Fantastic Obsession, Reimagined

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday November 6, 2007

Valerie Lawson

Symphonie Fantastique is a new ballet based on Hector Berlioz's score. Valerie Lawson examines its extraordinary pedigree.

It might have been her voluptuous shoulders, her heart-shaped face, her ivory skin, her waist-length dark hair, or, simply, the total woman that made Hector Berlioz fall madly in love in Paris.

When the French composer saw the Irish actor Harriet Smithson in the role of Ophelia, he descended into a torment of love and desire, telling a friend he was in a "delirium which takes possession of all one's faculties, which renders one capable of anything".

Berlioz staged concerts in Smithson's honour but she failed to attend them. When her visiting Shakespearean troupe returned to Britain, Berlioz poured all his heartache into his first major work, Symphonie Fantastique.

For its premiere in 1830, Berlioz prepared a synopsis so that concert-goers could follow his symphonic story. It told of a young musician obsessed by the woman of his dreams, whom he imagines as he hallucinates in opium-fuelled reveries. He dreams that he kills her and is executed for his crime.

"Loathsome," said Mendelssohn of the symphony. The work of a "genius", said Liszt.

The American critic Peter Gutmann now calls it the "first full musical outpouring of Romanticism ... never before had a concert hall work tried to depict a specific story".

More than 175 years after its premiere, a European choreographer retraced Berlioz's emotional journey when the artistic director of the Australian Ballet, David McAllister, asked him to create a new ballet based on Berlioz's score. The ballet, Symphonie Fantastique, part of the company's Destiny program opening in Sydney tomorrow, was choreographed by the resident choreographer of the Dutch National Ballet, Krzysztof Pastor.

"I was scared to do Symphonie Fantastique," says Pastor, who has been in Australia three times since last December to work with the dancers on the 50-minute ballet.

"It's an inspiring work, a musical obsession. The music is very big, very complex. For me, the music became obsessive. I've been listening to it since David commissioned me, 1 1/2 years ago."

McAllister had met Pastor in Amsterdam, but it was Nicollette Fraillon, the Australian Ballet's music director and chief conductor, who recommended Pastor for the ballet. She was the music director of the Dutch National Ballet before she came to Australia and knew of Pastor's success with ballets danced to the music of Wagner and Mozart.

The commission is part of the Australian Ballet's four-year tribute to Colonel W. de Basil's Ballets Russes troupes, who visited Australia three times in the 1930s. One of the most popular works in Sydney and Melbourne was the original ballet version of Symphonie Fantastique, choreographed by Leonide Massine in 1936.

Seventy years on, an audience would find it hard to sit through Massine's ballet, a much more literal interpretation of the score than Pastor's, especially the last movement, The Sabbath of the Witches, in which Massine depicted an orgy of witches, trolls, ogres and devils.

"It would look ridiculous now." Pastor says. "The audience would laugh. I paid no attention to the Massine version. I tried to do it a different way, and tried to follow the spirit of the music."

A dancer in Poland, then France before joining the Dutch National Ballet in 1985, Pastor began his choreographic career the following year, both in the Netherlands and as a freelancer for many other companies.

Most of his pieces are classical ballets rather than contemporary dance works as "I believe very strongly that this is what my company should do, to develop this aesthetic".

"I believe each company should have contemporary work, but in proportion. It is very important that we shouldn't lose our focus."

As for his creative approach, Pastor comes to the rehearsal room "musically prepared, but the steps, they happen in the studio. I know there will be eight people here and four people here, but I don't know the steps.

"It does make me nervous, yes, but it's not only me who gets nervous. I remember reading in some dance magazine that when John Cranko [the late British choreographer] came to the studio to choreograph a new ballet he grabbed the wrist of the dancer Richard Cragun, who could feel him shaking. You don't know, you can't know [what will happen]. I've made over 40 ballets [for about 10 companies] and it's the same every time."

In an interview this year in Dance Australia, Pastor revealed some of the anxieties that keep him awake at night, about "never having enough time to prepare the performance and hearing the music I am working on constantly in my head".

As Berlioz has been inside Pastor's head for 18 months the nights must have been tough at times. "It's all part of the creative process - as it was in the Romantic period, they had to suffer."

As for the suffering of Berlioz, in a strange turn of events, he finally met and married Smithson but the marriage was unhappy. The Clare County Library details the horrible ending to Berlioz's obsessive love.

"The marriage between Harriet and her husband became strained, largely due to Harriet's failure as an actress and her jealousy of her husband's success and his popularity with the women he met in the course of his work.

"They separated, and Harriet began to suffer from a paralysis which left her unable to talk or move. On March 3, 1854, Harriet, the actress who gained international renown, died.

"The inscription on the vault at Montmartre reads as follows: Henriette Constance Berlioz Smithson, nee a Ennis en Irlande, mort a Montmartre le 3 mars 1854."

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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