ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Good afternoon and thanks for tuning in to Little Rock Public Radio and KLRE-FM, 90.5. I'm Eric Harrison, I write about arts and culture at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and I’ll be your host for the next two hours.
You're listening to our new show, ‘Major and Minor Masterpieces,’ where we will focus each week on a broad range of classical music, from chamber music to choral works to full symphonies and maybe even an occasional touch or two of opera.
This week we’ll look at a couple of major works by French composer Hector Berlioz, including the Symphonie Fantastique (subtitled “An Episode in the Life of an Artist)” and his work for viola and orchestra, “Harold in Italy.”
Hector Berlioz was a musical rebel, determined to break barriers. With Ludwig van Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber as his role models, he was interested in creating music that was dramatically expressive.
In 1830, Berlioz, after several attempts, finally won the Prix de Rome, a scholarship from the French government enabling young French artists to study in Rome. And he completed and saw the premiere of his "Symphonie fantastique,” subtitled "Episodes from the Life of an Artist.”
Berlioz’s obsession with Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he saw play Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet in Paris in 1827, resulted in the composition of this piece, which he designed to attract her attention. (Smithson, however, was not at the 1830 premiere; she did attend a second performance in 1832 and she and Berlioz subsequently married, though unhappily; they eventually separated.)
Berlioz’ autobiographical hero is an artist with a self-destructive passion for a beautiful woman, represented through a leitmotif or "idée fixe.” Berlioz, in his own program notes from 1845 for the first movement, titled “Dreams and Passions,” describes the artist’s encounter with a woman “who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her.” He experiences “a state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.”
In the second movement, “A Ball,” the “idee fixe” theme weaves in and out of a waltz (introduced by a pair of harps). The third movement, “Scenes in the Fields,” opens (and closes) with a dialogue between English horn and offstage oboe, representing shepherds piping to one another across a pasture.
Here’s Berlioz again, on the final two movements, “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witches' Sabbath”:
“Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep …. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. … At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love, interrupted by the fatal blow.
“[Now] he sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral..… The ‘beloved’ melody appears once more, … now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque. … The funeral knell tolls, [with a] burlesque parody of the Dies irae” that eventually combines with the witches’ dance, leading headlong into a climactic finale.
Berlioz originally scored the “Dies irae” for brass and low winds, including two even-then obsolete instruments — the serpent, a coiled instrument resembling its name, and the opheicleide, a sort of precursor to the tuba. He subsequently rescored it for four bassoons and two tubas, but in too many performances, modern orchestras “pretty up” the “Dies irate” theme and thereby fail to capture its inherent mockery. (Incorporating an opheicleide and a serpent for a 2001 performance at the Hot Springs Music Festival created a particularly nasty sound that convinced me this is what Berlioz must have had in mind.)
And that’s the reason I chose this particular recording: John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra in the original 1830 instrumentation and on period instruments, including serpent and opheicleide. Enjoy.
(HECTOR BERLIOZ’S “SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE”)
You’ve heard John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra performing Hector Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” in the original 1830 instrumentation and on period instruments. You’re listening to “Major and Minor Masterpieces” on Little Rock Public Radio and KLRE-FM, 90.5.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
—PROGRAM BREAK—
[EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
SARAH BUFORD, PRODUCER:
Hey guys, welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces. I’m your producer, Sarah Buford and it’s time for our show’s little educational session in which we break down some of the terminology we use when describing classical music and its history.
And today, I’ve got a special word for us that we’ve used a couple of times in the show so far called a “tone poem.” Alright Eric, what exactly is a tone poem?
ERIC HARRISON, HOST:
Well, one dictionary I consulted describes a tone poem, sometimes also called a “symphonic poem,” as “a piece of orchestral music, typically in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme.” Another broader definition: “a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evolves the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape or other source.
A German composer Carl Loewe appears to have first used the term in 1828 with credit for creating the musical form is generally given to Franz Liszt, who wrote at least a dozen pieces to which he gave that title, the best known being “Les Preludes,” “Mazeppa” and “The Battle of the Huns.”
The tone poem, however, reached its apotheosis in the hands of Richard Strauss, shorter such works include “Don Juan,” “Till Eulenspiegel’s Many Pranks” and “Death and Transfiguration.”
SARAH: So, if I could describe tone poem in one word, it would be “description”?
ERIC: That would be right. It would be a descriptive piece of music. Sometimes, it describes a pre-existing story like Strauss’ “The Don Quixote” is based on Cervantes’ novel and consists of a series of episodes. So that you hear, ya know, the battle of the windmills and he encounters a group of pilgrims whom he scares because he believes they’re evil. Or sometimes, it is a piece of the composer’s own composition- “Lis Les Preludes,” for example, was based on his own concepts. It’s not based on something pre-existing. But “The Battle of The Huns” represents a portrait or a painting that he saw. He’s describing it in music.
SARAH: Thank you so much, Eric. Let's get back to the show.
[END OF EDUCATIONAL SEGMENT]
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
ERIC: Welcome back to Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio, KLRE-FM, 90.5. I’m your host, Eric Harrison of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The success of “Symphonie Fantastique” and winning the prestigious Prix de Rome propelled Berlioz into the European musical spotlight, and attracted the notice of renowned violinist Niccolo Paganini, who had recently acquired a Stradivarius viola and commissioned Berlioz to write a concerto for it. But he rejected “Harold in Italy” because the viola part wasn’t big enough: “I must be playing all the time,” he is reported to have told the composer.
What Berlioz had actually created was part symphony, part tone poem, with viola obbligato, representing the title character of Lord Byron’s romantic poem "Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage," also reflecting Berlioz’ recent sojourn in Italy. The four movements depict Harold’s wanderings across the Italian landscape in search of the meaning of life. The first shows the hero climbing in the Abruzzi mountains; in the second, he joins a procession of pilgrims; the third is a serenade to a beloved; and the in the fourth, aptly titled “Orgy of the Brigands,” he finds himself in the midst of riotous revelry from which he flees in terror.
Oh, and Paganini, though he never played the piece, eventually came around: After hearing it performed some years later, he was sufficiently impressed to send Berlioz 20,000 francs and a note: “Beethoven being dead, only a Berlioz could reincarnate him.”
I chose this classic 1965 Philadelphia Orchestra recording, not only because it’s one of the best performances of this work on disc, but for personal reasons: the soloist is the late Joseph dePasquale, who for many years was the Philadelphia Orchestra’s principal violist. And, as a member of the DePasquale String Quartet (which originally consisted of four brothers and after the death of Charles, the cellist, the orchestra’s principal cellist), he was one of my chamber music coaches at Haverford College in the mid-‘70s. One of his sons, Joe Jr., was my stand partner in the viola section of my high school orchestra; another son, Charlie, was part of that orchestra’s cello section.
This is violist Joseph dePasquale with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Eugene Ormandy performing Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” in a Sony Classics recording, made at Philadelphia’s Town Hall in 1965.
(HECTOR BERLIOZ’S “HAROLD IN ITALY”)
You’ve been listening to “Harold in Italy” by Hector Berlioz with violist Joseph dePasquale and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting, on “Major and Minor Masterpieces” on Little Rock Public Radio and KLRE-FM, 90.5.
Hector Berlioz wrote several operas, including a couple that reflected his love of Shakespeare — “Romeo et Juliette” and “Beatrice et Benedict,” the latter based on “Much Ado About Nothing”; the one that has most prominently remained in the repertoire, despite its length (it’s in five acts): “Les Troyens” (“The Trojans”), with a libretto by Berlioz himself based on Virgil's epic poem “The Aeneid." “Royal Hunt and Storm,” is probably the most familiar orchestral excerpt. Daniel Barenboim leads the Orchestre de Paris.
(HECTOR BERLIOZ’S “ROYAL HUNT AND STORM”)
You’ve been listening to Daniel Barenboim conducting the Orchestre de Paris in “Royal Hunt and Storm,” from Hector Berlioz’ opera “The Trojans” on Major and Minor Masterpieces.
(SOUNDBITE OF WOJCIECH “BOITEG” CIESLINKSKI’S “FIRST VIOLIN”)
Thanks for listening this week! I’ve been your host, Eric Harrison of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. You’ve been listening to Major and Minor Masterpieces on Little Rock Public Radio and classical station KLRE FM 90.5. Many thanks to Operations Coordinator and Producer Sarah Buford for all her hard work making all this sound good as well as a big thank you to Wojciech Cieslinski for our transition and credit music. Tune in next week for more Major and Minor Masterpieces.