It’s quite normal to write songs to express one’s love...but a whole symphony? You got me right. Berlioz wrote this sensational piece in 1830, when he had just fallen in love with an Irish actress, Henrietta Smithson.

At that time, Berlioz was in stuck in Paris, having quit his medical studies while he tried to study music. His father had cut off his allowance, and he found himself a job singing in the chorus at one of the Parisian theatres. It was there that he first met Henrietta; he saw her playing Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Helplessly in love with Henrietta, Berlioz changed his lodgings to be near her, followed her to and from the theatre, wrote her passionate love letters, and dedicated his music to her - all without having spoken a single word. It was his overwhelming passion for her that influenced him to write Symphonie Fantastique.

The Symphonie has five movements, and is about the bad dreams of a young man who has taken opium after being rejected by his lover.

In the first movement, Reveries-Passions, the anti-hero recalls his love, and the joys and depressions since she came into his life. And then the neurotic despair and jealousy when she left him. In the second, a Ball, he sees his love dancing - with someone else. The third, In the Fields, takes us outside to hear two shepherds piping to each other. Tranquillity at last - but at the end, the first shepherd pipes only to get no response. Loneliness looms with distant thunder.

The anti-hero then dreams that he has murdered his lover in a fit of jealousy. He is condemned to death in the fourth movement, the March to the Scaffold. The lover appears just before the axe falls ... and in the fifth movement, the Witches' Sabbath, cackling crones celebrate the dead anti-hero in their devilish orgy.

Berlioz’s own adventures in love were not much better. He and Henrietta finally married in 1833, but it didn’t work out. Henrietta later met with an accident and had to give up her career on stage, and thus could not contribute to the household expenses. Furthermore, Berlioz was an extremely jealous person, and he imagined that Henrietta was meeting other men. Inevitably, they separated after several years.

This piece was, at its time, the most dramatic, and bizarre ever heard. It stretched the dramatic possibilities of the symphony, and introduced the "idée fixe," a recurring musical theme to unite the elements of the story, which Wagner later took up and extended.

Recommended recording:
Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique: Sir Colin Davis's 1974 account of the Symphonie with the Concertgebouw Orchestra is almost definitive.

The rendition here is of the fourth movement.