The bells toll once again, ominously, in Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique’

“From the bells bells bells bells/Bells bells bells!/In the clamour and the clangour of the bells!” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in “The Bells,” a poem he penned shortly before his death in 1849; it’s fascinating to speculate whether this work might have been inspired by a revolutionary opus published just a decade earlier: Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. (The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform in the work in concerts Oct. 16-18 under Zell Music Director Designate Klaus Mäkelä.)

Truly ground-breaking, Symphonie fantastique is “one of the most shockingly modern works in the repertoire and surely the most astonishing first symphony any composer has given us,” observes CSO annotator Phillip Huscher of the work, written in 1830 and revised through 1855. “For its time [it stretched the definition] of the symphony to the limit.”

Composed in five movements, Symphonie fantastique is remarkable for its “staggeringly inventive use of the orchestra, creating entirely new sounds with the same instruments that had been playing together for years, for the bold, unexpected harmonies, and for melodies that are still, to this day, unlike anyone else’s,” Huscher writes. “There isn’t a page of this score that doesn’t contain something distinctive and surprising.”

Symphonie fantastique depicts the life of an artist — a thinly veiled Berlioz himself — as he confronts unrequited love, opium-induced hallucinations, witches, guillotines and finally, in the fifth movement, a sabbath dance that culminates furiously with funeral rites. Here the bells toll in a magnificent clamor. In his score, Berlioz called for giant church bells pitched at G and C, and the sound of this distinctive percussion instrument must have been pealing in Poe’s mind when he wrote “The Bells.”

The CSO, like many orchestras, uses custom-cast bronze bells for this piece, as the composer, Hector Berlioz, specifically called for them. These bells are typically played offstage, creating a distant, ominous sound that is a key part of the symphony’s atmosphere. 

This is an updated version of an article previously published on Sounds & Stories, the predecessor site of Experience CSO.