Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

Lot 104
08.11.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 7 560
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1053218
Lot 104 | Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Estimate value
£ 4 000 – 6 000
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Autograph musical quotations signed (‘Berlioz’), two excerpts from the Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14, n.d. [after 1830]
Two quotations from Berlioz’s opium-infused Symphonie fantastique.

Four bars from the third movement, ‘Scène aux champs’, and nine bars from the fourth movement, ‘Marche au supplice’, notated in brown ink on three four-stave systems. One page, 257 x 265mm, cut down from a larger sheet, 19-stave paper, autograph superscriptions and instrumentation. Modern blue cloth gilt folding case.

Provenance:
(1) Northcott collection, UK, according to –

(2) Sotheby’s, 12 April 2007, lot 7.

(3) Sotheby's, 8 June 2011, lot 215.

(4) Schøyen Collection, MS 5499.

It was Berlioz’s discovery of Beethoven that led him to compose symphonies, yet his treatment of music as an expressive and dramatic art made his symphonies into something other than the pure instrumental music that many Germans saw in Beethoven. They stretch the meaning of the word to new limits (see Berlioz, Grove Music). The first, the Symphonie fantastique of 1830, is a five-movement piece of program music, an ‘Episode in an Artist’s Life’, composed at least partly under the influence of opium. Leonard Bernstein suggested the work could well have a self-portrait, with Berlioz ‘the morbid young musician […] a creature of wild imagination—wild enough to have these visions and fantasies without taking a dose of anything. His opium was simply his genius, which could transform these grotesque fantasies into music’.
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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SW1Y 6QT London
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