“Fantasy Symphony” not only pioneered the title symphonic music, but also made groundbreaking contributions to both the content and means of musical expression.The title of the fifth movement of the “Fantasy Symphony” is “The Dream of the Banquet of Demons”. The content is about the protagonist, the sick and sensitive young musician, who met the girl he fell in love with at first sight at the dance, but the girl refused his pursuit. After being rejected, the young musician became angry and killed the girl. He was also sentenced to death for murder. After the musician was executed, a group of monsters gathered around his body, holding knives and forks, lighting a bonfire, dancing, and holding a carnival like feast.
This is a significant innovation in the content of musical expression. During the period of religious music, the main content of musical works was God, which was God’s experience, God’s thought, God’s suffering, and God’s compassion for human beings; During the Baroque period, musical works began to embody human images and thoughts, with human praise and praise of God in their content; During the period of classicism, the content of music expression expanded to society, expressing the interactive relationship between people and society. However, in general, music works express “positive images” such as God, man, and human society, or in part, with the main content of expressing “truth, goodness, and beauty.”.
The fifth movement of “Fantasy Symphony” expresses the theme of the party of monsters and ghosts. The main body is those monsters and ghosts, which has never appeared in previous music works. It is a great innovation in content, opening a new door for the content of music creation.
From the perspective of music aesthetics, this is also a pioneering achievement. The connotation of music aesthetics not only includes positive energy content such as God, human beings, love, compassion, heroes, struggles, and help, but also includes content such as ferocious laughter, blood, cruelty, ugliness, madness, and barbarism. It is a great subversion and expansion of the connotation and extension of aesthetics.
Due to changes in content and aesthetic values, previous musical compositions have focused on harmony as the beauty, and sound effects have striven for harmony. Even in order to break the overly calm octaves and fourth and fifth harmonies, musicians have added non very harmonious third and sixth harmonies to their creations to increase the momentum driving the development of music, but the sharp and harsh sound effects are still excluded.
“But if Berlioz wants to express demons and ghosts, he cannot still use harmony effects that make people sound harmonious and comfortable.”. These monsters are essentially another world opposed to human society and the divine world that exists to transcend humanity. “Human beings are the people of God, and their language is also given by God. Therefore, human beings and God share the same language system. God teaches human language, and humans can understand it. Human beings praise God, and pray to God, and God can understand it.”.
The world of monsters and ghosts is another world, a world cursed by God and far away from humanity. They have another language system and aesthetic outlook. Therefore, the music that expresses demons and ghosts must not be the same as the language that expresses people and God. “The beauty of expressing human language is harmony, so the beauty of expressing the language of demons and ghosts is the sharp, harsh, and discordant sound effect. This unacceptable sound effect for human hearing is precisely the most beautiful sound in the hearing of demons and ghosts.”.
Therefore, in the fifth movement, Berlioz tried many innovative creative techniques, such as tapping the strings with the bow of the violin to make the flute and piccolo emit a sharp and harsh sound, using a large amount of disharmonious harmony effects to make the sound appear tense and depressing, using complex and variable rhythms to create a carnival scene of ghosts and monsters staggering and dancing in disorder, and making bold attempts and full display of innovative sound effects.
“Fantasy Symphony” not only pioneered the title symphonic music, but also opened up the expressive content of musical works, promoting the development of musical aesthetic ideas. At the same time, it also explored new creative techniques from aspects such as performance techniques, harmonic means, rhythm combinations, and is a landmark work.
