There is one go-to site on Berlioz: The Hector Berlioz Website. The creatures of hell amass around the artist, gleefully celebrating his demise.īerlioz wrote his own program to the piece, which he provided for audience members to read as they listened. Here he sees his true love, now grotesque and distorted in comically demonic fashion. The symphony’s final movement imagines the young artist, still in his opium dream, transported to hell. The idee fixe appears only once, as a sudden remeniscence just before the guillotine strikes the young man’s head right off and the movement comes to a perversely joyous conclusion. This movement thus depicts the artist’s forced march to the scaffold.
The fourth movement takes on a nightmarish character: having taken opium, the young artist dreams that he has killed his true love and is about to be executed for his crime. The third moves to an imagined countryside where a storm is brewing, reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The second is a waltz, moving the action to a fabulous-sounding ball. The first movement introduces the idee fixe and chronicles the beginnings of the young artist’s quest. This melody appears in every movement of the symphony. The true love is represented musically by a melody known as the idee fixe (fixed idea). The symphony as a whole tells the story, in music, of a troubled young artist and his quest for his true love. The “March to the Scaffold” is the fourth of five movements in the Symphonie Fantastique. He was prolific as a writer and critic throughout his life, often supporting his family on his writer’s income between compositions. His experience with such immense musical forces lent him great expertise in instrumentation and orchestration, and led him to write a treatise on the subject.
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He wrote his music on a grand scale: his Requiem, for example, was scored for: 20 woodwinds a brass section of 12 horns, 4 cornets and tubas, and 4 additional antiphonal brass choirs of 38 musicians total 26 percussionists on 16 timpani, 10 cymbals and more more than 100 strings a choir of at least 210 voices, plus a tenor soloist. He pursued her for years and finally convinced her to marry him, only to have the marriage fall apart in short order. As a young man he fell madly in love with Harriet Smithson, an actress whom he saw play Ophelia in Hamlet. He was prone to fits of passion and obsession in both his life and his music. He developed a great love for Shakespeare, basing several of his composition on the bard’s work. His most famous work is among his earliest: the Symphonie Fantastique. He initially studied medicine before leaving school to become a composer.
He never mastered one single instrument, dabbling in the guitar and flute early in his life. French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) is a unique figure in music history.
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