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The salons of Paris during the days of the romantic dawn were populated with poets, playwrights, journalists, critics, architects, painters, sculptors, musicians, and utopian political reformers without number. Heinrich Heine, poet and journalist from north Germany, Chopin from Poland, Liszt from Hungary-all mixed freely with such homegrown artists and intellectuals as Victor Hugo, Theophile, Gautier, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Dumas, George Sand, and others. Social philosophers Like Lamennais, Proudhon, Auguste Comte, and Saint-Simon, gave a political tinge to the heated aesthetic debates. In this supercharged atmosphere Hector Berlioz must have appeared as an authentic apparition, embodying in the flesh the wildest romantic dreams and nightmares. One contemporary described him as a young man trembling with passion, whose large umbrella of hair projected like a moveable awning over the beak of a bird of prey. The German composer Robert Schumann saw him as a "shaggy monster with ravenous eyes"; his personality as that of a "raging bacchant"; and spoke of his effect on the society of his times as being "the terror of the Philistines." The suave and polished Felix Mendelssohn, on the other hand, found his French colleague completely exasperating, and he continually reproached Berlioz because, with all his strenuous efforts to go stark raving mad, he never once really succeeded.

In one striking personality, Berlioz combined qualities that made him a great composer, the ranking orchestral conductor of his day, a brilliant journalist, and an autobiographer. As a conductor the painter Gustave Dore caricatured him as the mad musician (above). At the first performance of one of his overtures, when the orchestra failed to give him the effect he demanded, he burst into tears, tore his hair, and fell sobbing on the kettledrums. His Memoirs are stylistically a literary achievement of the first magnitude and rank with the few top autobiographies of world literature. From this lively source one gathers that Berlioz' development proceeded in a series of emotional shocks which he received from his first contacts with the literature and music of his time. One after the other, the fires of his explosive imagination were ignited by Goethe's Faust, which resulted in his oratorio the Damnation of Faust; by the poetry of Byron, which became the symphony for viola and orchestra, Harold in Italy; and by Dante's Divine Comedy, which was sublimated into his great Requiem. In music it was first Gluck, then Weber, and he said that he had scarcely recovered from these two when he "beheld Beethoven's giant form looming over the horizon. The shock was almost as great as that I had received from Shakespeare, and a new world of music was revealed to me by the musician, just as a new universe of poetry had been opened to me by the poet." It was, of course, the Beethoven of the Eroica, Pastoral, and Ninth symphonies. To a milder extent, the literary figures of Vergil, Walter Scott, and Victor Hugo made up the more distant claps of thunder in his creative brainstorms.

Berlioz even insisted on actually living out his enthusiasms to an alarmingly realistic degree. He fell violently in love with the Irish actress who was playing the feminine leads in the Shakespearean troupe that was so successful in the Paris season of 1827. After a desperate romance leading both to the brink of suicide, he finally married the beautiful feminine package whom he thought of as Juliet and Ophelia wrapped up in one. When his wife turned out to be merely the actress Miss Harriet Smithson, now Madame H. Berlioz, he wrote with acute anguish to a friend: "She's an ordinary woman." The cold dawn of disillusionment brought years of personal misery, compensated for by some happier results on the musical side. For all his external flightiness, his literary, musical, and human loves were completely enduring; and he carried them with him to the end of his life. There one finds him still musing on the "mild, affable, and accessible" figure of Vergil; on Shakespeare, "that mighty indifferent man, impassable as a mirror"; on Beethoven, "contemptuous and uncouth, yet gifted with such profound sensibility"; and on Gluck, "the superb."

Berlioz' autobiographical Fantastic Symphony, first performed in the year 1830, contains a complex of many ideas he gathered from the musical and literary atmosphere that surrounded him. In the detailed programmatic notes he wrote for this work it is clear that he took the idea of poisoning by opium in the first movement from De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which had appeared shortly before in a French translation by Alfred de Musset. The musical form of this movement, with its Largo introduction and the Allegro agitato e appassionato assai continuation, is in the Beethovenian symphonic tradition. Its principal claim to technical originality is the use of an idee fixe, or "fixed idea" (above), by which Berlioz conveys the notion of his beloved who is everywhere present and colors his every thought. The metamorphosis of the theme on its appearance in each of the movements fulfills a dual purpose-that of providing a semblance of unity in the sequence of genre pieces, and that of expressing, by its mutations, the necessary dramatic progress. The theme is varied in each of its reappearances and provides the listener with the necessary continuity to build up the image of a dramatic character through the associative process. All evidence, however, points to the fact that this specific programme was written later than most of the music, which apparently was conceived for quite another purpose.

Gerard de Nerval's prose translation of Goethe's Faust had appeared late in the year 1827 and was the direct inspiration for Berlioz' Eight Scenes from Faust. Since most of the movements of the Fantastic Symphony were being written at the same time, this alone would indicate a connection in the creative process. Berlioz was among the earliest to attempt a realization of Goethe's great drama in music. An opera by Spohr had appeared in 1816, but the well-known one by Gounod came many years later. A secular oratorio by Schumann, a Faust Symphony by Liszt, and a Faust Overture by Wagner are but a few of the many subsequent works on this theme. The subject of Faust was in the wind and the stages of London, Paris, and other Continental cities rang with the echoes of the many versions of this subject in dramatic and ballet form. The Paris Opera alone had accepted no less than three librettos that were waiting to be commissioned. It is known that Berlioz was angling for one of these, and this fact further fortifies the case for the common source of inspiration for the Damnation of Faust and the Fantastic Symphony. Since the desired commission was not forthcoming, those parts projected for a Faust ballet became instead the movements of the Fantastic Symphony.