Berlioz: Harold en Italie
Symphony in four movements with a solo viola, Op.16 (1834)

“Harold in the Mountains. Scenes of melancholy, happiness, and joy (Adagio – Allegro)
“Procession of pilgrims singing their evening prayer” (Allegretto)
“Serenade of an Abruzzi mountaineer to his mistress” (Allegro assai – Allegretto)
“Orgy of Brigands. Memories of past scenes” (Allegro frenetico)

Berlioz must have been one of the most impressionable of men, acutely sensitive to so much he came into contact with, whether it be poetry, nature, women, or other composers’ music. So many of his works were conceived out of a creative response to such experiences, and none more so than Harold in Italy, the second of his four symphonies. In fact, it was a combination of a number of different – even unrelated – happenings which eventually gave rise to this work, and although such a genesis might suggest something of a hotch-potch – particularly when some of the themes (as so often with Berlioz) were lifted from previously discarded or failed material – the end result is in fact a tightly unified musical voyage through wildly contrasting scenery, such as is already implied in the title. This title in itself recalls two things very dear to Berlioz’ heart; but the original idea for the music goes back beyond these to a meeting with Paganini. Berlioz tells us in his Mémoires (compulsory reading for everyone!) that the legendary violinist wanted something new to play on his Stradivari viola, but was too unwell to compose himself; perhaps he also suspected that it was not in his own nature to write the type of music required for this instrument – as was demonstrated when he saw the projected first movement and rejected it: “That is not at all what I want. I am silent a great deal too long. I must be playing the whole time.”       

Berlioz had begun a work for chorus and orchestra, featuring a solo viola, entitled Les derniers instans de Marie Stuart; but now other ideas came to him:

I conceived the idea of writing a series of scenes for the orchestra, in which the viola should find itself mixed up, like a person more or less in action, always preserving his own individuality. The background I formed from my recollections of my wanderings in the Abruzzi [during an obligatory period of residence in Italy, Berlioz – at the fourth attempt – having won the Prix de Rome] in the manner of Byron’s Childe Harold. Hence the title of the symphony…

Byron was in fact one of the four poets by whom Berlioz was most constantly affected (the others being Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virgil), but it can clearly be seen from the composer’s account that the idea of this symphony being a detailed programmatic recollection of Byron’s poem is a considerable (and much promoted) misconception – as is the notion that it is a kind of substitute viola concerto: “more or less in action”. The viola’s principal rôle is in the exposition of the symphony’s idée fixe – representing the hero Harold himself – and in a highly Romantic type of expressive comment on his surroundings (that melody, surely the most perfect ever written for the viola, enshrining the heart of the instrument as well as the character it portrays…yet it originally appeared on the cor anglais in the earlier Rob Roy overture, as did the second subject of the Allegro).

The proportions of the first movement suggest that it would more accurately be described as being in two parts, rather than as the more conventional sonata Allegro with a slow introduction; eventually, after over half the movement’s duration, there is indeed the expected sonata Allegro (complete with exposition repeat – often wilfully ignored) which in itself is extremely concise, although rounded off by a lengthy coda of ever increasing tempo and excitement which goes some way towards balancing the extended opening section. The contrasting elements of the movement’s sub-title are thus very clearly defined, from the magnificently brooding fugato with which the symphony begins, to a tremendously virile and joyful C major tutti in the central part of the Allegro.

The two middle movements are such exquisite masterstrokes of tone-painting, not the least inspired passage being the Canto Religioso at the heart of the Pilgrim’s March, with its delicate viola arpeggios, instructed to be played sul ponticello (on the bridge). The next movement starts with the type of open-air tune which Berlioz must have heard played on a piffero – a kind of rustic Italian oboe. There follows the Serenade itself, which Harold soon ardently joins; eventually he takes up the serenade melody himself in what is perhaps the most intimate part of the whole work, here joined by the orchestral violas playing their original pifferari drone-rhythm, with his own theme in dreamy attendance.

The musical idea for recalling previous scenes at the start of the finale might well have come from Beethoven’s Ninth (as surely did the corresponding moments in Bruckner’s Symphony No.5 and Franck’s string quartet); but to accuse Berlioz of “naïvely copying Beethoven” (J H Elliot) is to misunderstand the poetic, Romantic, programmatic – as opposed to philosophical – purpose behind his use of the device. Berlioz was certainly much excited by the brigands:

…that furious orgy where wine, blood, joy, all combined, parade their intoxication – where the rhythm seems to stumble along, sometimes to rush on in fury, and the brass seems to vomit forth curses and to answer prayer with blasphemies; where they laugh, drink, fight, destroy, violate, and utterly run riot.

But how superbly constructed is this movement, and how achingly beautiful the heart which created that final, broken, love-sick appearance of the wanderer.

© Alan George
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Another hurdle in my path is that the feeling to be evoked moves me too much…This is bad. One must try to do coolly the things that are most fiery.
                                                                                                                                 Hector Berlioz

With Berlioz all impressions, all sensations – whether joyful or sad –are expressed in extremes, at the point of delirium.
                                                                                                                                 Charles Gounod

…only Berlioz…comes near to Shakespeare in his ability to suspend the apparent forward motion of time by the creation of a poetry of unbelievable, and scarcely bearable, beauty.
                                                                                                                                   Colin Davis