Fantastic Finale Program Notes

Girl Crazy, music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, first appeared on Broadway in 1930.  The show made stars of Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman.  This musical contains some of the best loved songs from the Gershwin brothers including “I Got Rhythm,” and “Embraceable You.”

Elmer Bernstein is best known as a film composer – The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc.  However, between his busy schedules with the movie studios he found time to compose many concert works, including the Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra. 

Bernstein wrote this concerto in 1999 at the request of musician and orchestrator (also Bernstein’s closest colleague and friend) Christopher Palmer and guitar virtuoso Christopher Parkening.  When Parkening was a young and aspiring musician, Bernstein was president of the Young Musicians Foundation.  The Foundation encouraged the guitarist to pursue a professional career.  Bernstein later remarked that he “watched him from afar, pleased with the knowledge that I was able to have been of some small help at the beginning.”

Written when the composer was a 26 year old student at the Paris Conservatory, the Symphonie Fantastique was inspired by his ill-fated love for an English Shakespearean actress named Harriet Smithson.  Berlioz had seen the actress perform three years earlier and was instantly smitten.  After seeing a second performance by Miss Smithson, Berlioz declared, “I shall marry that woman and on that drama I will write my greatest Symphony.”  Berlioz sent her letter to which she did not reply.  He took her silence as a test of his love and faithfulness.  He wrote to his sister in 1830 that he had ideas for a grand symphonic work that would surely make Harriet notice him.  As he was writing his grand work, the Symphonie Fantastique, thoughts of Harriet kept coming to him accompanied by a particular melody.  He called this melody an idée fixe, which was a relatively new medical term used in the fledgling science of psychology.  (As a side note – Berlioz did finally marry Harriet in 1833, though he did not speak English and she did not understand French.  The marriage was a very unhappy one and they separated less than 10 years later.)

The Symphony premiered in December of that year, initiating an on-going and heated battle over the ability of music to portray anything other than sound.  Before the work was even heard in public, the reviewer remarked that Berlioz was attempting the impossible by trying to describe in music both physical objects and moral quality.  This so enraged Berlioz that he had special leaflets printed to hand out at the concert to refute the reviewer’s attack on his new work.  It read, “The composer’s intention has been to develop, insofar as they contain musical possibilities, various situations in the life of an artist.  The outline of the instrumental drama, which lacks the help of words, needs to be explained in advance.  The following program would thus be considered as the spoken text of an opera, serving to introduce the musical movements, whose character and expression it motivates.” 

The symphony contains five movements for which Berlioz published a program describing the scene and the action.

A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair.  The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments, and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images.  The beloved woman has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea which he finds and hears everywhere.

Part I.  Dreams, Passions
He first recalls that uneasiness of soul, that vague des passions, those moments of causeless melancholy and joy, which he experienced before seeing her whom he loves; then the volcanic passion with which she suddenly inspired him, his moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, his returns to loving tenderness, and his religious consolations.

Part II.  A Ball
He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant fete.

Part III.  Scene in the Fields
One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a Ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scene around him, the light rustling of the trees swayed by the breeze, some hope he has recently conceived, all combine to restore an unwonted calm to his heart and to impart a more cheerful coloring to his thoughts; but she appears once more, his heart stops beating, he is agitated with painful presentiments: if she were to betray him! … One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him.  The sun sets … the sound of distant thunder … solitude…silence.

Part IV.  March to the Scaffold
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death, and led to execution.  The procession advances to the tones of a march which is now somber and wild, now brilliant and solemn, in which the most resounding of outbursts.  At the end the idée fixe reappears for an instant, like a last love-thought, interrupted by the fatal stroke.

Part V.  Walpurgis Night’s Dream

He sees himself at the witches’ Sabbath, in the midst of a frightful group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together for his obsequies.  He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, shrieks to which other shrieks seem to reply.  The beloved melody again reappears, but it has lost its noble and timid character; it has become an ignoble, trivial and grotesque dance-tune; it is she who comes to the witches’ Sabbath … Howlings of joy at her arrival … she takes part in the diabolic orgy …. Funeral knells, burlesque parody on the Dies irae [Gregorian chant for the dead].  Witches’ dance.  The witches’ dance and the Dies irae together.