Lawrence Gilman

(Hector Berlioz: born in la CÔte Saint-AndrÉ, France, December 11, 1803; died in Paris, March 9, 1869)

OVERTURE TO "KING LEAR": Op. 4

Berlioz, a sincere and ardent admirer of the genius of Shakespeare, wrote his overture to "King Lear" at Nice and at Rome in the spring of 1831. Although the work bears an early opus number, it stands, in order of composition, between the Symphonie fantastique (Op. 14-a, 1830) and LÉlio (Op. 14-b, 1831-1832).

Berlioz had seen his innamorata, Henrietta Smithson,[14] play Shakespearian rÔles at the OdÉon, Paris, in 1827. He was profoundly impressed. "Shakespeare," he wrote afterwards, with characteristic fervor, "coming upon me thus suddenly, struck me as with a thunderbolt. His lightning opened the heaven of art to me with a sublime crash, and lighted up its fullest depths. I recognized true dramatic grandeur, beauty, and truth." Four years later he wrote the "King Lear" overture.

Berlioz has supplied no programme or elucidation of the music. It is entitled simply, Ouverture du Roi LÉar (TragÉdie de Shakespeare), leaving the hearer to decipher unaided its precise significance. Is it a character study of the figure of the harassed and desperate king? Are definite incidents, definite phases, of the tragedy, depicted in the music? Or is the overture a preparatory mood-picture, an introduction designed to awaken in the hearer emotions appropriate to the play? Mr. Edward Dannreuther, writing, with presumable deliberation, in the "Oxford History of Music," declares that "in this piece the form of expression ... is vivid enough for a tragic opera which might be named 'Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia'; so vivid, indeed, that, given the general designation, even an unimaginative hearer is likely to take the composer's meaning, and to find the proper names for the themes."

What, in brief, are the general emotional characteristics of the music? The opening is threatening, portentous, fate-burdened. [15] There are brief moments of tenderness—a pathetic tenderness. The mood changes suddenly—the expression-mark in the score is disperato ed agitato. The music is now furious, turbulent, wildly passionate, interrupted by intervals of quietness, of suspended intensity—a quietness that is piteous, poignant, momentous. The end is convulsive, storm-swept; and one is here reminded of Hazlitt's description of the mind of Lear, "staggering between the weight of attachment and the hurried movements of passion, like a tall ship driven about by the winds, buffeted by the furious waves; ... or it is like the sharp rock circled by the eddying whirlpool that foams and beats against it, or like the solid promontory pushed from its basis by the force of an earthquake."

It is possible to see in this music a picture of Lear, "stretched to the last moment upon the rack of this tough world"; of Cordelia, "unmingled tenderness and strength, sunshine and rain at once"; of Goneril and Regan, types of "the ravening egoism in humanity which is at war with all goodness." Or one may recall the words of Coleridge as most pithily characterizing the overture of Berlioz: "What is Lear? It is storm and tempest—the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads—succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness."

FANTASTIC SYMPHONY: Op. 14-a

1. DREAMS, PASSIONS

(Largo)
(Allegro agitato e appassionato assai)

2. A BALL

(Waltz: Allegro non troppo)

3. SCENE IN THE FIELDS

(Adagio)

4. MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD

(Allegretto non troppo)

5. WALPURGIS NIGHT'S DREAM

(Larghetto)
(Allegro)

This Symphonie fantastique, in five movements, constitutes the first part of a work entitled by Berlioz "Episode in the Life of an Artist." The second part, a "lyric monodrama," is entitled "LÉlio; or, The Return to Life." The Symphonie fantastique was composed in 1830, at the time of Berlioz's "interminable and inextinguishable" passion for the Irish actress Henrietta Smithson—the tragic history of which this is not the place to review. The "Episode in the Life of an Artist," as he wrote to his dear friend Ferrand early in 1830, was to portray "the development of my infernal passion." As to the meaning of the "Fantastic Symphony," Berlioz has himself supplied the following detailed explanatory preface:

"A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments, and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thought and images. The beloved woman herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea which he finds and hears everywhere.

"Part I

"DREAMS, PASSIONS

"He first recalls that uneasiness of soul, that vague des passions, those moments of causeless melancholy and joy, which he experienced before seeing her whom he loves; then the volcanic love with which she suddenly inspired him, his moments of delicious anguish, of jealous fury, his returns to loving tenderness, and his religious consolations.

"Part II

"A BALL

"He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fÊte.

"Part III

"SCENE IN THE FIELDS

"One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a Ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scene around him, the light rustling of the trees gently swayed by the breeze, some hopes he has recently conceived, all combine to restore an unwonted calm to his heart and to impart a more cheerful coloring to his thoughts; but she appears once more, his heart stops beating, he is agitated with painful presentiments; if she were to betray him!... One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him. The sun sets ... the sound of distant thunder ... solitude ... silence....

"Part IV

"MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD

"He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the tones of a march which is now sombre and wild, now brilliant and solemn, in which the dull sound of the tread of heavy feet follows without transition upon the most resounding outbursts. At the end, the fixed idea reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought interrupted by the fatal stroke.

"Part V

"WALPURGIS NIGHT'S DREAM

"He sees himself at the witches' Sabbath, in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, shrieks, to which other shrieks seem to reply. The beloved melody again reappears; but it has lost its noble and timid character; it has become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance-tune: it is she who comes to the witches' Sabbath.... Howlings of joy at her arrival ... she takes part in the diabolic orgy.... Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies irÆ. Witches' dance. The witches' dance and the Dies irÆ together."[16]

"HAROLD IN ITALY"

SYMPHONY IN FOUR MOVEMENTS, WITH VIOLA SOLO: Op. 16

1. HAROLD IN THE MOUNTAINS; SCENES OF MELANCHOLY, HAPPINESS, AND JOY

(Adagio)
(Allegro)

2. MARCH OF PILGRIMS SINGING THEIR EVENING HYMN

(Allegretto)

3. SERENADE OF A MOUNTAINEER OF THE ABRUZZI TO HIS MISTRESS

(Allegro assai)
(Allegretto)

4. ORGY OF BRIGANDS; RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PRECEDING SCENES

(Allegro frenetico)

Upon the romanticists in France—"the heroic boys of 1830," as William Ernest Henley called them—the influence of Byron was gripping and profound. To Berlioz, in particular, "greedy of emotion, intolerant of restraint, contemptuous of reticence and sobriety, ... and prepared to welcome, as a return to truth and nature, inventions the most extravagant and imaginings the most fantastic and far-fetched," this prince of romanticists must have seemed a poet after his own heart. Yet, singularly enough, there are in his writings comparatively few references to the author of "Manfred" and "Don Juan."

The manner in which the "Harold" symphony came to be written is related by Berlioz in his Memoirs. His Symphonie fantastique had been played at a concert at the Paris Conservatory (December 22, 1833), with conspicuous success. "And then," says Berlioz, "to crown my happiness, after the audience had gone out, a man with a long mane of hair, with piercing eyes, with a strange and haggard face, one possessed by genius, a colossus among giants, whom I had never seen and whose appearance moved me profoundly, was alone and waiting for me in the hall, stopped me to press my hand, overwhelmed me with burning praise, which set fire to my heart and head: it was Paganini!... Some weeks after this vindicatory concert of which I have spoken, Paganini came to see me. 'I have a marvellous viola,' he said, 'an admirable Stradivarius, and I wish to play it in public. But I have no music ad hoc. Will you write a solo piece for the viola? You are the only one I can trust for such a work.' 'Yes, indeed,' I answered, 'your proposition flatters me more than I can tell, but, to make such a virtuoso as you shine in a piece of this nature, it is necessary to play the viola, and I do not play it. You are the only one, it seems to me, who can solve the problem.' 'No, no; I insist,' said Paganini; 'you will succeed; as for me, I am too sick at present to compose; I cannot think of it.'

"I tried then to please the illustrious virtuoso by writing a solo piece for the viola, but a solo combined with the orchestra in such a manner that it would not injure the expression of the orchestral mass, for I was sure that Paganini, by his incomparable artistry, would know how to make the viola always the dominating instrument....

"His proposal seemed new to me, and I soon had developed in my head a very happy idea, and I was eager for the realization. The first movement was hardly completed, when Paganini wished to see it. He looked at the rests for the viola in the allegro and exclaimed: 'No, it is not that: there are too many rests for me; I must be playing all the time.' 'I told you so,' I answered; 'you want a viola concerto, and you are the only one who can write such a concerto for yourself.' Paganini did not answer; he seemed disappointed, and left me without speaking further about my orchestral sketch. Some days afterwards, suffering already from the affection of the larynx which ultimately killed him,[17] he went to Nice, and returned to Paris only at the end of three years.

"Since I then saw that my plan of composition would not suit him, I set myself to work in another way, and without any anxiety concerning the means to make the solo viola conspicuous. My idea was to write for the orchestra a series of scenes in which the solo viola should figure as a more or less active personage of constantly preserved individuality; I wished to put the viola in the midst of poetic recollections left me by my wanderings in the Abruzzi, and make it a sort of melancholy dreamer, after the manner of Byron's 'Childe Harold.' Hence the title, Harold en Italie. As in the Symphonie fantastique, a chief theme (the first song of the viola) reappears throughout the work; but there is this difference: the theme of the Symphonie fantastique, the 'fixed idea,' interposes itself persistently as an episodic and passionate thought in the midst of scenes which are foreign to it and modifies them; while the song of Harold is added to other songs of the orchestra with which it is contrasted both in movement and character and without any interruption of the development."

The relationship between Berlioz's symphony and Byron's poetic account of the Italian wanderings of his Harold is of the slightest, and any attempt to discover, in Berlioz's programme of the moods and incidents of his symphonic hero, definite correspondences with Byron's poem, would be more than futile. One who seeks enlightenment concerning the intentions of Berlioz in this symphony must fall back upon the composer's own brief hints as contained in the inscriptions appended to the several movements. The voice of the solo viola, as we know, typifies throughout the "melancholy dreamer" as conceived by Berlioz—it is Harold undergoing his adventures: in the mountains; encountering a band of devout and simple pilgrims; observing an enamoured mountaineer in the act of serenading his mistress; and, finally, involved in a tumultuous orgy of drunken bandits. Concerning this last movement, Berlioz has left us some additional information. Included in his Memoirs is a letter addressed to Heine, in which Berlioz gives an account of a performance of the symphony at Brunswick in March, 1843. "In the finale of 'Harold,'" he writes, "in this furious orgy in which the drunkenness of wine, blood, joy and rage all shout together; where the rhythm now seems to stumble, and now to run madly; where the mouths of brass seem to vomit forth curses and reply with blasphemies to entreating voices; where they laugh, drink, strike, bruise, kill, and ravish; where, in a word, they amuse themselves; in this scene of brigands the orchestra became a veritable pandemonium; there was something supernatural and frightful in the frenzy of its dash; everything sang, leaped, roared with diabolical order and unanimity—violins, basses, trombones, drums, and cymbals; while the solo alto, Harold, the dreamer, fleeing in fright, still sounded from afar some trembling notes of his evening hymn. Ah! what a feeling at the heart! What savage tremors in conducting this astonishing orchestra! You know nothing like it, the rest of you, poets; you have never been swept away by such hurricanes of life. I could have embraced the whole orchestra, but I could only cry out, in French it is true, but my accents surely made me understood: 'Sublime! I thank you, gentlemen, and I wonder at you: you are perfect brigands!'"