Fantastical Symphony, & Notes on Instrumentation – by Hector Berlioz

Hector Berlioz was among the most extreme and outspoken partisans of Romanticism in France, and his influence on the music of the 19th Century avant-garde was pervasive. He was a key developer of the Tone Poem: music which attempts to directly translate a narrative from a verbal to a musical idiom.

With its grotesque devils, its gothic overtones, its volatile mix of irony and exaggerated intensity, its blasphemous appropriation of sacred musical themes, and its hallucinatory evocation of delirium, madness, and suicide, the Fantastical Symphony is the musical masterpiece of the multidisciplinary subgenre known as Frenetic Romanticism, exemplified in art by Louis Boulanger and in literature by Petrus Borel. Turn on the stereo and read along with the most brutal experimental music of the 1830s.