HECTOR BERLIOZ
SYMPHONIE
FANTASTIQUE
LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI
CONDUCTING
THE NEW PHILHARMONIA
ORCHESTRA
Producer: MARTY WARGO
Recording Director: TONY D’AMATO
Album Coordinator: VINCENT BIONDI
Recording Engineer: ARTHUR LILLEY
Graphic Design: HARRY FARMLETT STUDIO
LINER SPC 21031
Hector Berlioz, ever the Romantic, fell
deeply in love with Shakespeare and a
Shakespearian actress on the same day.
Both passions consumed him for years,
profoundly affecting his life and influencing
his music. The list of pieces they inspired
is really quite impressive: a dramatic
fantasy after ‘“The Tempest”, the mighty
symphony-cantata “Romeo and Juliet’’, the
opera ‘Beatrice and Benedict”, a vocal
scena Called ‘“The Death of Ophelia”, a
Funeral March for the last scene of
‘Hamlet’, the “King Lear’ Overture, and
more obliquely but no less importantly, the
Symphonie Fantastique.
The date of this double infatuation
was September 11th, 1827, and the occa-
sion: a performance of ‘“‘Hamlet”’, at the
Odéon Theatre in Paris, by a visiting
English troupe. ‘The sudden and un-
expected revelation of Shakespeare
overwhelmed me,” wrote Berlioz in his
Memoirs; “the lightning-flash of his genius
revealed the whole heaven of art to me,
illuminating its remotest depths in a single
bolt.” Meanwhile, Harriet Smithson, the
comely Irish lass who played Ophelia, was
making an equally indelible impression on
the young musician. He was entirely
captivated by the sound of her voice, by
her manner and movements on stage. “I
can only compare the effect her wonderful
talent produced on my imagination and
heart,” he said, ‘with the convulsion
produced on my mind by the work of the
great poet whom she interpreted. I was so
shaken when I left the theatre that I
determined never again to expose myself
to the fire of Shakespeare’s genius.”
That noble resolve lasted all the way
up to the next morning, when ‘‘Romeo and
Juliet” was announced. Berlioz had a free
pass to the Odéon, but terrified that the
gratis list might be curtailed for this special
production, he rushed out and bought a
ticket anyway. From that moment on, he
confessed, his fate was sealed. Once again,
the team of Smithson and Shakespeare
wrought its magic, and the excitement of it
all was almost more than the composer
could bear. According to his own word
(which is none too reliable, actually, but
makes for a great story), he wandered about
in a state of semi-shock for months, dream-
ing endlessly of the fair Ophelia—who had,
by that time, become the darling of Paris—
and brooding bitterly over the unjust
discrepancy between her glittering success,
and his own lowly obscurity.
Like a schoolboy with a crush on the
teacher, Berlioz tried one stunt after
another to attract Miss Smithson’s atten-
tion. He arranged a concert of his own
music to impress her, but, alas, hardly
anyone showed up to hear it, and the lady
herself never so much as knew of its
existence. Then he began writing her
ardent, not to say near-hysterical, letters,
until she gave orders to her maid to accept
no more of them. Berlioz even contrived to
have one of his pieces played during the
course of a benefit program in which she
participated, but the actress stayed in her
dressing room all through the performance.
‘No words can describe what I
suffered,” he lamented, when Harriet left
Paris to continue her tour; ‘‘even
Shakespeare has never painted the hor-
rible gnawing at the heart, the sense of
utter desolation, the worthlessness of life,
the torture of one’s throbbing pulses and
the wild confusion of one’s mind.”
It was to assuage this pain, and to sort
out his confused affairs of mind, that
Berlioz began work on the Symphonie
Fantastique—as autobiographical a work
as exists in music. Obviously, there was
more than a touch of malice in his heart
too, since he quite plainly cast Harriet as
the villain of the piece and then, adding
© Copyright 1969 by London Records, Inc.
539 West 25th Street, New York, N.Y. 10001
All Rights Reserved
insult to inference, represented her
throughout the score with a melody he had
originally written some years earlier to
express his love for another girl.
The premise of the Symphonie, as
Berlioz took care to point out in a long and
detailed written program, is that a young,
sensitive musician, in a fit of love-sick
despair, tries to poison himself with opium.
He doesn’t take enough of the stuff to
dispatch himself entirely, but the dose is
sufficient to conjure up in his diseased |
brain a series of wild, nightmarish
fantasies. In them, his emotions and
memories are swirled into musical images,
and his Beloved haunts him continuously,
her theme (the famous idée fixe) weaving
itself in and about the other threads of
the complex orchestral texture.
The first movement, subtitled ‘‘Dreams,
Passions’, sets the stage for the melodrama,
its moods variously reminiscent of the
Musician’s somber depression, ardent
devotion, exhilarating joy, fuming jealousy.
In the second movement, the Musician
seeks his Beloved amidst the whirling
waltz and confused merriment of a festival
Ball. In the third, she clouds the sunniness
of a pastoral Scene in the Fields—
interrupting two shepherds as they pipe
their tunes across the hills, and filling the
Musician with ominous forebodings of
loneliness and tragedy.
The fourth movement, perhaps the
most graphic of all, finds the Musician
dreaming that he has murdered his faithless
love and now is himself led to the scaffold.
An eery march accompanies the procession,
its measured pace periodically shattered
by frenzied outbursts. The Beloved’s theme
returns briefly, but her farewell visit is cut
short by a tremendous orchestral thunder-
clap, signallling the completion of the
executioner’s grim duty.
The last vision is of a Witch’s Sabbath,
where a fearful host of spectres, monsters
and other ignominious characters of the
nether region has foregathered to celebrate
the Musician’s burial. The melody of the
Beloved returns, no longer gentle and noble
now, but shrieking and grotesque. The
theme of the Dies Irae (part of the old
Gregorian mass for the dead) is heard in
burlesqued form, and the infernal romp
mounts in fury until the witches’ dance joins
with the Dies Irae in a final orgiastic fling.
So much for the plot. There is, of
course, much more that goes into making
the Symphonie Fantastique such a
fantastic Symphony. For one thing it was,
in a way, just as revolutionary a work,
when it was premiered in 1830, as
Beethoven’s “‘Eroica’’ had been a little over
a quarter of a century earlier. Both pieces
broke sharply with established tradition,
infinitely expanding the horizons of
symphonic form, and blazing new trails
that would be followed for generations to
come. In the Symphonie, Berlioz at one
stroke revitalized the romantic concept of
descriptive music, set a precedent for a
century of tone poems (even though the
term hadn’t been invented yet), and
advanced the art of orchestration to
dazzling new heights.
It is this last attribute—Berlioz’
startlingly effective use of instrumental
colors, contrasts and combinations—that
gives the Symphonie Fantastique its unique
sense of drama, and accounts for its
enduring popularity. The score fairly
bristles with imaginative touches that
remain as intriguing today as they were
unheard of when Berlioz conceived them:
the duet between oboe and English horn at
the start of the third movement, for instance,
and the kettledrums playing in chords to
simulate distant thunder at its conclusion;
the crashing brass and percussion effects
of the fourth movement execution scene;
the rapping of bows and the satirically
squealing piccolo clarinet in the finale.
It is also this element of orchestral
tone painting that makes the Symphonie
Fantastique so perfect a subject for a
recording utilizing the sonic clarity and
depth of phase 4 stereo.
We should, incidentally, add a brief
postscript to the love story that prompted
the composition of the Symphonie
Fantastique in the first place. After several
years more of trial and trauma, Berlioz’
persistence finally did succeed in crumbling
the defenses of the elusive Miss Smithson.
He courted her, proposed to her a number
of times and (after taking a cue from his
symphonic hero, and semi-poisoning
himself with opium in her presence!)
convinced her to marry him. Later on they
were separated, but that, of course, is
another story. And, remembering ‘““Romeo
and Juliet’, another symphony too.
... ROBERT SHERMAN
For all that Hector Berlioz was a composer
far ahead of his time, he couldn’t foresee
the advent of microgroove recordings, and
thus was most inconsiderate to 20th
century stereophiles. The five movements
of his Symphonie Fantastique are so timed
that to put any three of them in sequence
on a single side would inevitably result in
overcrowding and, consequently, a loss
of fidelity. This would be bad enough ona
regular recording, but it is unthinkable
for phase 4 stereo—for so many years the
standard of immaculate reproduction.
Accordingly, the middle movement has
been split over the two sides, giving the
shepherds a chance to catch their breaths,
and the listener an opportunity to hear
the Symphonie in its full sonic glory.
PRINTED IN U.S.A.
AADE IN ENGLAND THE DECCA RECORD CO.LTD.
SPEED 33-4 Side e $098 TVZ
1 SPC 21031
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (H. Berlioz)
1. REVERIES. PASSIONS (14.01)
2. A BALL (6.16)
3. SCENES IN THE COUNTRY (Beginning) (6.27)
LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI
CONDUCTING
THE NEW PHILHARMONIA
ORCHESTRA
: MADE IN ENGLAND THE DECCA RECORD CO.LTD.
SPEED 33-} Side S798 TWZ
2 SPC 21031
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (H. Berlioz)
1. SCENES IN THE COUNTRY (Conclusion) (11.09)
2. MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD (4.25)
3. DREAM OF A WITCHES’ SABBATH (10.21)
LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI
CONDUCTING
THE NEW PHILHARMONIA
ORCHESTRA

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