The last movements of both the Eight Scenes from Faust and the Fantastic Symphony have to do with the triumph of the exultant diabolical forces as they claim the souls of their victims. The endings to Berlioz' early works are often the most wild and dissonant parts. No anticlimactic calms after the storms, no carefully planned resolutions, no safe havens after the shipwrecks. The Symphony ends with a diabolical "Witches' Sabbath," just as Harold in Italy ends with an "Orgy of the Brigands." The grisly scene here is both the climax and the unresolved end, and the movement that most fully justifies the title "Fantastic." It is divided into three distinct sections. The first is introductory and begins with wild shrieks for the piccolo, flute, and oboe, accompanied by the ominous roll of the kettledrums in bars 7 and 8, which is echoed softly by the muted horns in bars 9 and 10 to suggest distance. After a repetition, the tempo changes from Larghetto to Allegro and the idie fixe is heard (21-28). The ghostly appearance of the fixed melodic idea associated with Berlioz' beloved in this final movement undoubtedly was derived from the witches' kitchen scene of Goethe's drama where Faust has gone to have his form changed from that of old age back to young and lusty manhood, and where the conjuring up of the image of Margaret is a part of the process. It is also related to the Walpurgis Night scene where Margaret again puts in a brief appear-ance. Surely it is a novel notion that the winsome heroine, exemplified in previous mutations as the em-bodiment of desirability, should now appear at the witches' sabbath. Was she a witch all along and dis-guised only in his imagination in desirable human form? Or is this merely another manifestation of her "bewitching" power? The entrance at this point of his beloved on her broomstick, accompanied by a pan-demonium of sulfurous sounds, is therefore some-what unexpected. The hero, obviously Berlioz, gives a shriek of horror (29-39) as he listens to her modu-late from the previously chaste C major to the more lurid key of E flat. Her instrumental coloration, while still that of the pale clarinet, descends now in pitch to a new low and more sensuous register. After this shocking revelation, she executes a few capers and subsides for the time being as the introduction con-cludes with bar 101. The second section is labeled Lontano ("in the dis-tance") and begins with the tolling of the chimes re-calling the opening lines of Hugo's ballad. After this signal for the unleashing of the infernal forces, the foreboding Dies Irae is solemnly intoned, first by the brass instruments in unison octaves. In bars 127-146, it is in dotted half-notes; next, in bars 147-157, the rhythm is quickened into dotted quarters; then it be-comes syncopated in triplet eighths (157-162) and ends with an abrupt upward swish of the C scale. With the appearance here in syncopation and in such surroundings of this ancient and honorable Gothic liturgical melody, a solemn part of every Roman Catholic requiem mass, Berlioz fulfills the promise of his programme that he will make a "burlesque par-ody" on the Dies Irae. Besides serving Berlioz as a symbol conjuring up all the fire-and-brimstone aspects of his medieval Christianity, it also introduces at this point a form of macabre humor. This parody of a sacred melody caused considerable comment at the time. Schumann attributed it to romantic irony, one of the few forms of humor tolerated in a style practiced by artists who took life and themselves with deadly seriousness. Another explanation, however, seems more logical and is to be found by applying a remark that Hugo made in the preface to Cromwell. "When Dante had finished his terrible Inferno," he wrote, "and naught remained save to give his work a name, the unerring instinct of his genius showed him that multiform poem was an emanation of the drama, not of the epic; and on the front of that gigan-tic monument, he wrote with his pen of bronze: Divina Commedia." Thus, if Dante was justified in con-ceiving his Inferno as a comedy, albeit a divine one, then Berlioz could include the Dies Irae in this context. Even the devil is conceded to be a clever theologian, and in Goethe's drama he is found in the sacred pre-cincts of the church, whispering in Margaret's ear as she listens to the choir chant the Dies Irae.
The title of the final section of Berlioz' Symphony which begins with bar 241, is Ronde du Sabbat, the neomedieval, blood-curdling, black-mass ballad published by Victor Hugo in 1826. It is also the sub-ject of one of Goya's paintings, Witches' Sabbath (Fig. 342). A dance fragment hinted at previously now be-comes the "Rondo of the Sabbath" theme and a four-bar phrase forming a fugue subject. The first entrance is for the cellos and double basses (241-244); this is followed by the violas (248-251); next, for the first violins fortified by the bassoons (255-258); and the final entrance is scored for the woodwind section and horns. These successive entries, each with a different instrumental combination, mark Berlioz' departure from the academic tradition of the linear fugue. Here he introduces the element of instrumental coloration into the usually austere fugal exposition. Other color combinations follow with melodic and chromatic variants of the subject in a fugal development that has won the composer wide admiration. It must be noted that when Berlioz is writing his wildest and most fantastic images, his mind is always fully in command; and at the climax of such a work as this, he writes a fugue without either violating the rules or sacrificing his expressive intentions. After the fugue on the dance theme has come to its climax with the entire string section playing an extension of the subject (407-413), the Dies Irae makes a reappearance, and the two themes are woven together with great skill from bar 414 to the end. Some of Berlioz' enthu-siastic admirers have called this contrapuntal section a "double fugue." There is only one fugue, however, with the Dies Irae melody running concurrently. With the final blood-curdling shrieks and flying images, a composer, quite probably for the first time in music history, has written a fugue that fulfills its literal meaning-that is, a flight. After the Fantastic Symphony, the use of the Dies Irae became a symbol of the macabre, and it has been used countless times since. Liszt's Totentanz for piano and orchestra is a set of variations on it, while it appears again in Gustav Mahler's symphonies and in some of Rachmaninoff's variations on a theme of Paganini. With this final movement, Berlioz also established a style that brought the demonic element-and a chain of harmonic and psychological dissonances -into music to stay, Both Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre are cut from the same cloth. One writer has even called this move-ment of Berlioz' the first piece of Russian music. Some of the wilder moments written by Stravinsky for his Fire Bird and Rite of Spring would certainly seem to bear this out. Berlioz was one of the first composers to build up his musical forms by the use of tone color. The only way to understand his music is to hear it in all the full richness of its instrumental sound, because his scores can never be transcribed successfully for piano or any other instrumental medium. In addition to the incomparable richness of his orchestral palette, the sheer quantitative weight he added to the ensembles of his day is nothing short of spectacular. Seldom composing in any but the largest forms, he delighted in the use of orchestral and choral combinations of extraordinary complexity. To assemble all the necessary forces for a Berlioz performance is always a challenge, and the demands his works make on the time and effort of the performers are considerable. In his gigantic Requiem, the composer employs an im-mense principal orchestra, a chorus of 500, a tenor soloist, and 4 huge brass bands. The latter were placed facing the 4 points of the compass, so as to suggest vast space and to enhance the acoustical effect made by the bands when they sound the call for judgment Day. All this, plus such additional effects as a battery of 16 kettledrums, caused the newspapers to comment the day following the first performance that Paris had not heard such a volume of sound since the fall of the Bastille. There was always something of the conqueror about Berlioz as he marshaled his orchestral forces in such a composition. Each orchestra had its own conductor, and the choruses were signaled by com-manders of lesser rank, with all of them taking their cues from the generalissimo himself, who appeared in the role of a musical Napoleon storming over the battlefield. Berlioz was the first of the great orchestra conductors and the prototype of the great maestros of today. No wonder his contemporaries did not know how to take him and found both his personality and his compositions somewhat difficult to absorb. He always reminded them of something monstrous, and Heinrich Heine characterized him in the follow-ing way: "Here is the wingbeat that reveals no ordi-nary songbird," he wrote, "it is that of a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as must have existed in the primeval world."
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