Classical & Opera: Toning down Berlioz for a Romantic trip

IF THIS had been April 1830, and these the pages of Paris’ iconic newspaper Le Figaro, then the feverish expectation of Hector Berlioz’s forthcoming Symphonie Fantastique, or more precisely the steamy nature of its underlying inspiration, would have dominated the headlines.

Imagine a front page splash along the lines of: “Composer bares all”; or “Symphony of a stalker – composer’s nightmare infatuation for mystery actress exposed in coded notes”.

Just as celebrity PR works today, Berlioz had leaked the piece’s highly personal extramusical storyline to the media in advance of the following week’s intended premiere. He claimed he didn’t want its radical sounds and structure to be misunderstood; but who’s to say he wasn’t pulling a fast one over scandal-hungry Paris by letting slip that his autobiographical depiction of a tormented monde fantastique was all about his unhealthy obsession with a pin-up Anglo-Irish actress?

Berlioz had spotted Harriet Smithson playing Ophelia in an 1828 Paris production of Hamlet. Utterly smitten, he had showered her with love letters that were never answered.

The symphony’s idée fixe – a recognisable musical theme that undergoes fantastical transformations of character, from the languid longing of the opening Reverie to the depiction of the composer’s own death in the opium-fuelled March to the Scaffold, to Smithson’s vicious cackling as a harlot in The Witches’ Sabbath – symbolises that unrequited love.

In an unlikely twist of fate, Smithson heard a performance of the work in 1832, realised it was all about her, and they did eventually marry. But like many such celebrity love stories – Smithson’s career was by then on the wane – it was short-lived.

There’s even been speculation that Berlioz composed the symphony’s wilder hallucinatory moments under the influence of opium, a fact that led the American composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein to describe it as music’s first psychedelic trip: “Berlioz tells it like it is: you take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”

Whatever the truth, whatever the motives, Le Figaro knew instinctively it was on to a story which, as we say today, had legs and would run. “What effect it will produce one can, in advance, only guess: but the programme of the different movements which compose it already constitutes an act of candour and whimsicality that cannot but impress the reader,” ran its initial report in the moderate language of the day. Apparently supplies of the paper ran out in record time as word spread.

In the event, the performance was cancelled, officially because of conflicting concerts on the same day, but more likely due to the trouble Berlioz had in mustering the 100 musicians he wanted for a successful performance, and a lousy rehearsal exacerbated by the inability of the theatre venue to provide sufficient chairs and music stands to accommodate the players.

Paris had to wait till the following December to hear what all the media hype was about. And what a sensation it was. Even today, Berlioz’s unorthodox instrumentation contains a shock factor that must have blown the minds of post-Napoleonic Paris. Heavy metal for revolutionary ears.

No danger this week of such controversial headlines. But there is genuine curiosity and anticipation as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, under chief conductor Robin Ticciati, prepares to open its new subscription seasons in Edinburgh tomorrow and in Glasgow on Friday with a view on this wild and wanton symphony that will challenge traditional expectations.

Firstly, the SCO is, by definition, a chamber orchestra, more attuned to the crystalline sparkle of Mozart and Haydn than the heaving emotional girth of the heavyweight Romantics.

Sure, its repertoire has ventured more and more into Brahmsian territory, as a natural extension of its lithesome coverage of Schubert and Schumann in recent years. Nor is it out of place for the SCO to be offering us fresh perspectives on the folksy swagger of Dvorak or the steely contours of Sibelius. But Berlioz?

“I feel this orchestra can really present Berlioz’s music in a different dramatic light through articulation and colour, exploring it as we did last season with his L’Enfance du Christ and La Mort de Cléopâtre”, says Ticiatti, recalling the delicious sounds he conjured up last year when he launched his ongoing small-scale assault on the mighty Berlioz.

“Of course there will be people who say they prefer to think of the Symphonie Fantastique as the sole property of the big symphony orchestra. It’s a piece that has trombones and other major artillery firing at you from every side.

“But there’s also enormous intimacy in this music: the opening Reverie, for instance, or the countryside vision of the third movement with the buttercups in the field. I’m not setting out to convert people here, but I want to let them feel closer to that side of it.”

That said, Ticciati believes we’ve become more used to hearing Berlioz played with a “21st-Century Fox approach”, reminiscent perhaps of Venezuelan firebrand Gustavo Dudamel’s thuggish assault on the Symphonie Fantastique at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival.

“I want to circumnavigate that notion. The key to this piece is that it was written in 1830,” says Ticciati. He has a point. French concertgoers were then just getting used to the shock of Beethoven who had died three years before. So when Berlioz came along with his own revolutionary brand of orchestral music, superheated by the literary gloss of French Romanticism, the connection would be made.

“On the one hand, you can position Berlioz’s orchestra on a level with Beethoven, whose scoring in the Pastoral Symphony is so clever and colourful, but so clear,” explains the young conductor. “But we are also witnessing the onset of early Romanticism. It’s important to sense the transition.”

This week’s programme also includes Tristia, three short pieces for chorus and orchestra which Berlioz began just after completing the Symphonie Fantastique.

“It’s really exciting to hear the parallels,” says Ticciati, who will stay on with the SCO next week to record the Symphonie Fantastique as part of Linn Records’ commitment to recording all the orchestral works from his Berlioz project.

Ticciati’s ongoing tryst with an old French eccentric might not be the stuff of today’s front page headlines, but don’t expect it to be yesterday’s news.

• Robin Ticciati and the SCO perform Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique tomorrow at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh and on 7 October at the City Halls, Glasgow.