"Berlioz, Opium, and Program Music"
By HRJ
During the inaugural program (July 8, 9 and 10) of the Summer Season 2022, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería will perform the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) alongside with Iberia by Debussy and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto.
The following is a brief introduction to the Symphonie fantastique, considered a masterpiece of musical Romanticism, specifically of programmatic music.
The Symphonie fantastique (1830) by Berlioz narrates how a man hallucinates with opium who murders the woman he claims to love, is condemned to the guillotine and has his head cut off in a public square.
Being a dream, the sound events are confusing and ethereal, going back and forth between unresolved sensations, which are exalted and blurred in dreamlike emotional outbursts built through an orchestration of overflowing ingenuity.
The work was premiered on December 5, 1830 at the Paris Conservatory. It is considered a masterpiece of Romanticism (music at the service of the inner world), specifically of programmatic music.
"What is the narrative structure of Berlioz's *Symphonie fantastique*?"
Before composing the music, Berlioz wrote this introduction for his Symphonie fantastique:
"A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a deep sleep, accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, feelings and memories are transformed in his diseased brain into musical images and thoughts. The beloved woman has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea to be found and heard everywhere."
But Berlioz was not content with simply sketching a generic literary landscape and painstakingly set out the narrative material that his music describes in each of the five movements of the Symphonie fantastique.
Here is a summary:
1.- Dreams, passions
The musician consumes opium and thinks of the woman he is in love with. As he thinks of her, the orchestra plays a theme (that of the beloved) that from this moment on will repeat itself every time he thinks of her, thus establishing a sort of fixed idea whose continuous repetitions give the different atmospheres that run through the score thematic cohesion. As opium distorts his perception of reality, jealousy, anguish and despair begin to torment the musician.
2.- A dance
The hallucination becomes a dance. A seductive waltz plays and many couples dance. The musician sees his beloved in the distance. He goes to look for her, but he can no longer find her: she has disappeared among the guests, and the waltz loses all seduction to become a desolate dance.
3.- Scene in the fields
The sad dance has become an open field. Shepherds, smell of earth and the wind stirs the leaves of the trees. The musician tries to calm down from the peaceful bucolic scenery. And yet he is unable to feel calm. He is tormented by dark omens. He has the presentiment that a tragedy lurks.
4.- March to the scaffold
The musician hallucinates that he murders the woman he loves, is judged and condemned to the guillotine. As the executioner leads him to the blades, he thinks of her again, and the theme of the fixed idea is the last thing heard before the mortal blow.
5.- A Witches' Night Dream
After death, the musician arrives at a party of monsters, demons and witches. The beloved appears and for a moment he deludes himself with the fantasy that it has all been a nightmare. But no: the grotesque Requiem of his own funeral sounds.
"Join us for our 2022 Summer Season!"
