What two events inspired Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique?

Answer 1

The previous answers are misleading, I'm afraid.

Berlioz was infatuated and obsessed with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he had seen performing in Paris in 1828. He immediately fell in love with her and wrote her endless love letters, despite never having met the woman.

She came to a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique in 1832, realised it was about her and agreed to meet the composer. They did actually marry in 1833 but the marriage soon failed.

To summarise what the Symphonie Fantastique is about, one can do no better than to read Berlioz's own programme notes:

"The following programme should be distributed to the audience every time the Symphonie fantastique is performed dramatically and thus followed by the monodrame of Lélio which concludes and completes the episode in the life of an artist. In this case the invisible orchestra is placed on the stage of a theatre behind the lowered curtain.
If the symphony is performed on its own as a concert piece this arrangement is no longer necessary: one may even dispense with distributing the programme and keep only the title of the five movements. The author hopes that the symphony provides on its own sufficient musical interest independently of any dramatic intention.

Programme of the symphony

A young musician of morbid sensitivity and ardent imagination [Berlioz] poisons himself with opium in a moment of despair caused by frustrated love. The dose of narcotic, while too weak to cause his death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his experiences, feelings and memories are translated in his feverish brain into musical thoughts and images. His beloved [Smithson] becomes for him a melody and like an idée fixe which he meets and hears everywhere.

Part one
Daydreams, passions

He remembers first the uneasiness of spirit, the indefinable passion, the melancholy, the aimless joys he felt even before seeing his beloved; then the explosive love she suddenly inspired in him, his delirious anguish, his fits of jealous fury, his returns of tenderness, his religious consolations.

Part two
A ball

He meets again his beloved in a ball during a glittering fête.

Part three
Scene in the countryside

One summer evening in the countryside he hears two shepherds dialoguing with their ‘Ranz des vaches’; this pastoral duet, the setting, the gentle rustling of the trees in the light wind, some causes for hope that he has recently conceived, all conspire to restore to his heart an unaccustomed feeling of calm and to give to his thoughts a happier colouring; but she reappears, he feels a pang of anguish, and painful thoughts disturb him: what if she betrayed him… One of the shepherds resumes his simple melody, the other one no longer answers. The sun sets… distant sound of thunder… solitude… silence…

Part four
March to the scaffold

He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march that is sometimes sombre and wild, and sometimes brilliant and solemn, in which a dull sound of heavy footsteps follows without transition the loudest outbursts. At the end, the idée fixe reappears for a moment like a final thought of love interrupted by the fatal blow.

Part five
Dream of a witches’ sabbath

He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance-tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath… Roars of delight at her arrival… She joins the diabolical orgy… The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies Irae. The dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies Irae."

There!! Dramatic stuff.

Berlioz himself enjoyed the odd dose of opium and it is very likely that much of the Symphonie Fantastique was written under its influence.

Answer 2

Berlioz was smitten by a Shakespearean actress, Harriet Smithson, whose wonderful portrayal of Ophelia in Hamlet made the poor sod fell in an obsessive phase. He sent letters to her, which were unanswered for several years. Years of unrequited love bore a fruit that is Symphonie Fantastique.

Some scholars though that Berlioz might have lapsed into a bout of opium smoking, which incidentally opened the Symphonie Fantastique.

When the work premiered in 1830, Ms Smithson was not there, but two years later she heard of the music, and when realised that the symphony came to being because of her, she met Berlioz, and later married, only to divorce nine years later. They parted amicably, of course.

Answer 3

It's about a dream Berlioz had about his fiancee. She gets beheaded.

Answer 4

Layman is right. Also, he was on an opium trip when composing much of it as well.