What about the music?
An inside look with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra
COFFEE CONCERT: Symphonie Fantastique
Friday, April 11, 2025 | 11AM | Ferguson Center
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique
By Stella Feliberti
The Performers
Conductor
Eric Jacobsen
Hailed by the New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” conductor and cellist Eric Jacobsen has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming. He is the newly-named Music Director of the Virginia Symphony, becoming the 12th music director in the orchestra’s 100-year history.
Jacobsen is Artistic Director and conductor of The Knights, and serves as the Music Director for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. Jacobsen founded the adventurous orchestra The Knights with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, to foster the intimacy and camaraderie of chamber music on the orchestral stage. Eric splits his time between New York and Orlando with his wife, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, and their daughter.
The Creators
Hector Berlioz
Pronounced EHK-tor BEHR-lee-ohz
Fast Facts:
- Hector Berlioz was born in 1860 in France. His father was a well-respected doctor, and his mother was strict Roman Catholic, leading to Berlioz growing up in a restrictive household and little opportunity to express him musical interests.
- In 1821, Berlioz moved to Paris to study medicine. However, he used his time in Paris to dive into the musical scene, discovering his true passion for music. He then defied his parents’ expectations of him and decided to pursue composing full time after graduating from medical school.
- Berlioz was a book worm. He grew up reading classics by Virgil and Shakespeare, which later inspired some of his compositions including his symphony Roméo et Juliette.
- He was also a music journalist throughout his composing career. His most famous writing is his Treatise on Instrumentation, which influenced many compositional styles of the 19th and 20th century.
Definitions
idée fixe:
an idea that dominates the mind:
an obsession.
Musical reference:
a recurring theme that serves
as a structural foundation of a work.
Berlioz
Symphonie Fantastique
Listen to Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France:
- Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique was written in 1830. He was inspired to write it after he fell in love with Harriet Smithson years before the premiere. During a concert of the piece, Smithson finally met Berlioz and the two married the following year.
- Berlioz wrote his own detailed account of the symphony’s vivid storyline: “A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair. The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a deep slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.”
- Throughout the entire symphony, Berlioz includes a singular melody that represents this idée fixe (psychological fixation). It is first introduced in the first movement but woven into all the textures of the other movements following. At one point, Berlioz blends the idée fixe with the Dies Irae from the Mass of the Dead.
- Each movement depicts a specific scene, notated in the score. The first movement is labeled Daydreams, passions. The second, a ball; the third, scene in the countryside; the fourth, march to the scaffold; and the final movement, dream of a witches’ sabbath.
Discussion Questions
- What is the effect of Berlioz’ use of the same “idée fixe” throughout the full work?
- This piece is called the “Fantastical Symphony;” why do you think Berlioz called it this?
