Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique

Why are we listening to Symphonie Fantastique? I just have the urge to hear it, i'm sure there's some subconscious reason we'll find out at some point.

At first i was trying to work up some joke about some malformed breakfast cereal ( Cheerios my ass, those are Barely-Os), but that's beneath me. So i dug a little deeper and thought "ok, what is it really?"

Well, i'll tell me so you can find out. This is like a large scale autobiography in the making about Berlioz driving himself crazy crushing on a girl, Irish actress Harriet Smithson.

Movement 1 is all about how sensitive an artist he is, filled with passion for Beethoven and Shakespeare and Harriet.

Then he's at a Ball and she's not paying any attention to him. Of course not, Harriet didn't attend the premier (and those who did didn't like it very much). So he learned how to write fugues and won a big fugue writing contest. He won (like i just said) and used the prize money to study in Italy, where he tried to make this symphonic diorama of his tortured artistic soul less crappy.

He's terribly depressed that she doesn't love him, so he takes a bunch of opium and dreams that they send him to the guillotine. Turns out he does not get to keep his head at the end of that adventure.

So all the monsters in Satan's army attend his funeral and it's a fugue, because mastering the Fugue to win a competition was a hellish amount of effort just to get your head chopped off afterward. 

Luckily for Berlioz, nobody much cared for Harriet's acting anymore, so she had plenty of free time to attend a free concert when tickets showed up.

Everybody liked this second premier, even Harriet, so Berlioz got to woo her by apparently actually ingesting a crap ton of opium to guilt trip her into marrying him so he could Indiana Jones the antidote from his pocket. That lasted all the way up to their divorce, but he still financially supported her afterward. 

I suspect permanganate of potassium or possibly atropine were the "antidote," but Berlioz isn't really trying to win my drug specificity award that i know of, and i might be the tiniest bit skeptical about fatal opioid overdoses being a serious player move, even in the roaring mid 19th-century fever dream that is Romanticism. It's a bit fantastic, and not in the "totally awesome" sense that we use that word today.

Drugs and chicks in financial desperation, i guess that is about as rock-star as it gets. It's not a total quack story, he did start out studying to be a doctor like his dad before deciding to disappoint everyone by being a musician. Some people thought he was a genius, some thought he sucked, lawyer/diarist  George Templeton Strong called his music flatulent, rubbish, and the work of a tipsy chimpanzee. I'm not sure GEETS is even worthy of the nickname i just gave him, let alone critical authority. Sounds like music to me, the tubas aren't oom-pah-ing the whole time and he resolves most of his leading tones eventually. Why can't low brass play melodies?

I'll give you the fact that this is more of a concept album than a Symphony per se, but the thing about Beethoven was that he said convention be damned when it fails to express the ideas i have in mind. I have to assume this is what Hector was trying to do, and it's totally lovely. Melodramatic, sure, but also fun. You could learn a lot from a dummy. Buckle your safety belt.