According to
The New Penguin Dictionary of Music, [Louis] Hector Berlioz was a French composer; learnt guitar, and had general music training at Paris Conservatory, but became proficient neither on piano or any orchestral instrument yet a proficient master and innovator in orchestration (on which he wrote a book) also noted as conductor and music critic. Nearly all his works have some literary or other extra-musical allusion. His love for the English Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson is expressed in his "Fantastic Symphony", 1830; he married her in 1833 and separated from her in 1842.