I Am Lovesick, Now Please Pass the Opium

Hector Berlioz (From: Wikipedia)

"When he was twenty-three, [Hector] Berlioz was overwhelmed by the works of Shakespeare and also fell madly in love with a Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, to whom he wrote such wild, impassioned letters that she considered him a lunatic and refused to see him. To depict his 'endless and unquenchable passion,' Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique (Fantastic Symphony) in 1830, which startled Parisians by its sensationally autobiographical program, its amazingly novel orchestration, and its vivid depiction of the weird and diabolical.

In 1830, too, Berlioz won the Prix de Rome (the Rome Prize), subsidizing two years' study in Rome; when he returned to Paris, he finally met and married Harriet Smithson--after she had attended a performance of the Fantastic Symphony and realized that it depicted her. (They separated, however, after only a few years.)" (241-242)

So, what exactly was in the Fantastic Symphony that won Berlioz the girl of his dreams? Here are some quotes from the program notes he wrote for his audience:

"A young musician of extraordinary sensibility and abundant imagination, in the depths of despair because of hopeless love, has poisoned himself with opium. The drug is too feeble to kill him but plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by weird visions. His sensations, emotions, and memories, as they pass through his affected mind, are transformed into musical images and ideas. The beloved one herself becomes to him a melody, a recurrent theme (idee fixee) which haunts him continually...

Harriet Smithson (From: Wikimedia)

[Notes for the Fourth Movement, March to the Scaffold] He dreams that he has murdered his beloved, that he was been condemned to death and is being led to the scaffold. The procession moves forward to the sounds of a march that is now somber and fierce, now brilliant and solemn, in which the muffled sounds of heavy steps give way without transition to the noisiest outbursts. At the end the idee fixee returns for a moment, like a last thought of love interrupted by the death blow...

[Notes for the Fifth Movement, Dream of a Witches' Sabbath] He sees himself at a witches' sabbath in the midst of a hideous crowd of ghouls, sorcerers, and monsters of every description, united for his funeral. Strange noises, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries, which other cries seems to answer. The melody of the loved one is heard, but it has lost its character of nobleness and timidity; it is no more than a dance tune, ignoble, trivial, and grotesque. It is she who comes to the sabbath!... A howl of joy greets her arrival... She participates in the diabolical orgy... The funeral knell, burlesque of the Dies irae. Witches' dance. The dance and the Dies irae combined." (243-246) --Roger Kamien, Music: An Appreciation

I hope all you lovesick young men are out there reading! If you really want the girl, write in a song in which you imagine murdering her and, after your trial and execution, discovering that she is a witch! Now that's a prescription for love. Hey, it worked for Berlioz.