Symphonie Fantastique was written in 1830 by Hector Berlioz. Now, poor Hector wasn’t very successful in the financial sense (heh – POOR Hector). He paid to have most of his work played, and with these huge amounts of musicians, costs racked up fast.
Hector Berlioz. 
Berlioz was known for being…well, being a bit of a sociopath. He was
prone to angry and violent outbursts and to making split second
decisions. Here’s a bit of a back story to this symphony, just so you will appreciate the creepiness of it. So, Hector was a fan of Shakespeare. When attending performances of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz became infatuated with the lead actress, an Irish woman named Harriet Smithson. He flooded her hotel room with romantic (stalkerish) and increasingly desperate (terrifying) letters, declaring his undying love to a woman he’d never actually met. Now, Harriet, being a sensible woman, was creeped out by this, to say the least. She ignored Hector’s desperate pleas to meet her, and went on her merry way.
Hector wrote this symphony as a program symphony. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it pretty much means he wrote in a program what you were supposed to be thinking about during each movement. It was like Fantasia for the imagination. There is loads of sources dictating word for word what he said, but I’m not going to make you read that (though if you’re inclined, you can find the 1830 and the 1855 versions here). Essentially, there is 5 movements in the symphony. 1.Daydreams – Passions. 2. A Ball. 3. Scene in the Country. 4. March to the Scaffold. 5. Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath. Okay, so far, the titles kind of point out where the real weirdness sets in. The general story is about a lovesick artist who sees a woman at a party, falls madly in love with her, tries to overdose on opium and instead hallucinates that he kills her, gets sentenced to death, and sent to hell where she tortures him for an eternity for murdering her. Well, that’s not creepy and terrifying at all, considering his obsession with Ms. Harriet Smithson. Not to mention that EVERYONE in the upper crust of France at this time knew about it, so people definitely talked about how ABSOLUTELY WEIRD that was.
Onwards to Movement One, Dreams-Passions. Here’s a Youtube video of a decent performance. (side note: my favorite performance is with Leonard Bernstein conducting, for what its worth).
First Movement
Okay. (Yes, I know its 10 minutes long, bear with me here). Berlioz did this cool innovative thing which was later named CYCLICISM. (Vocab time!) This is when a musical idea, or idee fixe, if you’re French (or a music history student), shows up in all the other movements. No one had really done it before, at least not successfully. You hear it for the first time at 1:08. This cute little melody represents the object of the artist’s affections (obsessions). Anyways, the cyclicism thing is a precursor to what’s called a leit motif, which was pioneered by Richard Wagner and it means each person gets their own mini theme song throughout the piece. Think you haven’t heard of Wagner? You have. He wrote the wedding march ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ but when he wrote it, it was for an opera called Lohengrin, which had a very unhappy ending. And you think you’ve never heard what the hell a ‘leit motif’ sounds like? Think again, if you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, you have! Each race (and the ring) has their own mini-theme song.
OK, Okay. I know this is getting long. So here’s movement 2: A Ball.
Movement 2
Listen to how this shit builds up, and then sounds like a big, fancy, fun, liquor fueled party. Admit it, you’d have thought that even if I didn’t tell you to. By the way, he sees the woman he’s obsessed with right around 2:10, you can hear her music. Onwards.
Part 1
Part 2
Okay, so movement 3 is when some weird nonsense starts to go down. Berlioz wrote some stuff about shepherds being portrayed by the oboe and cor anglais in the beginning, but you can ignore that. Listen to the music though, because this is some stunningly paralyzing music. Anyways, you get hints of the idee fixe at 3:54 and 4:05, but they aren’t obvious. Once you hit the 5 minute mark, you get some little bursts of distraught sounding stuff. This is when the artist starts losing his marbles. 7:26 introduces more creepy sounding stuff. At 8:06 and 8:21 (ish) you hear the woman’s theme in its entirety in the flutes and oboes, framed by some seriously legit orchestration.
And at 9:10, the artist panicks because OBVIOUSLY this woman is cheating on him (yes, the woman he was never dating). Continue listening for some more gorgeous pastoral music. Towards the end of this movement is when the artist tries to OD on opium, but instead has a seriously bad trip and falls into some disturbing hallucinations.
Movement 4
My favorite part of this movement starts towards the very end, around 6:24 or so. Artist is on the scaffold, ready to pay for his crime of murdering his obsession, and his last thought is of her, and her theme plays; The guillotine then falls and cuts off his head.
Movement 5
Alright, so he’s in hell now. She shows up a lot in this one, so I’ll only point out the first one, around 1:34.
OKAY. HERE IS MY FAVORITE PART OF THIS ENTIRE WORK.
ARE YOU READY?
At 3:01 you can hear the funeral bells. And then. At 3:30 you hear the brass banging out Dies Irae, a latin chant for the dead (cool trivia: this was also heard in the movie, The Shining). The dies irae pretty much takes over the rest of the piece, which is fine with me because that is so eerily powerful.
Alright, so that’s it.
Oh. So Berlioz became engaged to a woman named Camille Moke when this premiered. She then broke it off to go be with some fancy piano-maker, he plotted to kill them but didn’t because he’d forgotten his disguise. Then he ended up hooking up with Harriet Smithson in 1833 when she heard the symphony, but they split after a years, presumably because Berlioz was a loony (albeit a fantastique (see what I did there) composer).
That’s all for now, hope you enjoyed this!
(Disclaimer: this music is public domain, and I don't claim to own any of it.)
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