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In his Symphonie fantastique, the young Berlioz bared his soul in music, torturing himself with passion—some might say obsession—for his beloved. Through tender love scenes, a thrilling march to the scaffold, and an opium-induced nightmare, Berlioz’s riveting masterpiece is unforgettable.
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In May 1868, Hector Berlioz was a mortally sick man with less than a year to live. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns had worked conscientiously with Berlioz in preparing the vocal score of the latter’s Lélio (the rarely heard sequel to Symphonie fantastique) in 1855, and he was a regular visitor to the dying composer’s bedside in 1869. Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise was his bible, as it was for Georges Bizet and all younger French composers, who recognized Symphonie fantastique as the work which blew apart the traditions of symphonic writing for the post-Beethoven age.

Berlioz’s special feeling for the orchestra and his quest for new sounds and combinations has often been attributed to the fact that he never learned to play more than a few chords on the piano. He never wrote piano music except as accompaniment for songs. He was a close friend of Franz Liszt, yet he would never write the cascades of notes that made the piano such a popular instrument in the 19th century.

By a strange irony, the two heavy bells whose tolling creates such a grim background to the Dies irae chant in the last movement of Symphonie fantastique were often unavailable when Berlioz conducted the work himself. On such occasions he would have the part played on a piano, with ponderous double octaves, and the work was even published in that form. — Hugh Macdonald