This combination of trivial ends with highly clever means may be illustrated by the "Symphonie Fantastique," a work which, though written early in his career, remains one of his most characteristic productions. How different, to begin with, are the inspirations which a romanticist and a realist derive from the passion of love! Schumann, married to Clara Wieck after years of waiting, utters his joy in a series of songs, the most lyrical, the most intimate, that song literature has to show. Chopin, in an amorous revery, writes in the larghetto of the F-minor Concerto one of the quietest, simplest, most devout of all his pieces. Berlioz, on the contrary, is goaded by the thought of his Ophelia to conceive "a young musician of unhealthily sensitive nature," who "has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of love-sick despair," and to carry this hero through a very detailed drama in five acts.[31] His impulse is, in short, realistic rather than lyrical, and the art in which he embodies it is descriptive and narrative rather than emotionally expressive.
The most important technical result of this realistic attitude is that Berlioz, as we have already noted, treats his melodies, not as materials for a purely musical development, but as symbols of characters or other dramatic motives, thereby anticipating the _leit-motif_ idea which later became so prominent in the work of Wagner and Liszt. The central motive in the "Symphonie Fantastique" is the melody known as "_l'idée fixe_," symbolizing the beloved, roughly transcribed for the piano in Figure XXIV.
This melody, though it appears in each of the five movements, undergoes but little evolution; it is complete in the first place, and in its later phases is often modified hardly at all, or if so chiefly for dramatic reasons. In the Ball Scene two phrases of it are sounded pianissimo, by the clarinet, just after a sounding climax of the full orchestra,[32] to indicate the hero's remembrance of the beloved in the midst of the festivities. In the third movement, "In the Country," it is given to the oboe and flute (full score, p. 66), and is treated somewhat more ingeniously, its fifth phrase being interrupted by a rough tumult in all the strings. In "The Procession to the Stake" it figures purely as a theatrical property in a highly characteristic and amusing passage. The hero has finished his long march to the place of execution; as he puts his head on the block silence descends upon the scene, and then a single clarinet plays four measures of the theme--"Ah! he thinks of her once more"--but the thought is cut short by a blow of the axe (fortissimo chord, _tutti_) and the death-rattle (tremolando on three kettle-drums) ends the movement and his life together. Only in the last movement, the frenetic "Witches' Sabbath," is the theme really varied. Here, at p. 102, it appears as in Figure XXV, turned by change of rhythm and the addition of ornament into a grotesque, undignified dance tune.