Hector Berlioz

📍69 Rue de la République, 38260 La Côte-Saint-André, Isère, France

“I was born Hector Berlioz on the 11th of December 1803 in La Côte-Saint-André, a small town in the Isère department of southeastern France, the son of a doctor. My father gave me my first musical education and encouraged a broad reading in classical literature that became the foundation of my imagination — the Symphonie Fantastique, the Damnation of Faust, the Trojan opera all came from literary sources absorbed in the La Côte-Saint-André library. I was sent to Paris to study medicine, attended the Opéra instead, and eventually entered the Conservatoire. My father hoped medicine; I heard Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and understood that music was not a choice but a necessity. The Dauphiné landscape of my childhood — its mountains and meadows — appears in the pastoral movements of my music.”

Sources: Cairns, D. Berlioz (1989-1999), University of California Press; Berlioz, H. Memoirs (1870, translated David Cairns 1969)