Francisco Goya – { feuilleton }

Symphonie Fantastique

1955. Cover art by Jane Sinnickson Flora.

The programme for the symphony (1845 version) by Hector Berlioz:

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions (le vague des passions), sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations—all this forms the subject of the first movement.

Part Two: A Ball
The artist finds himself in the most diverse situations in life, in the tumult of a festive party, in the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature, yet everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds in the distance dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring. He broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own… But what if she betrayed him!… This mingled hope and fear, these ideas of happiness, disturbed by dark premonitions, form the subject of the adagio. At the end one of the shepherds resumes his “ranz des vaches” the other one no longer answers. Distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
Convinced that his love is spurned, the artist poisons himself with opium. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end of the march, the first four bars of the idée fixe reappear like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roar of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

1958. Cover art by Richard M. Powers.

The programme for the symphony (1855 version) by Hector Berlioz:

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

Part One: Daydreams, Passions
He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Part Two: A Ball
He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Part Three: Scene in the Countryside
One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their “ranz des vaches” this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part Four: March to the Scaffold
He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part Five: Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath
He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae.

1958. No cover artist credited.

1959. Cover art by Hieronymus Bosch.

1960. No cover designer credited.

1964. Cover art by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Continue reading “Symphonie Fantastique”

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive

Weekend links 788

The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

• Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Art on film: The Medusa Touch

Continuing an occasional series about artworks in feature films. The Medusa Touch (1978) is the kind of film I usually dislike: a supernatural horror story with a preposterous premise—a man who causes disasters to occur with the power of his mind—which is also an ITC production directed by Jack Gold with a TV-friendly gloss, all overlit interiors and zoom-happy camera work. Richard Burton plays the man with a name you only find in horror novels, “John Morlar”, whose telekinetic gift is also a curse, the Medusa touch of the title, although his affliction is never quite described as such. It’s Burton who makes this one worth watching, he burns with a misanthropic intensity in every scene he appears in, delivering his lines with a conviction that suggests he identified rather too much with Morlar and his hatred for the world. The film unfolds as a police procedural, opening with the attempted murder of Morlar by an unknown assailant, then following the investigation that reveals the victim’s history. The police business is the weakest part of the film; being a British/French co-production means that the man leading the investigation, Inspector Brunel, is a Frenchman working in London as part of an exchange programme. Brunel’s dull character is further diminished by having him played by Lino Ventura with a dubbed voice, but it’s the inspector’s quest for clues to Morlar’s past that bring us eventually to the art.

The first artwork, however, appears before all of this. The film opens in the street outside Morlar’s London home then cuts to the inside of his flat with this close view of a print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Munch’s most famous painting wasn’t quite the visual cliché in 1978 that it is today. Morlar’s history is recounted in a series of flashbacks which reveal him to have been a barrister whose distaste for the legal profession leads to his becoming a novelist with characters used as mouthpieces for his misanthropy. The art in his mansion flat is scrutinised by Brunel without being subjected to any discussion, leaving us to decide whether these works are the kinds of things that Morlar actually liked or exterior emblems related to his condition.

A relief based on Caravaggio’s Medusa (c.1597).

The head of Medusa pinned on Morlar’s wall suggests the latter, although the only introspective comments from Morlar come in the scenes with him and his psychiatrist, Dr Zonfeld (Lee Remick), which are mostly discussions of his calamity-filled life. Morlar and Zonfeld’s combative relationship may explain the next artwork which catches Brunel’s eye, a print of Bond of Union (1956) by MC Escher.

The choice is an unusual one when the print was made to celebrate Escher’s marriage which was relatively happy, unlike Morlar’s disintegrated union which ends with him willing his wife to death in a car crash. Escher was very trendy in the 1970s, collections of his work were being published for the first time and his prints were everywhere. A better match for a story of this type might have been Eye (1946), an image with greater symbolic resonance that would also complement all the moments when Jack Gold’s camera zooms into Morlar’s basilisk glare.

Encounter in Space (1899) by Edvard Munch.

After looking at the Escher, Brunel leafs through Morlar’s print collection, pulling out another Munch, and a very strange choice it is. This is an odd scene: the prints are all badly lit and none of them have much overt reference to either Morlar’s character or the story as a whole.

Continue reading “Art on film: The Medusa Touch”