Throughout its five movements, Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) tells the story of a love-struck artist who overdoses on opium and descends into psychedelic madness. While the first three movements relay his inner turmoil—taking him from a ball to a pastoral landscape—the fourth movement, a procession, sees the protagonist dreaming that he has killed his beloved and is led to the scaffold. The fifth movement is his funeral: a witches’ sabbath replete with monsters and creatures, with an undead version of his beloved as their ringleader. In his Young People’s Concerts, Leonard Bernstein famously titled his lecture on Symphonie Fantastique “Berlioz Takes a Trip,” referring to the psychedelic nature of its reveries.
The trials and tribulations of the fictitious protagonist, however, have precedents. In fact, there’s evidence of a strong connection between Berlioz’s music and nineteenth-century fantastic literature.
“Despite the ‘fantastique’ in the symphony’s title, few scholars have explicitly connected Berlioz to the fantastic genre,” argues Marianna Ritchey in the journal 19th-Century Music.
Halfway between the Marvelous and the Uncanny, the French Fantastic is “an artistic genre that came to prominence after the French Revolution and that engaged with subsequent cultural anxieties about secularism, violence, and death,” Ritchey writes. It’s symptomatic of the abrupt end of the Enlightenment—marked by violence, social upheaval, and horror—as it stands in contrast with eighteenth-century doctrines of rationality and reason.
“Studies of the fantastic, for example, point to this moment of historical rupture as the defining foundation for the ghosts and dreamscapes that haunt so much early-nineteenth-century European literature,” says Ritchey. It’s characterized by “unresolved ambiguity that manifests itself in nonlinear plots and the intentional muddying of boundaries between dream and reality.”
Ritchey sees the fantastic as the foil to the Germanic Bildungsroman, which influenced continental Romantic arts across disciplines. While the French translation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales in 1829 contributed to the popularity of fantastic literature in France, earlier examples include Charles Nodier’s short story “Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit“ (“Smarra, or the Demons of the Night,” 1821) and Jacques Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772).
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On that note, Berlioz’s most illustrious fantastic-literature precedent is Nodier’s “Smarra,” which features a young protagonist who, while intoxicated, slips into a feverish dream in which he murders his beloved, the enslaved Myrthé, and is then marched to the scaffold. Nodier’s words resemble an extended program for Berlioz’s Marche au supplice, the fourth movement of Symphonie Fantastique.
“Nodier’s dark, protofantastic tale [serves as] a primary inspiration for not only the symphony’s aesthetic but also its formal structures,” writes Ritchey.
The tie to “Smarra” is further reinforced in the fifth movement, where the melodic representation of the beloved—known as the idée fixe throughout the symphony—becomes a mocking caricature, portraying her as a demonic or otherworldly creature similar to those the protagonist of “Smarra“ encounters.
“In keeping with Symphonie Fantastique’s relationship with the fantastic and Smarra, the beloved is at some points refined and beautiful, at other points ethereal and ungraspable, but in the fifth movement, she becomes a demonic witch,” says Ritchey. “As in Smarra, however, events are depicted with the surreal detachment of the observing dreamer, who may or may not be present in ‘reality’—the hellish fifth movement is often more hilarious than horrible.”
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There are, of course, musical citations within the symphony that demonstrate Berlioz was not the “incompetent” genius he was sometimes perceived to be by his critics. For instance, the second movement, the ball, is set to a waltz rhythm, whereas the third echoes Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (Pastoral). The fifth movement incorporates the Dies irae, “which instigated a veritable fad for the tune that spanned the rest of the nineteenth century, appearing in compositions by Liszt, Wagner, Rachmaninoff, and many others—even making the jump to the twentieth century and beyond via many terrifying film soundtracks,” writes Ritchey.
Overall, focusing on how Symphonie Fantastique borrows from fantastic literature allows us to broaden our understanding of Romantic art and culture.
“We can appreciate the subtle transactions, inspirations, and communications that happened (and continue to happen) between artists,” Ritchey concludes.
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