Fran Magazine: Issue #105

A classical music hour about being 26 years old

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Some of this stuff is funny on purpose

Last week I saw my last New York Philharmonic concert of the season, which is always a bittersweet time in the rotation of the year. I’ll pick up again in the fall — September or October, I think — and it’s not like it’s illegal or impossible to go see classical music in the summer, but it’s a different sort of thing, concerts in the park and all that. Last week’s concert featured Sheku Kanneh-Mason playing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto (a really cool, relatively underrated Shostakovich entry, in my opinon), and then Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Whenever people ask me how to get into classical music, I point them in one or two directions: the first is to just start listening to classical radio, the public radio station of your choosing, they’ll always pick stuff that feels relatively approachable and it’s a great kind of music to get work done to, and the second is to start with Romantic era classical music, rather than full-on proper Classical era classical music. The reason I suggest this is because the Classical era works, which stretch from the late 18th century into the early 19th century, are really form-driven and often about God or the Divine in an either metaphorical or literal way. I advise friends against this because most of my friends do not engage with art in a form-motivated way, nor are they particularly passionate about God. Obviously, I think learning to appreciate art from a formalist perspective¹ can be a rewarding thing to do, but when you’re trying to understand what can feel like an esoteric genre of music, maybe the last place you want to start is with unending Mozart variations, or whatever. I also think it’s good to get right with God, so to speak, which is not to say that you have to literally believe in God, but that a whole world of art (not just music, but film and books, to say nothing of visual art) will open up to you if you’re willing to come meet an artist who loves God halfway.²

Okay, but let’s say that you are not a formalist and that you’re not exactly square with giving yourself over to music that is about God. Maybe you read Fran Magazine and you say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about PLOT!” Maybe you go to the symphony with an optimistic, budding interest, but you also clutch your program for dear life with hopes that it will guide you to a point of artistic understanding. Well, good news: that’s where Romantic music comes in. Romantic music has capital t-Themes and sometimes capital p-Plots. Something to really latch onto. So I always send people in the direction of the aforementioned Berlioz piece, Symphonie Fantastique, the first ever piece composed as five-part “programmatic symphony,” which is to say: music that required you to read a program in order to understand it.

Berlioz composed Symphonie Fantastique the year that he was 26 years old, and it is — and I say with great respect towards anyone who is any age — a very 26 year old’s idea of what a symphony should be about, which is to say, yearning and doing drugs. Over the course of five movements, Berlioz depicts an unnamed artist (but a kind of autofictional version of himself) who meets and falls in love with a woman (first movement), and sees her in his mind’s eye everywhere he goes, like a ball (second movement), or imagines their relationship as depicted by two shepherds out in a field (third movement). Convinced that she’ll never reciprocate his feelings, he takes opium — not enough to kill himself, but to induce hallucinations. He dreams that he’s killed his crush, and now he’s been sentence to public execution (fourth movement). In hell, he’s taunted by monsters and witches and demons, and eventually also his crush, who is participating in a “diabolical orgy” (composer’s words) (fifth movement).

If you want to watch or listen to the whole symphony, you can do so on YouTube here.

I also really like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recording that you can find on most streaming services.

Of course, if you just want to watch the diabolical orgy and you’re like, “did Maestro conduct that and is there video?” the answers are mercifully, “yes and yes.”

This is such a great version of it because you can see Bernstein laughing through the piece. You might be thinking, “is a 26 year old French person composing a symphony about an autofictional version of themselves getting a crush so bad they take drugs to chill out about it and then they have a bad trip imagining they commit murder and are subsequently tormented in hell… supposed to be funny?” Yes, obviously! This is silly stuff, drawn on obviously real feelings — both Berlioz’s and the general human population — exaggerated to a profound degree.

Symphonie Fantastique is a constant in my list of pieces³ that I basically feel like I have to see if they’re being played by my local orchestra even though I know it like the back of my hand and there’s maybe not that much new to get out of it as a text. As I say on Letterboxd about bad movies all the time: I like hearing songs I already know played loud. The unending appeal of seeing and hearing Symphonie Fantastique played live is that it’s a piece that’s played loudly, with gusto and passion and a rich sense of humor. This is silly stuff!

What’s rewarding about it being a favorite for so long is that it’s allowed me to drift in and out of certain movements as favorites or points of note. In the past few months, I’ve found I’ve connected to the second movement — the imagined ball — more than the rest.⁴

This movement shows up in television and film not infrequently, but my current fixation on it is that it sounds more like the idea of something you’d hear at a ball or a night out, rather than something that might actually be played. It’s a little too spritely, lively. There’s an archness, as though Berlioz himself knows this music is hacky and bad, but he can’t deny himself the pleasures of the waltz form.⁵ These fantasies — it is called, essentially, fantasy symphony — feel real: more romantic, more passionate, more possible.⁶ It’s the second shortest movement of the piece: the vision can’t last too long. In the final minute or so, the waltz collapses under the weight of itself, too twirling and frantic to sustain its energy. Too bad, you might think, wishing the night would stretch on.

1. I once got into a heated argument with a former employer that ended in him practically shouting, “You’re such a formalist!” at me, so I guess take all of my formalist endorsements with a grain of salt.

2. As a point of personal taste, there are few points of view I find as annoying, restrictive, and tiresome than widespread “epic atheism” mentality that takes a position against organized religion in any presence whatsoever, especially when it comes to engaging with fictional works if they require any kind of suspension of disbelief about a person’s faith. I once went to the Met Cloisters with someone who remarked that there was “a lot of God stuff there.” Like, did you think they had Spotify back then? What’s going on here?

3. Everything else on here is really obvious, namely: Shostakovich 5, Tchaikovsky 5, Beethoven 7, Dvorak 9, Symphonic Metamorphosis — which NY Phil is doing this fall! Run, don’t walk.

4. This piece also made a cameo appearance in a fall issue of Fran Magazine, not that I’ve ever repeated myself here.

5. It’s for this reason that I also think Espresso is kind of undeniable — it sounds like the IDEA of a stupid pop song made literal.

6. Essentially how half the people I know felt about their chances with Josh O’Connor after walking out of Challengers.