When streaming costs you music’s fantasia,
there are ways to get it back.
Alexa has no knack for pianissimo. Here’s how to tell. Set her
to living-room volume and ask her to play Berlioz’s rapturous
epic of sex and opioids: Symphonie Fantastique. The opening
passages should be erotic and feather-light, but on the Echo
the massive orchestra comes through as smothered whooshes,
the exhalations of a pint-sized table fan caked in dust. Q Is this
thing on? The first movement is meant to conjure the fantasies
of an artist in thrall to a woman of infinite allure; in the sway
of the opening strings, she grazes his mind in her gentle, pre-
coital theme, which becomes insistent, demanding, and then
maddening. (“So many musical ideas are seething within me,”
Berlioz wrote at the time. “Must my destiny be engulfed by
this overwhelming passion?”) This is how Berlioz introduced
the piece in Paris in 1830: “A young artist of morbidly sensi-
tive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with
opium in a fit of lovesick despair.” Q That’s amore. But by the
time the fantasia is performed, recorded, engineered, and mas-
tered, and then internetted via Amazon’s all-knowing cloud
through the Echo’s admittedly paltry tweeter-woofer combo,
the piece has lost the volatility that makes it a masterpiece of
sexual obsession. Forget about pianissimo’s complexity;
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
SYMPHONIE
DIGITIQUE
0 1 3
MIND GRENADES
ILLUSTRATION / ALVARO DOMINGUEZ
