Charles Munch was a French conductor renowned for his passionate, spontaneous style and for championing French orchestral music. Born in Alsace, he trained as a violinist before turning to conducting in the 1930s. He led major ensembles including the Boston Symphony Orchestra and later became the first music director of the Orchestre de Paris. Munch is especially remembered for his vivid performances of Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique became one of his signature works.
Munch wrote, “Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious. Man’s right to speak this language is for me the most precious gift that has been bestowed upon us. And we have no right to misuse it. . . .Let no none be astonished then that I consider my work a priesthood not a profession, it is not too strong a word.”
Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique revolutionized classical music. It introduced the first true programmatic symphony, established the structural use of the idée fixe (a recurring musical theme for a character), and pioneered massive, highly experimental orchestration.
I have posted a short piece from an opera by D’Indy, and I have also posted a famous recording of the Symphonie Fantastique. I hope that you enjoy them.
Vincent D’Indy, Fervaal, Op. 40: Prelude to Act I
Charles Munch
September 6, 1891 – November 6, 1968
Munch’s uncle was the distinguished missionary and organist Albert Schweitzer, and his father was the Alsatian choral and organist Ernst Munch , who gave his son his first music lessons on the violin. Charles studied the violin at the Strasbourg Conservatoire, where his father was a professor and continued with Lucien Capet in Paris in 1912 and Carl Flesch in Berlin. As Alsace was a part of Germany at the outset of WWI, he was conscripted into the German army and saw active service: he was made a sergeant of artillery, was gassed at Peronne and wounded at Verdun,. Following the end of hostilities, he returned to Alsace-Lorraine (now part of France) and took French citizenship. Munch later became a professor of violin at the Strasbourg Conservatoire in 1919 and leader of the Strasbourg Municipal Orchestra. He took up the same position at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1925, serving also as the leader of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, whose conductors during the period included Fritz Busch, Wilhelm Futwängler, and Bruno Walter. It was in Leipzig that he had his first experience of conducting.
After returning to France in 1932, Munch made his Paris debut as a conductor in a self-financed concert (which he later said that he had not been able to fund earlier) with the Straram Orchestra. This was sufficiently successful to confirm his decision to pursue a career as a conductor, and in 1935, he became the conductor of the newly formed Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, which he conducted until 1938. Meanwhile, he continued to teach the violin, having been made a professor of violin at the École Normale in 1936. He was invited to conduct at the 1937 meeting of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Berlin, and, in the following year, was appointed chief conductor of Paris’s oldest orchestra, the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra (Orchestre de la Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire). He also appeared in London at the head of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and made his American conducting debut in 1939 with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. With the outbreak of WWII, Munch threw himself into his work as a conductor of the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, commenting, “My role is to raise spirits to happier worlds”. During the war, he refused to collaborate with the Nazi regime and gave his earnings to the French Resistance; he was made a member of the Legion d’honneur in 1945.
With the coming of peace, Munch’s international career took off rapidly; he appeared in Prague in 1945 kat the fiftieth celebrations of the founding of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and during the following year, he appeared at the Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, toured America with the Orchestre Nationale de Radio France, the principal French radio orchestra and spent a month in London recording for Decca with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. Having relinquished his post with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra in 1940, he appeared for the first time with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946 and with the Chicago Symphony in 1948; the following year, he succeeded Serge Koussevitsky as chief conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and, in 1952, as director of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, holding both of these posts until 1962. He toured with the Boston Symphony Orchestra across Europe in 1952 and 1956, when it became the first American orchestra to visit the USSR. Munch appeared in Europe sporadically during this period: he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic again at the Salzburg Festival in 1955 and accepted the presidency of the Concerts Colonne from 1965 to 1958. Following his departure from America, he conducted little: in 1965, he appeared with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and toured the USSR once again, with the Orchestre National de Radio France. Following the decision to disband the Paris Conservatoire Orchestre and to form the Orchestre de Paris in 1967, Munch was persuaded to become the orchestra’s first conductor. During 1968, he toured Russia with the orchestra, but had to cancel several concerts because of ill health, and, in the autumn of the same year, during a further tour by the orchestra, this time of the USA, Munch suffered a fatal heart attack.
From A-Z of Conductors by David Patmore
Symphonie Fantastique
In Paris of 1830, Hector Berlioz, aged 26, is experiencing even more intense shocks to his psyche than is normally the case in the anything but placid life of the arch-Romantic composer. “I have just been plunged into an endless, insatiable passion,” he wrote to his friend Humbert Ferrand. “She is still in London, and yet I feel her near.” The “she” was Harriet Smithson, an Irish Shakespearean actress of reportedly modest professional endowments but considerable personal magnetism.
Smithson, after a period of indifference, which worked its way up to mild curiosity, then qualified interest and presumably a stage well beyond, married her wild-eyed suitor in 1833. The union proved stormy and ultimately intolerable to both parties. (The fact that she never learned to speak more than minimal French and he never learned English may have caused some misunderstandings.)
Berlioz was initially, when still a Smithson observer rather than an intimate, “paralyzed by passion” (his words) for her. He was beginning “a great symphony” when the fit of passion overtook him and froze all creativity. Smithson’s arrival in Paris a few weeks later occasioned a thaw, and work began on the first version of the Symphonie fantastique, completed in April of 1830.
The premiere had been scheduled, long before the work’s conclusion, to take place in May. But the score was still incomplete when the fatal date approached. Thus, the composer “worked in a frenzy” (again, his words), borrowing bits from his other scores and leaving in portions he had planned to revise later.
Nerves were raw from the outset at the first rehearsal, which took place on a stage far too small to accommodate the sizable orchestra. Berlioz, never the most accommodating of colleagues, was especially difficult to deal with in his capacity as conductor. After a few rehearsals, all concerned decided to call it quits, and the notion of presenting the premiere of the Symphony was shelved.
The delay, until the end of the same year, enabled Berlioz to do some polishing, and the “Episodes in the Life of an Artist,” as the score was originally called, made its debut on December 5. It proved a huge success, contrary to what we might expect with a work so eccentric, so forward-looking—and so well-publicized. Among the audience in the Great Hall of the Paris Conservatoire were Victor Hugo, Nicolò Paganini, Alexander Dumas (père), Heinrich Heine, and Smithson.
In his “Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts,” a literal translation of the work’s final title, Berlioz tells a musical tale, with himself as the central character—creating not only a mood (as in Liszt’s symphonic poems), but states of mind and precise, physical situations. Nothing like it had been attempted on this scale before.
Berlioz’s new concept of how far one could go in dramatic music without resorting to a vocal text once caused considerable polemicizing over whether such music was viable without reference to the “story.” Wagner’s great friend and champion Eduard Dannreuther took the negative tack: “The Symphonie fantastique, particularly its finale, is sheer nonsense when the hearer has no knowledge of the program.”
Robert Schumann expressed a different point of view regarding Berlioz’s wild child. For Schumann, a too-intimate knowledge of the program prevented maximum enjoyment of the music: “When once the eye has been led to a certain point, the ear no longer judges independently.”
If Berlioz is to have his way, the program must be read; therefore, an abbreviated version of the composer’s descriptive text is:
I. Reveries; Passions. The first movement is in two sections, a brief Adagio followed by a long Allegro. The subject is an artist gifted with a lively imagination. The theme of the beloved [the idée fixe, an obsessively recurring theme in flutes and violins] appears in the Allegro for the first time. The artist is subjected to floods of passion, tenderness, jealousy, fury, fear…
II. A Ball. The hero is at a grand ball, but the tumult cannot distract him. “She” appears in oboe and flute among the whirling dancers.
III. Scene in the Country. After great agitation, he finds hope and believes his feelings to be requited. In the country, he hears two herdsmen play a ranz des vaches [melody played to gather the scattered cattle]. This plunges him into a delicious reverie, and we hear again the idée fixe. He is again filled with doubt. Silence.
IV. March to the Scaffold. He attempts to poison himself with opium but is instead subjected to a horrible dream: He has killed his beloved. He is to be executed, and, even worse, must witness his own execution. At the march’s end, she reappears—but her picture is obliterated by the final blow.
V. Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath. He finds himself at a witches’ revel, surrounded by sorcerers and monsters. The melody of his beloved, which has thus far been noble and full of grace, is transformed into a drunkard’s song: It is the beloved coming to the revels, to assist at the funeral of her victim. She is no longer anything but a courtesan, worthy of participation in such an orgy. The ceremony begins. The bells toll. A choir [of brass instruments] chants the Dies irae, which is then parodied by the other [instrumental] choirs. The Dies irae mingles with the wild revelry at its height—and the vision comes to an end.