symphonie fantastique

Do you know the story behind "Symphonie Fantastique?" Hector Berlioz wrote an innovative symphony, treating themes in a new way — profligately throwing them out without going into the kind of development and recapitulation that had become a bit formulaic.

He did, though, expand on those themes in a new way, with unconventional harmonies and bright new orchestration (and a large orchestra to carry it off). Certainly it's safe to say that audiences in 1830 were hearing sounds that, literally, no one had ever heard before.

Berlioz was also a great marketer. He caught the idea that people respond to a story. Instead of just presenting it as a masterful orchestral experience, he presented it as a story, drawing on the literary trend of gothic novels and ghostly horrors that was sweeping through the European mind.

There's a nice ("nice" being the synonym for "icky") meta-ness to it, because not only was there an external story attached to sell the orchestral work, but there was a superexternal story that he spread to sell the external story and build ticket sales. It was about the celebrity actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had an unrequited crush on. (He'd written letters to her and all that.) When she went to a concert to hear it, virtually everyone who was anyone knew the story and who she was, and she had no idea. So, fairly serious creep factor there.

To complicate the issue, she was impressed by his genius, and they met and eventually got married. (Then broke up because of totally unforeseeable problems.)