Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
L’Enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ), Op. 25

Hector Berlioz was born in 1803 at La Cote-St-Andre in the departement of Isere, the eldest son of a doctor of some local distinction. After the closing of the nearby Imperial Seminary in 1811, he was educated by his father, who taught him Latin, giving him an early taste for Virgil, and passed on to him a love of literature. He also instructed him in the rudiments of music, through the flageolet and then the flute, the only instruments, along with the guitar that Berlioz was to play. His father, with his double passion for literature and for music, remained always a model for him; at his father’s death in 1848, he wrote: It seems that my life no longer has an aim, instinctively there had always been, in my efforts, a tendency towards my father, a desire for his approval, a hope that he would be proud of them and now.