More Successive Octaves in Some Music of Berlioz

As I post this, Quatuor Aeolina is performing a four-accordion transcription of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique of 1830 at the Berlioz Festival in La Côte-Saint-André in southeastern France.

Here's more audacity: toward the end of the last movement of this work, Berlioz's combination of his original Witches' Sabbath theme and the preexisting Dies irae chant contains successive octaves. Like the successive octaves in Jerry Goldsmith's score for Patton I blogged about a year ago, these octaves take place from one compound-duple (e.g. 6/8) downbeat to the next, toward the beginning of a combination of two themes -- one sacred, one not.

A small rewrite of the Sabbath Round would have avoided these successive octaves. Here are a couple of possibilities:

I am not arguing that these successive octaves are inherently good or bad—plenty of ink has been spilled judging Berlioz's counterpoint in this manner—but they are unquestionably a deviation from the manner in which melodies were combined in classical Western music from the previous century.