Symphonie Fantastique

The Symphony Fantastique is an orchestral piece of music written by Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is widely regarded as one of the most important and representative pieces of the early romantic period.

The symphony is a piece of program music which tells the story of "an artist gifted with a lively imagination" who has "poisoned himself with opium" in the "depths of despair" because of "hopeless love." A symphony in five movements (though they normally had four) on unrequited love with a subtext on the horrors of opium-obfuscated neuroses, the movements are as follows:

1. Dreams - Passions
2. A Ball
3. A Scene in the Meadows
4. March to the Scaffold
5. The Witches Sabbath

Throughout the symphony, there is a recurring melody which represents the protagonist's beloved (in real life she was the Irish actor Harriet Smithson, with whom Berlioz had fallen in love, and whom he later married). The exact form of the melody is altered according to the circumstances in which she appears: in the first movement, for instance, when the protagonist is dreaming of her, the melody is drawn out and idyllic, but in the last movement, when the protagonist sees her in a vision as a witch come to witness his burial, the melody is quicker, transformed into a "brazen and trivial dance" (as Berlioz put it), and is played on the squeaky E-flat clarinet.

Berlioz called this repeating melody an idée fixe (fixed idea). It is similar to the later use of leitmotifs by Richard Wagner. Carl Maria von Weber had previously used similar recurring fragments to represent characers or objects in his operas, though the Symphonie Fantastique may be the first use of such repeating fragments in purely orchestral music.

Leonard Bernstein called this symphony the first musical expedition into psychedelia because of its hallucinatory and dream-like nature, and because history suggests Berlioz composed at least a portion of it under the influence of opium.

In 1831, Berlioz wrote a much less well known sequel to the work, Lelio, for narrator and orchestra.