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Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique Analysis

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Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was one of the most well-known composers of the romantic period. In 1826, he enrolled as a student at the Conservatoire de musique et de declamation in Paris, where he began his musical journey. At this conservatory, he proceeded to create some of his most famous compositions such as his Symphonie Fantastique (Samson, 2007: ). This renowned composition was dedicated to Harriet Smithson, whom he later got married to. The program of the Symphonie Fantastique concerns Berlioz who, unhappy in love swallowed an overdose of opium, where he survived the powerful drug, but in his hallucination experiences he has impassioned dreams of the Shakespearian actress Harriet Smithson. According to Joseph Kerman (Kerman, 1980), Romanticism gave birth in a sense to the word “romantic” (Kerman, 1980: 325). This artistic movement has been shaped by a set of very distinctive ideas and aesthetics of music, which therefore distanced it from all previous eras and movements. In the following I will be drawing up these ideas and relate them to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. I will furthermore elaborate on how Romanticism is seen as an aesthetic and music style within the western art music and the innovative way Berlioz approached the symphony, to how Beethoven influenced the symphony. The Romantic period …show more content…

In this paragraph, I will relate Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique to Beethoven’s symphony. Ludwig von Beethoven is known as the idea of a lonely artist, a hero whom has been removed from society, but because of his suffering, he produced work that inspired greatness (Kerman, 1980: 293). Berlioz has a similar a set of circumstances in which he was rejected by the one he loved, Thus because of this rejection Berlioz composed his Symphonie Fantastique — Which even consisted of his love being one of the characters that he brought to life within his

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