Love’s labour lost

If you are madly, headily in love, try Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique on your beloved

June 10, 2017 04:24 pm | Updated 06:59 pm IST

Harriet Smithson playing Ophelia in Hamlet.

Harriet Smithson playing Ophelia in Hamlet.

If you are a Bengali, you don’t have to worry about trying to express deep, wonderful complex emotions in words. Rabindranath Tagore has already done it for us. We just shamelessly sing his songs and recite his poems in our attempts to convince our beloved about the depth of our feelings. But, for a change, if I were to shake off Tagore’s looming presence over my thought process (a blasphemous idea, right?) and try to express that heady rush of love in those early days without resorting to a Tagore song, I would probably play the love theme from Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869), one of the most original and innovative French romantic composers, fell in love with Harriet Smithson within the span of an evening in 1827, while watching her play the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Berlioz tried to communicate with Harriet — he sent her letters and handwritten messages — but she did not give him the time of day. Berlioz directed his obsession for Harriet into Symphonie Fantastique — ‘the most remarkable first symphony ever written’ — which narrates the story of a young artist and his journey from unrequited love to obsession, murder, execution, and finally, the torments of hell. The symphony features a love theme, which is present in all five movements, and which symbolises the beloved and ties the harrowing story together.

In the first movement, the love theme is a melancholic tune that surges into aimless joy, takes flight into intense passion, but falls back to a shy tenderness reminiscent of first love — beautiful but tentative, pulsating but not quite reaching a climax.

 

Love, obsession, despair

If you have ever suffered through the wonderful phenomenon of falling in love, then you must know how all-pervading the obsession becomes. Thoughts of the beloved fill every waking moment and every corner of the heart.

In the second movement, called ‘The Ball’, the love theme is superimposed over a gorgeous waltz as the young artist cannot take his mind off ‘her’ even while dancing the waltz.

 

In the third movement named ‘Scenes in the Country’, the young man turns to Mother Nature for solace. One summer evening in the countryside, he hears two shepherds singing. The pastoral duet, the setting, and the gentle rustling of leave in the breeze, give him hope that he will be soon be one with his beloved and his loneliness will end. But she reappears—we hear the love theme again in the background—and pangs of doubt cloud his mind.

Back and forth

The music alternates between hopeful, symbolised by snatches of the love theme, and darkness, the presentiments of rejection and betrayal, represented in music as a storm complete with the rumble of dark clouds, rain, and thunder. In the end, one of the shepherds resumes his melody, but the other no longer answers. The journey into the darkness of despair begins.

Attempted Suicide, Hallucination, Murder and the Guillotine

There is something to be said about being ordinary. We don’t start writing symphonies to deal with our ‘love’ issues; instead, we move on, fall in love again, get married, make babies… you get the drift. But not so Berlioz’s artist. Convinced that he is never going to be with his beloved, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dosage is too weak to kill him, but plunges him instead into a drug-induced hallucinatory trip. The artist dreams that he has murdered his beloved, has been condemned, and is being led to the scaffold to witness his own execution. Hence, the name of the fourth movement of Symphonie Fantastique: ‘March to the Scaffold’. The movement ends with a flourish when the guillotine blade crashes down and chops his head off. But the most delicate moment in this movement comes when the march ends—just when the blade is about to be released we hear the first four bars of the love theme reappear on a solo clarinet, signifying the last embrace of the beloved interrupted by the fatal blow.

Dreams of Witches’ Sabbath

In the fifth and final movement, ‘Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath’, our headless artist attends his own funeral. He finds himself in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers, and monsters who have come together for his funeral. We hear strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter, and distant shouts that seem to be answered by more shouts. The vividly visual music reminds me of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, in that it is full of eerie sound effects like creaking doors, thunder, feet walking on wooden planks, the screeching wind, and howling dogs. The movement has many extraordinary sections, including a burlesque parody of ‘Dies Irae’, one of the most important Catholic plainchants. The part that never fails to move me is the reappearance of the love theme in a barely recognisable form. It comes back without its tenderness and shyness, transformed into a vulgar dance-tune, choppy, shrill, and grotesque: it is she, the beloved, coming to the sabbath to join the orgy.

 

The finale

As the symphony closes with a brilliant juxtaposition of the witches’ dance and ‘Dies Irae’, one cannot but wonder about what eventually happened to Hector and Harriet. Harriet Smithson finally saw Symphonie Fantastique in 1832 and realised that the symphony was about her. A year later, Berlioz and Harriet were married at the British Embassy in Paris on October 3, 1833. But they did not quite live happily ever after.

As Harriet’s acting career dwindled, she grew resentful and jealous of Berlioz’s musical success, and this in turn pushed Berlioz into the arms of other women. She moved out on her own in 1843. Toward the end of her life, she suffered from paralysis and was barely able to move or speak. She died on March 3, 1854, without Berlioz by her side, very ill and alone.

Sudipta Bhattacharya designs big data systems to earn money, writes to make sense, and plays the classical guitar to escape drudgery

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