Symphony Fantastique

My daughter just recently graduated with a Bachelors of Music degree, and has been living home for the last few weeks. We had all gone down to the Chautauqua Institution for dinner with their mother and grandmother, and were driving home, a three hour trip. My oldest, the music person, had on her iPod and was listening to Rap. My youngest one seemed to be texting friends etc. I was listening to the radio.

Public radio was on from Buffalo9 and they were broadcasting the Pittsburgh Symphony concert. They were about to play Berlioz’s  Symphony Fantastique: (Fantastic Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts) Op. 14 is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is an important piece of the early Romantic period.

The first performance was at the Paris Conservatorie in December 1830. The work was repeatedly revived between 1831 and 1845 and subsequently became a favourite in Paris. The author imagines that a young vibrant musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer  has called the vagueness  of passions  and sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. The piece relates to an exploration of a drug overdose.

My daughter says  that she knows about this piece as they studied it in music history.

Twice during the ensuing ride, my daughter asked me to turn up the radio and she removed her iPod.

This has never happened before!

I thought with a wry smile upon my face, “$80,000 has gotten me this moment!”