Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique - How far would YOU go for love?

For 23-year-old music student Hector Berlioz, the answer was clear. From the moment he saw Irish actress Harriet Smithson performing the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he knew he had to do something spectacular to pique her romantic interests. This was no ordinary crush. It was complete and utter infatuation. 

He stalked her at stage doors, wrote her impassioned love letters in French – which she couldn’t even understand – and “accidentally” bumped into her on the street. But then came the worst news imaginable: Harriet’s been having an affair...with her manager.

Berlioz plunges into meltdown – uncontrollable mood swings, diabolical nightmares. Nowadays you’d see a shrink for that stuff, but Berlioz finds salvation in music; great music like Beethoven’s. In fact, all the talk in 1827 is of European’s greatest composer’s recent death. Now Beethoven was a man who knew how to channel his emotions into the symphony. What’s stopping Berlioz writing his own psychological thriller, based on his own experiences of heartache and sorrow?

Dosed up on Beethoven and a dash of opium, Berlioz completes his autobiographical masterpiece – the Symphonie fantastique – in 1830. It’s in five movements spanning almost an hour, with an orchestra of unprecedented size. This is an epic, cinematic story of agony and ecstasy – the full Tarantino treatment.

It’s the story of a young lovesick artist prone to melancholia and roller-coaster emotions. Remind us of anyone? And then there’s this repeating theme – what he called the idee fixe. It runs through the entire symphony in various guises and represents the beloved object of the artist’s affections. Yes, you’ve guessed who that is too! Harriet’s theme floats flirtatiously over the orchestra which pulses in imitation of the artist’s quickening heartbeats. Both themes interweave seductively. Harriet’s perfume trail lingers at every twist and turn. We see the lovers caught up at a society ball, at which the woman spurns the artist’s attentions. She disappears into the waltzing crowds, yards of silk swirling behind her, as she falls into the arms of another.

Depressed and dejected, the artist decides to poison himself with opium. But the dose is too weak to kill him and he’s plunged into a series of even WILDER delusions. He hears marching footsteps and imagines himself as a prisoner being escorted to the scaffolds for having murdered his beloved. Extreme much? Not really – when Berlioz discovered that his fiancée had an affair with some sugar daddy, he in fact hatched a plan to kill them both and himself. Thankfully he never followed through, but the artist of his symphony meets a more unfortunate fate.

After succumbing to the guillotine, Berlioz imagines a psychedelic opium trip in which the artist now lies dead on the altar of a black mass. Cackling witches dance around him before the chief witch enters – none other than the abominable Harriet herself. It’s Berlioz’s ultimate revenge on the woman who shunned him. The symphony ends bombastically with the artist’s beloved gloating over his soul in damnation.

So did the symphony catch Harriet’s attention? Anonymously, Berlioz organised for her to get the best seat in the house when it was performed under his baton in 1832. Everyone was in the audience Liszt, Chopin, Paganini, Victor Hugo. But it was Harriet, without even knowing it, who had inspired that evening repertoire. As she studied the programme notes carefully, she understood what the Symphonie fantastique was all about. She was the idee fixe. She agreed to meet Berlioz who decided to swallow a lethal dose of opium in front of her eyes when she rejected his marriage proposal. Hysterical Harriet could only consent, before he conveniently produced the antidote lodged in his pocket. And so they married. The scoundrel Berlioz had given hope to lovesick youth everywhere – that perseverance (and a shade of genius) will get you there in the end.

Yet in a strange twist of fate, the couple started to act out in reality what the symphony had only imagined. For Harriet succumbed to alcoholism and, after losing her looks, Berlioz obsession faded. The union grew deeply bitter and they separated only a few years later, Harriet unable to live up to the woman his symphony had idolised. The moral? Be careful what you wish for.