“Symphonie Fantastique” in 3 parts which include,“A Ball”, “The March to the Scaffold” and “The Witches' Sabbath”.
The story is this...
A young musician with a nervous disposition and an ardent imagination, hopelessly in love, poisons himself with opium in a fit of desperation. The dose he takes is not enough to kill him, rather he sinks into a heavy sleep. In his sickly mind, the strangest visions appear and all sensations and recollections are transformed into musical thoughts and figures. Most of all he experiences the volcanic love inspired by his beloved, his insane alarm, his furious jealousy, the return of joy when he sees her and his consolation in religion.
At the ball he finds his beloved once again amid the festivities.
His heart is gripped in torment...that if she should deceive him....
He dreams he has killed her, she whom he loves, and that sentenced to death, he is lead to the scaffold. The cortège moves with gloomy, sinister, heavy footsteps following the loudest cries. At his end she appears again for a moment, a last thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow of the guillotine!
He sees himself at a sabbath...
In the midst of a ghastly throng of wizards, shades and monsters, assembled for his funeral; howls, explosions of laughter, shrieks answering, a myriad of strange sounds, his beloved appears, a joyful howl at her entrance. She joins the devilish orgy in an obscene and grotesque sabbath dance, a funeral knell.
Berlioz was an idealist who was at odds with the world in many respects - a man of great passions, his honesty and directness often alienated others.
Symphonie Fantastique is an autobiographical representation of his obsession with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
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