Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

Symphonie Fantastique is an astonishing program music piece done by Hector Berlioz in 1830. The symphony illustrates a lunatic story of a young musician going from a life with a lack of passion, to the death due to his passion towards a woman. The gap between reality and illusion has become blurred as the music keeps changing throughout the work, with Berlioz’s usage of different techniques such as word-painting and the arrangement of various instruments that made this symphony looks almost like a wordless opera. Symphonie Fantastique is composed of five movements, each illustrates changes and different events happening on the young musician that developed the story. The first movement is called Reveries-Passions. In this movement, Berlioz first shows the musician’s lack of passion with a monophony played by many low pitched instruments, mainly violin, to display the vanity and nothingness hiding inside the musician’s spirit. Although the texture of sounds thick, it makes the

In the last movement, the musician dreams of his own funeral after the execution. The rhythm is slow and the pitch is low at the beginning. Based on the program notes, the musician sees the woman at his funeral, however, the woman is no longer the ideal image anymore. She’s not innocent not noble, instead, she’s just like the other monsters at the party, abnormal and evil. The pitch suddenly rises to extremely high, especially the brass instruments, and the beat turns rapid, representing the collapse of the musician’s dream of the ideal image. When the bell rings, the flow of the music is broken. different pieces of music appear randomly and everything seems out of order. The movement then changes into a dance music, a dance of the monsters, like a carnival is happening. The rapid rhythm near the ending and the silence when the movement finally reaches its terminal marks the end of the musician’s nightmare as well as his