Symphonie Fantastique

An unredeemed aesthetic type in art school, I was immersed in Bosch, Breughel, Symbolists Moreau, Delville and Toroop, the dark visionary Alfred Kubin and the flamboyant Ernst Fuchs in Vienna. Baudelaire, Huysmans and Rimbaud impacted me as I also counted Mahler and Berlioz among my musical heroes oft repeated the latter’s own program notes for Symphony Fantastique in a parody of myself: “A young man of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination takes a massive dose of opium in a fit of amorous despair and dreams that he is at witches sabbath.” Little did I know in 1973 how precisely this program had become my own!