked so hard on their compositions, to work just as hard in evaluating them. By his own admission, he reviewed Hector Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique" countless times before writing about it in 1835. He tried to be fair to Berlioz.
Berlioz admired Beethoven, Shakespeare and Goethe. He made enemies at the conservatory because he had little respect for the rules. That sounds good, doesn't it? Yet, the only way to successfully break the rules is by finding a higher order of lawfulness, not by trashing them.
Like Wagner, Berlioz claimed to love Beethoven. In 1829, he wrote:
“Now that I have heard the awe-inspiring giant Beethoven, I realize the point that music has reached. It's a question of carrying it further..no, not further, that's impossible, he has attained the limits of art, but as far in another direction.”
But what is that other direction, and how far will it go? Wagner said the same thing. Were they intimidated by the challenge of going beyond Beethoven? Definitely. But even more, they opposed his rigorous method and morality.
Schumann was only 25-years old when he wrote the review. He divided his reviews between two characters who represent the inner dialogue of the critical mind: Florestan—heroic and impassioned, and Eusebius—a patient, careful thinker. Schumann's Florestan starts out:
“I will show you the composer as I have come to know him, with his virtues and his shortcomings, with his vulgarities and his intellectual sovereignty, as an instrument of destruction and a lover. For I know that what he has presented here can no more be called a work of art than can nature without the ennobling hand of man, or passion without the discipline of a higher moral force.”
The entire work is built on obsession. Berlioz had attended a performance of Hamlet in 1827, in which a young British actress named Harriet Smithson played Ophelia. He instantly fell in love with this woman who he did not know in the slightest. It caused him great anguish. He sent her immediately a series of impassioned letters, to which she did not respond. We don't know why, but who could blame her if she found it a bit creepy, maybe even thought he was a stalker. Berlioz wrote to a friend:
“You don’t know what love is, whatever you may say. For you, it’s not that rage, that fury, that delirium which takes possession of all one’s faculties, which renders one capable of anything.”
Love at first sight: passionate, all-consuming, fiery, and blind, was an obsession of the Romantics. Emotion was everything. The true artist, in order to be an artist, must suffer, and pass through wild out-of-control mood swings such as Berlioz describes in his program notes for the first movement.
In 1829, he wrote to his father:
“I suffer so much, so much, that if I did not take a grip on myself, I should shout and roll on the ground. I found only one way of satisfying that immense appetite for emotion, and that is music.”
Far from Beethoven indeed. Compare such enervation to Beethoven's portrayal of a heroic woman, Leonore, in his opera Fidelio. (Musical examples from the following discussion are in an accompanying audio.)
The entirety of Berlioz' 1830 Symphonie Fantastique centers on this obsessive delusion. He wrote a programme which he insisted had to be handed out to the audience if they wished to make sense of the work. For the first movement, he writes:
“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.”
Idee Fixe literally means a fixated idea. It's a double Idee Fixe, that applies to both Harriet, and the theme that represents her. Although Berlioz thought his theme to be noble, Schumann's Eusebius found it otherwise, and wrote with great irony:
“One should remember that it was not his intention to represent a great thought, but rather a persistent torturing idea, the kind of thing one carries around for days without being able to get it out of one's head; and this suggestion of something monotonous, maddening, could hardly have been more successfully accomplished.”
...and Florestan did not share Berlioz' view of the other half of of the Idee Fixe, Harriet:
“I picture this creature as I picture the main theme of the whole symphony,-pale, slender as a Lily, veiled, still, almost cold...Read in the Symphony itself how he plunges toward her, seeking to entwine her in all the tentacles of his soul, and how he recoils breathlessly in front of the chill of this Briton...Read it through. It is all written in drops of blood in the first movement.”
The Third Movement describes a scene in the countryside, and clearly references Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. For the first time Berlioz acts more like an adult, and in the program notes writes:
“...this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring.”
Schumann recognized it in the music:
“What music there is in the third movement!...The metaphor of a deep refreshing breath after a storm is overworked but I know of none more beautiful or appropriate...And here is the place where one who wished to earn the name of artist would have wrapped it up and celebrated a victory of art over life.”
Schumann had warned earlier though, that:
“Fiery young men whose love remains unrequited, tend, sooner or later, to throw out the inner Plato and render countless sacrifices on Epicurean alters.”
The movement undergoes an abrupt turn-about:
“But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his ‘ranz des vaches’; the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…”
The fourth movement is called March to the Scaffold. Listen to how Berlioz describes it:
“Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution..”
After saying that a true artist would have wrapped it up and called it a victory with the third movement, Schumann's Florestan concludes:
“Tasso continued on into an insane asylum. (Ft 1). But in Berlioz the old lust for destruction is doubly awakened and he lays about him with a Titan's fists. As he pictures the taking of the beloved, and as he passionately embraces the automaton figure, so does the music, ugly and vulgar, cling to his dreams and the attempted suicide. the bells toll to it, and the skeletons play wedding dances on the organ.......... Here, genius turns away weeping.”
The Fifth Movement pictures a witches' Sabbath. Again, from Berlioz' program:
“He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.”
Poe Takes on the Matter
The great American writer, Edgar Poe, who is too often characterized as a romantic or worse, may very well have had this Berlioz story in mind in his hilarious story, The Spectacles, which deflates the romantic idea of "love at first sight." Ft 2
Poe's impassioned young man, M Froissart, begins with:
“Many years ago, it was the fashion to ridicule the idea of “love at first sight;” but those who think, not less than those who feel deeply, have always advocated its existence.”
The situation is remarkably similar. Berlioz saw Harriet at a production of Hamlet and fell in love at first sight. Poe's M. Froissart did the same at the opera. He beheld a figure in the balcony, and said:
“If I live a thousand years, I can never forget the intense emotion with which I regarded this figure. It was that of a female, the most exquisite I had ever beheld. The face was so far turned toward the stage that, for some minutes, I could not obtain a view of it—but the form was divine; no other word can sufficiently express its magnificent proportion—and even the term “divine” seems ridiculously feeble as I write it.”
There is one complication (or ironic twist in Poe’s version). M. Froissart has very weak eyes, and out of shear vanity, refuses to wear eyeglasses.
“My eyes are large and gray; and although, in fact they are weak to a very inconvenient degree, still no defect in this regard would be suspected from their appearance. The weakness itself, however, has always much annoyed me, and I have resorted to every remedy—short of wearing glasses. Being youthful and good-looking, I naturally dislike these, and have resolutely refused to employ them. I know nothing, indeed, which so disfigures the countenance of a young person.”
The question therefore becomes: What happens to love at first sight if you cannot see? In Poe’s story, the woman, Madame Eugenie Lalande and the young man's friends, play along with the young man's infatuation, and even set up a fake wedding. Only after, does he discover who he has actually married. We won't spoil it for you. Ft 3
The pathology of Berlioz deserves compassion and medical help, but not to be set on a stage, and worshipped as artistic genius.
Here’s is the audio accompanying our discussion on Berlioz: https://drive.google.com/.../1SzfPHDI6ecxJDH2J.../view...
Ft 1. Felix Mendelssohn befriended Berlioz (he may have been worried about him), but did not care for his music. He quipped that no matter how hard Berlioz tries to go mad in his symphonies, he never quite succeeds.
Ft 2. One of Poe's many functions was as a music critic in New York City, where he would likely have heard Maria Malibran, who sang there many times. Read this detailed description of a singer from Poe's The Spectacles:
It is beyond the reach of art to endow either air or recitative with more impassioned expression than was hers. Her utterance of the romance in Otello—the tone with which she gave the words Sul mio sasso, in the Capuletti—rings in the memory yet. Her lower tones were absolutely miraculous. Her voice embraced three complete octaves, extending from the contralto D to the D upper soprano, and, though sufficiently powerful to have filled the San Carlos, executed with the minutest precision, every difficulty of vocal composition-ascending and descending scales, cadences, or fiorituri. In the final of the Somnambula, she brought about a most remarkable effect at the words:
Ah! non guinge uman pensiero
Al contento ond ‘io son piena.
Here, in imitation of Malibran, she modified the original phrase of Bellini, so as to let her voice descend to the tenor G, when, by a rapid transition, she struck the G above the treble stave, springing over an interval of two octaves.
Ft 3 A bankrupt Harriet eventually married Berlioz. We will let you guess how that turned out.
