Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)

THE STORY

On a September evening in 1827, 24-year old French composer Hector Berlioz attended a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and fell desperately in love with a young English actress named Harriet Smithson. He described himself as “paralyzed by passion.”

Met with indifference, Berlioz poured his oceanic obsession into a symphony—creating one of the largest orchestral forces used by any composer up to that point. The artist’s passion appears throughout in a melody Berlioz called the idée fixe (“fixed idea”). The early movements are reveries, as when the artist glimpses his beloved surrounded by glittering harps and strings in the elegant waltz of the second movement.

By the fourth movement, hopelessness has become unbearable. The artist attempts to poison himself with opium, but instead experiences a vivid hallucination in which he has murdered his beloved and is marched to his own execution. With the fifth and final movement, the artist encounters the ghost of his beloved at a ritual of witches and monsters gathered for his own funeral. The lover’s melody is now grotesque and disturbing. The work ends with, as Berlioz described it, a “burlesque parody” of the liturgical Dies Irae, or “Day of Wrath.”

Berlioz and Smithson did eventually become lovers, two years after the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique in 1830, and were married in 1833. They had one child, but eventually separated—though they remained married until her death in 1854.

LISTEN FOR

• The “fixed idea” melody, presented by violins and woodwinds in the first movement of the work, and in every movement thereafter
• The use of two harps, especially in the second movement
• The duet between the English horn and the oboe playing offstage in the third movement, meant to represent two shepherds singing to each other

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, two timpani, percussion, two harps, strings