Tales from the Stave: Series 7, Episode 4
Frances Fyfield Audio Book

Written when he was still an aspiring composer, driven by the image of a woman with whom he had fallen passionately in love from afar, and breaking new ground in the drama of concert performance, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is one of the most important manuscripts held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. With the help of the conductor Nigel Simeone, the Berlioz scholar Professor Peter Bloom and the music curator Cecile Reynaud, Frances Fyfield discovers the youthful energy of the handwritten score that Berlioz kept with him for 14 years before delivering it to the publishers. In that time there were rewrites, extra parts written in for extraordinary circumstances and other tweaks and refinements. But the score also comes complete with the composer's dedications to Harriet Smithson, the Anglo-Irish actress whose image became the famous 'idee fixe' of the symphony. Produced by Tom Alban.