``Plots, true or false, are necessary things,'' wrote poet John Dryden around 1680. Dryden was discussing a different kind of plot, but this line could be taken out of context to be the credo of people who can't get anything out of classical music without attaching some story to it.
Movies and novels have plots; why not music? Since long before Dryden's time, composers have occasionally given their music plots or programs. But the first composer to make a career of program music was Hector Berlioz.
The most famous French composer of the first half of the 19th century, Berlioz wrote no solo piano music and no chamber music. These had traditionally been regarded as vehicles for ``pure'' musical expression.
Instead, he produced a good deal of music for voice, including several operas, and many orchestral works often requiring extra (and sometimes exotic) wind and brass instruments. This is the sort of music that lends itself best to storytelling.
Berlioz was strongly influenced by men of literature, especially Shakespeare and Goethe, followed by Byron, Scott and other figures in the Romantic movement. He allowed his literary preoccupations to influence his music's style, instrumentation and layout. Note the word ``influence.'' Berlioz did not design overtures and symphonies to mirror the action in Shakespeare's plays or Byron's poems; the music merely conveyed the main emotions found in those literary works.
His music was typical of the Romantic era's arts - full of passion, unpredictability, novelty, experimentation and supernatural elements. But however uninhibited and loud his music could be, it rarely descended to vulgarity.
What sets Berlioz's scores apart from those of some other uninhibited composers (especially later Russians like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov) are their feathery elegance and sometimes delicate chamber music textures.
Berlioz objected to using musical thunderstorms and twittering woodwind birds merely as special effects. He stressed that music imitating nature was appropriate only when it served a musical purpose.
This purpose could simply be contrast or dramatic effect, as long as the drama was motivated by the musical form, not the other way around. Contrast and drama, remember, are qualities found in the ``pure'' first movement of every Mozart symphony.
Berlioz was concerned with the expressive potential of music, which he felt was greater than that of poetry or art. Music can be expressive and dramatic in itself, without reference to stories. Mozart and Beethoven wrote a great deal of highly expressive music that told no tales.
Even when Berlioz was depicting a witches' dance, he had to concentrate on purely musical matters such as rhythm, melodic shape, patterns of rhythm and melody, the plushness or astringency of the harmony and the special sounds of each instrument at his disposal. The score would exist, make a strong effect and be intelligible as music even if Berlioz had not attached to it the image of a witches' dance.
Berlioz did not abandon traditional musical forms. He may have expanded them in unorthodox ways, but for the most part even his ``Symphonie fantastique'' follows the patterns found in symphonies of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
Berlioz subtitled his 1830 ``Symphonie fantastique'' ``Episode in an Artist's Life.'' The work mixes an imaginary autobiographical story with music. It can be hard to disentangle some of Berlioz's musical procedures from his story, but basically we're dealing with two different but complementary kinds of art - music and fiction.
Musically, the ``Symphonie fantastique'' is based on traditional symphonic patterns. The first movement begins with a slow introduction, then continues with a faster presentation of the basic themes and manipulates them to good dramatic effect. This is the same pattern Haydn had followed 40 years before.
Usually a slow movement would come next, but Berlioz put that off and inserted a lovely waltz. This could be thought of as a newfangled counterpart to the minuet movement common in Haydn's time. It also provides an essential contrast, separating the dreamy first movement from the low-key slow movement.
That third movement is a mostly quiet, peaceful section based on a call-and-response pattern introduced by the woodwinds. This is followed by an ``extra'' movement, a grand, noisy march - again, this could be considered in some ways a descendent of the old minuet.
It also provides a change of pace and a transition into the even wilder finale, in which a couple of themes are transformed in a procedure that is halfway between the old variation and rondo formats.
Discussion of the ``Fantastique'' requires one more important musical consideration. The first movement's main theme, introduced by the violins, appears at least briefly in each of the later movements, usually in the woodwinds. Berlioz called this recurring motif an idée fire.
Only after Berlioz had worked out most of the musical details of his symphony did he write and rewrite a detailed program for it. The story concerns the opium-induced fantasies of a sensitive young artist suffering from unrequited love.
According to the program, the first movement concerns the artist's dreams and passions, and thoughts of his beloved (represented by the idée fire). The waltz evokes a glittering ball, at which the artist catches sight of his beloved across the room.
The slow movement is inspired by a countryside scene, the call-and-response pattern representing pipes played by shepherds as the artist's serenity is disturbed by the suspicion that his object of desire may be requiting someone else's love for her.
The march takes the artist up to the guillotine, for he imagines he has murdered his beloved and is watching his own execution. At the end the idée fire is cut off in midnote by a sharp chord followed by a couple of plunks from the strings, as if the artist's severed head is dropping into a basket.
The finale is a dream of a witches' sabbath, into which the deceased artist wanders and discovers his murdered beloved to be a willing participant. The idée fire has become sour and lewd, and alternates with a burlesque version of the well-known ``Dies Irae'' melody from the Gregorian Mass for the dead.
The entire symphony stands up quite well without the elaborate program. So the real difference between, say, Mozart and Berlioz has less to do with form than with intent. Mozart addressed his expressive musical patterns mainly to the listener's intellect. Berlioz addressed his mainly to the listener's imagination.
Mozart expected to move his audience without associating his instrumental music with some poetic concept. But Berlioz's aim was precisely the opposite. By guiding the listener's imagination in certain directions, a poetic concept could deepen and enrich the music's dramatic plan.
Berlioz listening suggestions
One of the most perceptive interpreters of Berlioz's poetic concepts is conductor Colin Davis. He has recorded all the composer's major works for Philips, and that's the series of choice on compact disc.
Start with his version of the ``Symphonie fantastique'' with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra. Then move on to his treatment of ``Harold en Italie,'' a work that's part symphony, part viola concerto (the violist in the Davis recording is Nobuko Imai).
Those who love vocal music should hear ``Les Nuits d'CtC,'' a 30-minute cycle of songs with orchestra. For choral enthusiasts, there's a mighty Requiem and a more concise Te Deum that require massive forces of singers and instrumentalists.
The operas tend to be long and rather heavy going, so it might be a good idea to delay hearing things like ``Les Troyens'' and ``Benvenuto Cellini'' until you've developed a real enthusiasm for the Berlioz style.
For a collection of short pieces full of color, Sir Alexander Gibson conducts the Scottish National Orchestra in a set of Berlioz overtures on Chandos.