In 1827, Berlioz fell madly in love with an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson, who ignored him. He turned to his music as an outlet for his unrequited love. The result was Symphonie Fantastique, which was first performed at the Paris Conservatory on 

December 5, 1830. Harriet Smithson was not in the audience. 

The composer provided an explicit program for the work: “A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments, and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The beloved woman herself has become a melody… which he finds and hears everywhere.” 

Berlioz called this melody the idée fixe.

Accordingly, the five movements depict various dreams of our hero. The first movement, “Dreams, Passions,” finds him remembering his life before meeting his beloved. In the second movement, he sees her at “A Ball,” in which her tune is transformed into a waltz. The third movement, “Scene in the Fields,” depicts shepherds, whose pastoral calm he contrasts with his own turmoil. In the fourth movement, “March to the Scaffold,” he dreams 

that he has killed his beloved and is being executed. The Finale, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” portrays the beloved involved in an infernal orgy with ghosts, witches and assorted monsters. The idée fixe changes into a grotesque version of the original. Berlioz also 

parodies the Dies irae (“Day of Wrath” from the Mass for the Dead) in a grand free fugue to end the work.

~ Program notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022