Theme Music from Wagner to Berlioz
Symphonie Fantastique represents Hector's take on music as character a la Beethoven.
Jul 26, 2006
Thanks to film composers such as John Williams, associating musical themes or fragments with specific characters or emotions is familiar to today's music audiences. Who can hear the opening theme to Star Wars and not think of Luke Skywalker or listen to the two-note motive from Jaws without immediately associating it with sharks or danger?
But as familiar as this practice is to us, where did it come from? The obvious answer is from the opera; many early film composers came from classical music backgrounds and drew on techniques firmly established by Wagner.
But before Wagner, the association of themes with characters can be traced back to early Romantic symphonies. One could hear the embryonic stages of theme association in the symphonies of Beethoven. The 5th symphony in particular takes the short-short-long "fate theme" through various developments until the climatic final movement: the despair of the theme in the first movement is changed to triumph at last, much like a hero undergoing a "coming of age" transformation.
But it is in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique that we find the full development of theme association in the form that Wagner and later film composers would adopt. Berlioz's five-movement symphony follows the descent into madness of a lover (often speculated to be Berlioz himself) ignored by his beloved.
Berlioz's term for theme association, idée fixe (fixed idea), is appropriate in this case because the protagonist's obsession with his beloved provides the unifying thread throughout the symphony. It is never clear whether the lover actually ever meets his beloved: he catches glimpses of her and dreams of her, but his visions always idealize the beloved into unaccessible perfection. And so the unattainable drives him mad.
