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Program Music

Program music is music that attempts to depict an extra-musical scene or narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience in the form of program notes inviting imaginative correlations with the music such as narratives or scenes etc. A well-known example is Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which relates a series of drug-induced morbid fantasies concerning the unrequited love of a sensitive poet involving murder, execution, and the torments of Hell. This  genre of program music culminates in the symphonic works of Richard Strauss with narrations of the adventures of Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel,   Sinfonia Domestica  (the composer’s domestic life),  and an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman.  Following Strauss, the genre declined and new works  with explicitly narrative content are rare. However the genre continues to exert an influence on film music.

The term – program music is usually reserved for purely instrumental works (pieces without singers and lyrics), and not  for Opera or Lieder.  Programmatic  single movement orchestral works  are often called symphonic poems.

Absolute Music –  In  contrast, absolute music (music without  a program)  is to be appreciated without  reference to anything outside the music itself.

Program Symphony
A program symphony is the result of a composer applying the principle of program music to the genre of the symphony.  A program symphony, like any other work of that genre, would consist of multiple movements, usually four or five, and would likely follow to some extent the standard characteristics of symphonic construction. For example, the second movement would likely be slower than the first, and the third movement would be based on a dance.  The fifth movement would serve as a kind of grand finale. In comparison to the  Classical  Symphony discussed in Module 7, composer of a program symphony would have less concern for traditional forms of the classical symphony (Module 7). The form of a movement would likely be influenced by the subject matter being depicted.  Hector Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique is one of the quintessential examples of the program, symphony.

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An early Romantic innovator, Berloiz was  not always appreciated in his day, though he certainly enjoyed a fair amount of success. Prone to sudden emotional swings, his personality seems to come through the music. He had the  ability to draw unusual imaginative  sounds out of the orchestra. He is still studied today as a master  of orchestration. His instrumental music was often programmatic.

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Following is an overview of one of Berlioz’s best known work, Symphonie Fantastique. Read through the description of each of the movements of the piece. Most important  is the description of the 5th and final movement, as that is the piece on our playlist. Try listening  while you review the outline of the fifth movement and  see if you can hear all the unusual orchestral effects described there.

Introduction

Symphonie fantastique: Épisode de la vie d’un artiste . . . en cinq parties (Fantastical Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts) Op. 14 is an important piece of the early Romantic period, and is popular with concert audiences worldwide. The first performance was at the Paris Conservatoire in December 1830.

Leonard Bernstein described the symphony as the first musical expedition into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature, and because history suggests Berlioz composed at least a portion of it under the influence of opium.

Outline
The symphony is a piece of program music that tells the story of an artist gifted with a lively imagination who has poisoned himself with opium in the depths of despair because of hopeless love. Berlioz provided his own program notes for each movement of the work (see below). He prefaces his notes with the following instructions:

His intention has been to develop various episodes in the life of an artist, in so far as they lend themselves to musical treatment. As the work cannot rely on the assistance of speech, the plan of the instrumental drama needs to be set out in advance. The following programme must therefore be considered as the text  which serves to introduce musical movements and to motivate their character and expression.

There are five movements, instead of the four movements that were conventional for symphonies at the time:

1. Rêveries—Passions (Reveries—Passions)
2. Un bal (A Ball)
3. Scène aux champs (Scene in the Fields)
4. Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold)
5. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat (Dream of the Night of the Sabbath)

First Movement: “Rêveries—Passions” (Reverie—Passions)

In Berlioz’s own program notes from 1845, he writes:

The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions [le vague des passions], sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognizes a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.
Note: You may listen to the first four movements in this file below. Times for the entrance of the separate movements are given below.  Movement  5 is (alone) offered separately later in this  section.
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This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe –  the constant recurrence  of a melody or motive in all the movements in a symphony. The transitions from this 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—all this forms the subject of the first movement.

“The first movement is radical in its harmonic outline, building a vast arch back to the home key; while similar to the sonata form of the classical period, Parisian critics regarded this as unconventional. It is here that the listener is introduced to the theme of the artist’s beloved, or the idée fixe (see above).  Berlioz rejected writing the more symmetrical melodies then in academic fashion, and instead looked for melodies that were ‘so intense in every note as to defy normal harmonization’, as Schumann put it.

Second Movement: “Un bal” (A Ball)
This movement begins at 13:46 in the above video 

Again, quoting from Berlioz’s program notes:

“The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.”

The second movement has a mysterious-sounding introduction that creates an atmosphere of impending excitement, followed by a passage dominated by two harps; then the flowing waltz theme appears, derived from the idée fixe at first, then transforming it. More formal statements of the idée fixe twice interrupt the waltz.

The movement is the only one to feature the two harps, providing the glamour and sensual richness of the ball, and may also symbolize the object of the young man’s affection. Berlioz wrote extensively in his memoirs of his trials and tribulations in having this symphony performed, due to a lack of capable harpists and harps, especially in Germany.

Third Movement: “Scène aux champs” (Scene in the Fields)
This movement begins  at 21:04  on the above video.

From Berlioz’s program notes:

“One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches”; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own . . . But what if she betrayed him! . . . This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his ‘ranz des vaches’; the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder . . . solitude . . . silence.”

The two “shepherds” Berlioz mentions in the notes are depicted with a cor anglais(English horn) and an offstage oboe tossing an evocative melody back and forth. After the cor anglais–oboe conversation, the principal theme of the movement appears on solo flute and violins.  The sound of distant thunder at the end of the movement is a striking passage for four timpani.

Fourth Movement: “Marche au supplice” (March to the Scaffold)
This movement begins at 37:52 in the video above. It is also presented in the video below. 

From Berlioz’s program notes:

Convinced that his love is unappreciated, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. As he cries for forgiveness the effects of the narcotic set in. He wants to hide but he cannot so he watches as an onlooker as he dies. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. 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 when his head bounced down the steps.

Berlioz claimed to have written the fourth movement in a single night. The movement begins with timpani sextuplets in thirds, for which he directs: “The first quaver of each half-bar is to be played with two drumsticks, and the other five with the right hand drumsticks.” The movement proceeds as a march filled with blaring horns and rushing passages, and scurrying figures that later show up in the last movement. Before the musical depiction of his execution, there is a brief, nostalgic recollection of the idée fixe in a solo clarinet, as though representing the last conscious thought of the soon-to-be-executed man. Immediately following this is a single, short fortissimo G minor chord—the fatal blow of the guillotine blade, followed by a series of pizzicato notes representing the rolling of the severed head into the basket. After his death, the final nine bars of the movement contain a victorious series of G major brass chords, along with rolls of the snare drums within the entire orchestra, seemingly intended to convey the cheering of the onlooking throng.

Fifth Movement: “Songe d’une nuit du sabbat” (Dream of the Night of the Sabbath)

From Berlioz’s program notes:

“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. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath. . . . Roar of delight at her arrival. . . . She joins the diabolical orgy . . . The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.”

This movement can be divided into sections according to tempo changes:

• The introduction is Largo, in common time, creating an ominous quality through dynamic variations and instrumental effects, particularly in the strings (tremolos, pizz, sf).
• The tempo changes to Allegro and the metre to 6/8. The return of the idée fixe as a “vulgar dance tune” is depicted by the C clarinet. This is interrupted by an Allegro Assai section.
• The idée fixe then returns as a prominent E-flat clarinet solo , in 6/8 and Allegro. The E-flat clarinet contributes a sharper, more shrill timbre than the C clarinet.
• There is one bar of alla breve, with descending crotchets in unison through the entire orchestra. Again in 6/8, this section sees the introduction of tubular bells and fragments of the “witches’ round dance”.
• The “Dies irae” , the motif derived from the 13th-century Dies Irae. It is initially stated in unison between the unusual combination of four bassoons and two tubas.
• The “witches’ round dance” motif is repeatedly stated in the strings, to be interrupted by three syncopated notes in the brass. This leads into the Ronde du Sabbat (Sabbath Round)  where the motif is finally expressed in full.
• The Dies irae et Ronde du Sabbat Ensemble section.

There are a host of effects, including eerie col legno in the strings—the bubbling of the witches’ cauldron to the blasts of wind. The climactic finale combines the somber Dies Irae melody with the wild fugue of the Ronde du Sabbat.

“The aim of the second kind of imitation, as we have said before, is to reproduce the intonations of the passions and the emotions, and even to trace a musical image, or metaphor, of objects that can only be seen. The continual interruption of the Dies irae motif by the strings symbolizes this continual fight of death until the movement and piece eventually, as we all do given in to the Dies irae theme and our eventual but necessary deaths.”

He later adds:

“Emotional (imitation) is designed to arouse in us by means of sound the notion of the several passions of the heart, and to awaken solely through the sense of hearing the impressions that human beings experience only through the other senses. Such is the goal of expression, depiction or musical metaphors.”

As part of this he uses an example of cyclical structure—an idea drawn from Beethoven’s use of similar rhythmic structures in his Fifth Symphony, and the idea of musical “cycles”, such as a “song cycle.” Berlioz did not know of Mendelssohn’s Octet, which also uses this device.