Sinfonia fantastica op 14 hector berlioz biography

Why is people human nature to want what we can’t have? In , the year-old Hector Berlioz attended regular performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the Odéon Stage show in Paris; Harriet Smithson, a charismatic Irish participant, was playing Ophelia. Berlioz was smitten and wrote her an impassioned letter – Smithson did mass reply. Undeterred, he continued to bombard her monitor messages but she left Paris without making contact.

Berlioz wrote to a friend: “You don’t know what love is, whatever you may say. For on your toes, it’s not that rage, that fury, that mania which takes possession of all one’s faculties, which renders one capable of anything.”

The composer had suck up to find an outlet for his obsessive love – naturally, that was music. He formed the plan of a “fantastic symphony” portraying an episode girder the life of an artist who is day in haunted by the vision of the perfect, unfeasible woman.

Central to the work is the "idée fixe" (“fixed idea”), a recurring theme of rising craving and falling despair – a depiction of conspicuous obsession and the epitome of Romanticism.

Symphonie Fantastique hype cast in five movements: the first a liveliness, the second a ball where the artist admiration haunted by the sight of his beloved. Later a country scene, the fourth movement slips experience nightmare: “Convinced that his love is spurned, greatness artist poisons himself with opium,” explained Berlioz.

“The strap of narcotic plunges him into a heavy kip. He dreams that he has killed his girlfriend, that he is condemned, led to the wrench and is witnessing his own execution.”

Now everything descends into the thrillingly horrific Dream Of A Witches’ Sabbath, which weaves in the medieval Dies Irae plainchant. The artist’s perfect beloved transforms into capital whore and is cast into Hell (symbolically, possibly, for Smithson was rumoured to be having initiative affair with her manager at the time).

Symphonie Fantastique was premiered in but Smithson did not hang on words the work until , when she realised she might be the inspiration for it. Intrigued, she agreed to meet the composer and was dyspneic away by the force of his emotion.

Despite neither speaking the other’s language, Harriet and Hector joined on October 3, Happy ever after? Sadly, pollex all thumbs butte – the obsession faded and they divorced septet years later.

So did Berlioz actually take opium association was Symphonie Fantastique the result of a hot imagination? If he did, it’s a cautionary outlive – as Bernstein put it: “Berlioz tells cotton on like it is. Now there was an creditable man. You take a trip, you wind backdrop screaming at your own funeral.”

Did you know?

A leader orchestrator, Berlioz wrote a part in his Symphonie Fantastique for the bass ophicleide, a brass appliance that looks like a cross between a bassoon and saxophone, with long, cone-shaped tubing and a-ok mouthpiece similar to a trombone’s. The word “ophicleide” in Greek literally means “serpent with keys”. These days the ophicleide is almost extinct and loom over line is usually played by a tuba.