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CHAPTER 29 The Romantic Style in Art and Music 63
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Unified by theidée fixe, the symphony consists of a
sequence of five parts, each distinguished by a particular
mood: the lover’s “reveries and passions”; a ball at which the
hero meets his beloved; a stormy scene in the country; a
“March to the Scaffold” (marking the hero’s dream of mur-
dering his lover and his subsequent execution); and a final
and feverishly orchestrated “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath”
inspired by Goethe’sFaust. (Berlioz’sDamnation of Faust,a
piece for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, likewise drew on
Goethe’s great drama.) The “plot” of theSymphonie fantas-
tique, published along with the musical score, was (and usu-
ally still is) printed in program notes available to listeners.
But the written narrative isnotessential to the enjoyment
of the music, for, as Berlioz himself explained, the music
holds authority as absolute sound, above and beyond its
programmatic associations.
The spiritual heir to Beethoven, Berlioz took liberties
with traditional symphonic form. He composed the
Symphonie fantastiquein five movements instead of the
usual four and combined instruments inventively so as to
create unusual mixes of sound. In the third movement, for
example, a solo English horn and four kettledrums pro-
duce the effect of “distant thunder.” He also expanded
tone color, stretching the register of clarinets to screech-
ing highs, for instance, and playing the strings of the vio-
lin with the wood of the bow instead of with the hair.
Berlioz’s favorite medium was the full symphony orchestra,
which he enlarged to include 150 musicians. Called “the
apostle of bigness,” Berlioz conceived an ideal orchestra
that consisted of over 400 musicians, including 242 string
instruments, 30 pianos, 30 harps, and a chorus of 360 voic-
es. The monumental proportions of Berlioz’s orchestras
and choirs, and the volume of sound they pro-
duced, inspired spoofs in contemporary French
and German journals. Cartoons showed the
maestro, also spoofed for his extravagant hair-
styles, beating time with an electric telegraph
pole, recruiting orchestra members from the
artillery of a garrison, and conducting a sea of
instrumentalists (Figure 29.16). But Berlioz,
who was also a talented writer and a music
critic for Parisian newspapers, thumbed his nose
at the critics in lively essays that defended his
own musical philosophy.
The Piano Music of Chopin
If the nineteenth century was the age of
Romantic individualism, it was also the age of the
virtuoso: composers wrote music that might be
performed gracefully and accurately only by
individuals with extraordinary technical skills.
The quintessential example of this phenomenon
is the Polish-born composer Frédéric Chopin
(1810–1849). At the age of seven, Chopin gave
his first piano concert in Warsaw. Slight in build
even as an adult, Chopin had small hands that neverthe-
less could reach across the keys of the piano like “the jaws
of a snake” (as one of his peers observed). After leaving
Warsaw, Chopin became the acclaimed pianist of the Paris
salonsand a close friend of Delacroix (who painted the por-
trait in Figure 29.17), Berlioz, and many of the leading
novelists of his time, including George Sand (see chapter
28), with whom he had a stormy seven-year love affair.
Figure 29.16 ANDREW GEIGER, A Concert
of Hector Berlioz in 1846, 1846. Engraving.
Figure 29.17 EUGÈNE DELACROIX, Frédéric Chopin, 1838. Oil on canvas,
18 15 in. This unfinished portrait was originally part of a larger double portrait
that showed George Sand listening to the virtuoso pianist at the keyboard.
