SYMPHONY IN FOUR MOVEMENTS, WITH VIOLA SOLO: Op. 16
1. HAROLD IN THE MOUNTAINS; SCENES OF MELANCHOLY, HAPPINESS, AND JOY
(Adagio)(Allegro)
2. MARCH OF PILGRIMS SINGING THEIR EVENING HYMN
(Allegretto)
3. SERENADE OF A MOUNTAINEER OF THE ABRUZZI TO HIS MISTRESS
(Allegro assai)(Allegretto)
4. ORGY OF BRIGANDS; RECOLLECTIONS OF THE PRECEDING SCENES
(Allegro frenetico)
Upon the romanticists in France—"the heroic boys of 1830," as William Ernest Henley called them—the influence of Byron was gripping and profound. To Berlioz, in particular, "greedy of emotion, intolerant of restraint, contemptuous of reticence and sobriety, ... and prepared to welcome, as a return to truth and nature, inventions the most extravagant and imaginings the most fantastic and far-fetched," this prince of romanticists must have seemed a poet after his own heart. Yet, singularly enough, there are in his writings comparatively few references to the author of "Manfred" and "Don Juan."
The manner in which the "Harold" symphony came to be written is related by Berlioz in his Memoirs. HisSymphonie fantastiquehad been played at a concert at the Paris Conservatory (December 22, 1833), with conspicuous success. "And then," says Berlioz, "to crown my happiness, after the audience had gone out, a man with a long mane of hair, with piercing eyes, with a strange and haggard face, one possessed by genius, a colossus among giants, whom I had never seen and whose appearancemoved me profoundly, was alone and waiting for me in the hall, stopped me to press my hand, overwhelmed me with burning praise, which set fire to my heart and head:it was Paganini!... Some weeks after this vindicatory concert of which I have spoken, Paganini came to see me. 'I have a marvellous viola,' he said, 'an admirable Stradivarius, and I wish to play it in public. But I have no musicad hoc. Will you write a solo piece for the viola? You are the only one I can trust for such a work.' 'Yes, indeed,' I answered, 'your proposition flatters me more than I can tell, but, to make such a virtuoso as you shine in a piece of this nature, it is necessary to play the viola, and I do not play it. You are the only one, it seems to me, who can solve the problem.' 'No, no; I insist,' said Paganini; 'you will succeed; as for me, I am too sick at present to compose; I cannot think of it.'
"I tried then to please the illustrious virtuoso by writing a solo piece for the viola, but a solo combined with the orchestra in such a manner that it would not injure the expression of the orchestral mass, for I was sure that Paganini, by his incomparable artistry, would know how to make the viola always the dominating instrument....
"His proposal seemed new to me, and I soon had developed in my head a very happy idea, and I was eager for the realization. The first movement was hardly completed, when Paganini wished to see it. He looked at the rests for the viola in the allegro and exclaimed: 'No, it is not that: there are toomany rests for me; I must be playing all the time.' 'I told you so,' I answered; 'you want a viola concerto, and you are the only one who can write such a concerto for yourself.' Paganini did not answer; he seemed disappointed, and left me without speaking further about my orchestral sketch. Some days afterwards, suffering already from the affection of the larynx which ultimately killed him,[17]he went to Nice, and returned to Paris only at the end of three years.
"Since I then saw that my plan of composition would not suit him, I set myself to work in another way, and without any anxiety concerning the means to make the solo viola conspicuous. My idea was to write for the orchestra a series of scenes in which the solo viola should figure as a more or less active personage of constantly preserved individuality; I wished to put the viola in the midst of poetic recollections left me by my wanderings in the Abruzzi, and make it a sort of melancholy dreamer, after the manner of Byron's 'Childe Harold.' Hence the title,Harold en Italie. As in theSymphonie fantastique, a chief theme (the first song of the viola) reappears throughout the work; but there is this difference: the theme of theSymphonie fantastique, the 'fixed idea,' interposes itself persistently as an episodic and passionatethought in the midst of scenes which are foreign to it and modifies them; while the song of Harold is added to other songs of the orchestra with which it is contrasted both in movement and character and without any interruption of the development."
The relationship between Berlioz's symphony and Byron's poetic account of the Italian wanderings of his Harold is of the slightest, and any attempt to discover, in Berlioz's programme of the moods and incidents of his symphonic hero, definite correspondences with Byron's poem, would be more than futile. One who seeks enlightenment concerning the intentions of Berlioz in this symphony must fall back upon the composer's own brief hints as contained in the inscriptions appended to the several movements. The voice of the solo viola, as we know, typifies throughout the "melancholy dreamer" as conceived by Berlioz—it is Harold undergoing his adventures: in the mountains; encountering a band of devout and simple pilgrims; observing an enamoured mountaineer in the act of serenading his mistress; and, finally, involved in a tumultuous orgy of drunken bandits. Concerning this last movement, Berlioz has left us some additional information. Included in his Memoirs is a letter addressed to Heine, in which Berlioz gives an account of a performance of the symphony at Brunswick in March, 1843. "In the finale of 'Harold,'" he writes, "in this furious orgy in which the drunkenness of wine, blood, joyand rage all shout together; where the rhythm now seems to stumble, and now to run madly; where the mouths of brass seem to vomit forth curses and reply with blasphemies to entreating voices; where they laugh, drink, strike, bruise, kill, and ravish; where, in a word, they amuse themselves; in this scene of brigands the orchestra became a veritable pandemonium; there was something supernatural and frightful in the frenzy of its dash; everything sang, leaped, roared with diabolical order and unanimity—violins, basses, trombones, drums, and cymbals; while the solo alto, Harold, the dreamer, fleeing in fright, still sounded from afar some trembling notes of his evening hymn. Ah! what a feeling at the heart! What savage tremors in conducting this astonishing orchestra! You know nothing like it, the rest of you, poets; you have never been swept away by such hurricanes of life. I could have embraced the whole orchestra, but I could only cry out, in French it is true, but my accents surely made me understood: 'Sublime! I thank you, gentlemen, and I wonder at you: you are perfect brigands!'"