His opium was simply his genius, which could transform these grotesque fantasies into music. He certainly did have fits of lovesick despair we're told, and he was a creature of wild imagination-wild enough to have these visions and fantasies without taking a dose of anything. Doesn't sound very different from modern days, does it? And we have every reason to suspect that the morbid young musician Berlioz is talking about is none other than Hector himself. Just listen to these first two sentences of his own program note that he wrote describing the symphony. And that's not just my own idea: It's a fact, because Berlioz himself tells us so. He called it Symphonie Fantastique, or 'fantastic symphony,' and fantastic it is, in every sense of the word, including psychedelic. And it's spooky because those sounds you're hearing come from the first psychedelic symphony in history, the first musical description ever made of a trip, written one hundred thirty odd years before the Beatles, way back in 1830 by the brilliant French composer Hector Berlioz (That's Berlioz: the Z is pronounced). Original CBS Television Network Broadcast Date: