DARK MUSIC, based on a true story, by William E. Doyle A young musician sets out to win the love of a famous actress by composing a piece that depicts his dreams and fantasies — including her murder and his public execution. It’s Mick...
moreDARK MUSIC, based on a true story, by William E. Doyle
A young musician sets out to win the love of a famous actress by composing a piece that depicts his dreams and fantasies — including her murder and his public execution. It’s Mick Jagger in 1830 Paris and the beginning of heavy metal ‘orchestral’ music as Amadeus meets Shakespeare in Love.
Hector Berlioz, now 60 years old, is reading his Journal; “My career is over, I compose no more, I conduct no more concerts.” He then writes; “With this final entry, I shall have said enough… I must go to the graveyard, it is to be demolished, all remains must be exhumed - even my Juliet.”
The young Hector Berlioz travels to Paris to begin his university studies at Medical School. At his first Anatomy class he is horrified when the older students walk up to the cadavers, each in various stages of decomposition, and address them as if they were friends. One student takes an exposed shoulder blade and tosses it to a rat that begins gnawing on it. Another takes a scrap of lung and tosses up into the air — swallows begin fighting over it. Overwhelmed by sights and sounds, Hector opens a window, climbs out and runs away leaving bloody footprints.
Not wanting to return to Medical School he decides to follow his dream and, after several comical and unsuccessful attempts, is finally accepted into the Paris Conservatory of Music. At the end of the term he returns to his small village to tell his parents that he has found his destiny — only to have his father cut off his allowance and have his mother put a curse on him!
Needing a job, Hector starts working at the Paris Theater. There, in the audience for one night, he falls in love with the Irish actress playing Juliet — the beautiful and talented Henriette Smithson. He tries to speak with her after her performance but, recognizing that he was the one that yelled out “Don’t do it” during the final scene in the tomb, she refuses to speak to him. He decides to write a piece of music that will win him not only fame and fortune, but also her love.
The story he writes begins with; “A young musician, in a fit of lovesick despair, decides to poison himself. The opium is not strong enough to kill him, but plunges him into a strange dream ... in which he sees himself being sent to the gallows for murdering the woman he loves.” After a year of musical studies in Rome, he returns to Paris with this composition finished. He conspires with Henriette’s manager to have her attend the premier of Symphonie Fantastique.
With titles like Reveries, Passions, At the Ball, and Scene in the Country, Hector draws on his medical studies, the book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Shakespeare, and his unbridled imagination. Imagining that he has killed his ‘beloved,’ Hector will March to the Scaffold to be executed. The music is wild and gloomy, the crowd yells “murderer,” and he climbs up the steps to the gallows. Placing his head on the chopping block, he has one final thought — of love. The axe falls, his severed head rolls into a basket, and the crowd cheers.
Now a headless corpse, the Dream of a Witches Sabbath has the deceased ‘beloved’ return to laugh at him surrounded by a fearful crowd of specters, sorcerers, and monster of every kind all united for his burial. Unearthly sounds, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries — then a funeral bell and the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) bring the music to a powerful conclusion. Exhausted from having conducted the premier, Hector looks up to the balcony to see that even Henriette is standing and applauding. As their eyes meet, he announces; “I will have my Juliet!”
60-year old Hector Berlioz arrives at the cemetery for the exhumation. He sees a young grave digger, with bare hands, reach into a coffin coming away with the withered skull of Henriette. As he places it at the edge of her grave, the tired old man utters; “Love, a celestial flame, survives even in the tomb! It raises the stone, and, by the angels blest, like a wave of light loses itself in the infinite.”
