Hector Berlioz fell in love with an Irish actress after seeing her play Ophelia — and wrote the Symphonie fantastique. Her name was Harriet Smithson, and she spoke no French. A few years later they married. The marriage proved unhappy.
He was born in 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André. His father, a physician, intended medicine for him. Berlioz began his studies in Paris — and abandoned them for music. His father cut off his allowance, and he had to live by giving lessons and writing reviews.
The Symphonie fantastique (1830) was the first programmatic orchestral masterpiece: a young artist, drugged with opium, sees the execution of his beloved and a witches' sabbath. Each instrument supplies a detail of the hallucination.
The Requiem, The Damnation of Faust, Roméo et Juliette — music on a vast scale, an orchestra of a hundred and fifty. He was buried with pomp in Paris in 1869.