Only the most enthusiastic fan of nineteenth-century Franco-Belgian music would know the name Étienne-Joseph Soubre (1813–71). Born and raised in Liège, Soubre attended the École royale de musique, where his primary instrument was the bassoon. By 1839, he began to make a name as a conductor and composer, first directing the Liège Opera and then the orchestra of the newly formed Société du Conservatoire (p. vii). As a winner of the 1841 Belgian Prix de Rome, he heard his compositions performed in Italy, Germany and France. Although by 1845 he had settled into a teaching career in Liège and Brussels, he continued to compose works of modest proportions (songs and short choral pieces) and more ambitious ones, such the three-act opera Isoline, ou Les chaperons blancs and a handful of orchestral works.

A-R Editions makes a compelling case for this little-known Belgian composer with the first published edition of Soubre’s Sinfonie fantastique à grand orchestre, part of the exploratory series Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Soubre’s three-movement symphony premiered in 1835 in Liège, and was greeted with positive reviews from French, German and Italian critics. By all accounts, the work held its own in its day. But we must address the elephant in the room: the title immediately – and inevitably – calls to mind Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830). Indeed, as editor Francesca Brittan notes, Soubre was familiar with Berlioz’s published programme for the Symphonie fantastique before he embarked on his own ‘fantastic symphony’, and had most certainly acquired a copy of Liszt’s piano transcription before he completed his own composition (p. xi). Soubre’s Sinfonie, then, offers a glance at the musical thought processes of a composer early in his career, and provides music historians with a ‘missing piece’ of Berlioz’s reception history (p. vii). This new publication thus addresses some historiographical questions in nineteenth-century music studies. For instance, to what extent does Soubre’s composition challenge longstanding preconceptions of Berlioz as a composer isolated from his milieu? And, more broadly, does the publication of Soubre’s work destabilize the way we consider Berlioz vis à vis notions of the romantic fantastic?

Brittan has explored these questions, first in her doctoral dissertation and now in her critical edition of Soubre’s Sinfonie.Footnote ¹ ‘The notion of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique as an entirely idiosyncratic work’, Brittan writes in her preface, ‘has become routine, part of what we think we know about the composer and his place in history’ (p. vii). In addition to reading Berlioz’s widely circulated pamphlet detailing the programme of his Fantastique, Soubre may have also have been inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann; the German author’s ‘contes fantastiques’ appeared in French in the late 1820s, sparking widespread enthusiasm and controversy for their up-front depictions of the artist as a dreamer and hallucinator (p. xi). Soubre was not alone in his fascination with Berlioz’s symphonic treatment of the fantastic; Brittan also identifies a ‘Fantastic Symphony’ by one François-Laurent-Hébert Turbry (regrettably, the music is lost). The existence of not one but three ‘Fantastic Symphonies’ suggests an intellectual trend in which composers explored literary notions of the pathological through the symphonic medium.Footnote ² Such a trend indeed calls into question the belief that Berlioz had a uniquely ‘bizarre and fantastic imagination’, as Fétis had famously put it (p. vii). Perhaps, after all, fantastic symphonies were the work of craftsmen and not madmen.

One prominent musical antecedent to the fantastic and supernatural was, of course, Weber’s Der Freischütz, a work that seems to have left a significant ‘thumbprint’ (p. xi) in Soubre’s orchestration (Brittan does not identify any evidence that Soubre had studied Weber’s work, either in the original German or in Castil-Blaze’s reworking). Soubre’s brass instrumentation is indeed robust and certainly Weberian: four horns, four trumpets and pairs of alto, tenor and bass trombones. Brittan notes as well that the opening pages of Soubre’s Sinfonie recall rhythmic gestures in Beethoven’s Coriolan overture and the first movement of the Eroica symphony. I would also add Étienne Nicolas Méhul to this list of predecessors: the jagged rhythms in his Symphony No. 1 (1808) anticipate some of Soubre’s more forceful writing.

Brittan provocatively writes that Soubre’s and Berlioz’s symphonies intertwine both musically and programmatically, with ‘one collapsing into the other until it is difficult to say where Berlioz ends and Soubre begins’ (p. x). But such a claim is too speculative to be conclusive. Brittan clearly states that Soubre ‘could not have heard Berlioz’s symphony before he began his own’ (p. x), so we must rule out that Soubre embarked on his own ‘fantastic symphony’ via purely musical inspiration. Soubre did not pen a literary programme to his symphony, but he did title his dreamy second movement ‘Rêve’ in the manuscript parts, clearly recalling the opening ‘Rêveries – passions’ movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Moreover, an 1836 announcement in the Journal de Liège gave the third movement the title ‘Délire’. Brittan posits that the first movement remained unnamed because of its ‘clear-cut sonata form’ (p. viii), while the third movement’s more daring formal structure – a series of episodes roughly fitting into a sonata-rondo model – merited a programmatic title (Brittan places it in brackets in the score to denote the journalists’ intervention). Soubre does not deploy a reminiscence motive in his symphony à la Berlioz. Rather, Brittan notes how the lyrical theme from the first movement (bar 53) returns in the recapitulation of the third movement (bar 258). This hardly makes for an idée fixe, but Brittan takes the opportunity to create her own programmatic narrative of Soubre’s symphony, one in which a delirious protagonist attempts to shake off personal torment: ‘Is this the melody that cast Soubre’s protagonist into the realm of dream and then into a state of madness? Is he, like Berlioz’s “jeune musician,” suffering from musical monomania?’ (p. x) Soubre’s symphony races towards the end with a flurry of C-minor chords, but at the last second shifts to the relative major. Berlioz also shifted to the parallel major in the bombastic conclusion of his Symphonie, but the listener adjusts to the bright C-major key much earlier. Soubre’s jolt into the major key is far more unsettling – a ‘demonic grin’, as Brittan aptly puts it (p. x). Perhaps all of this is still not enough to dub Soubre’s work as a kind of second sequel to Berlioz’s Fantastique (after the enigmatic Lélio, of course). Brittan takes considerable literary license with her programmatic account of the symphony, but her excellent prose makes a skim through the score all the more rewarding.

As Brittan notes in her Critical Report, the two sources for Soubre’s Sinfonie fantastique are the autograph score (source A) and manuscript orchestral parts (source P); both sources are housed in the Library of the Conservatoire royal de Liège. Brittan’s edition reproduces five high-quality plates of Soubre’s autograph score, but one wishes that the editors had included examples of Source P, as well. For instance, it would have been nice to see the parts for the second brass choir in the third movement, which were not in Source A but which Brittan nevertheless included in her edition (p. 133). One also wonders why the composer opted for the Germanic spelling ‘Sinfonie’ and not the French ‘symphonie’: was it to differentiate his composition from that of Berlioz? These unanswered questions notwithstanding, Francesca Brittan has made available a musical work that inspires further inquiry into the romantic pathological imagination.Footnote ³ Chateaubriand and Musset both wrote of a mal du siècle (‘malady of the century’), which infected the minds of writers, artists, and musicians during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴ But we now have another piece of evidence that the nineteenth-century ‘fantastic’ was at once a literary trend, an autobiographical journey, a by-product of opium use, and a model of symphonic composition. With performance parts available through the publisher, I eagerly await the first commercial recording of Soubre’s Sinfonie, and look forward to including it in future classroom lectures on ‘the’ Fantastique.