In the long list of brilliant names which have illustrated the fine arts, there is none attached to a personality more interesting and impressive than that of Hector Berlioz.  He stands solitary, a colossus in music, with but few admirers and fewer followers.  Original, puissant in faculties, fiercely dogmatic and intolerant, bizarre, his influence has impressed itself profoundly on the musical world both for good and evil, but has failed to make disciples or to rear a school.  Notwithstanding the defects and extravagances of Berlioz, it is safe to assert that no art or philosophy can boast of an example of more perfect devotion to an ideal.  The startling originality of Berlioz as a musician rests on a mental and emotional organization different from and in some respects superior to that of any other eminent master.  He possessed an ardent temperament; a gorgeous imagination, that knew no rest in its working, and at times became heated to the verge of madness; a most subtile sense of hearing; an intellect of the keenest analytic turn; a most arrogant will, full of enterprise and daring, which clung to its purpose with unrelenting tenacity; and passions of such heat and fervor that they rarely failed when aroused to carry him beyond all bounds of reason.  His genius was unique, his character cast in the mold of a Titan, his life a tragedy.  Says Blaze de Bussy:  “Art has its martyrs, its forerunners crying in the wilderness, and feeding on roots.  It has also its spoiled children sated with bonbons and dainties.”  Berlioz belongs to the former of these classes, and, if ever a prophet lifted up his voice with a vehement and incessant outcry, it was he.

Hector Berlioz was born on December 11, 1803, at Cote Saint Andre, a small town between Grenoble and Lyons.  His father was an excellent physician of more than ordinary attainments, and he superintended his son’s studies with great zeal in the hope that the lad would also become an ornament of the healing profession.  But young Hector, though an excellent scholar in other branches, developed a special aptitude for music, and at twelve he could sing at sight, and play difficult concertos on the flute.  The elder regarded music only as a graceful ornament to life, and in no wise encouraged his son in thinking of music as a profession.  So it was not long before Hector found his attention directed to anatomy, physiology, osteology, etc.  In his father’s library he had already read of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, etc., and had found a manuscript score of an opera which he had committed to memory.  His soul revolted more and more from the path cut out for him.  “Become a physician!” he cried, “study anatomy; dissect; take part in horrible operations?  No! no!  That would be a total subversion of the natural course of my life.”