"My whole life," Berlioz wrote, "has been one long ardent pursuit of an ideal which I created myself." In this programme, Donald Macleod explores the music that resulted from Berlioz's romantic idealism, including his falling in love, precociously, at the age of 12; and later, in what he called "the grand drama of my life," his overwhelming infatuation with the young Irish actress Harriet Smithson, an infatuation which would produce two of his genre-defying works, Symphonie Fantastique and Lélio, or the Return to Life. Show less