Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La Côte St. André, a small town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world when, in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent him to become a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the study of medicine for that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash, resolve, worthy of a born dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were all external forces clearly in league to keep him in the beaten path, but his vocation for music was as yet far from obvious. He played only the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his knowledge of harmony was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his autobiography that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he found a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a moment the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they might give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when the young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into unquenchable flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.
He introduced himself to Lesueur, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength of it became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the aged Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that he should write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous refusal. He did not hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a friend as a means of producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he had written. And all this time he was raising obstacles for himself by his enthusiastic impulsiveness and his utter lack of tact and worldly discretion. The story of his first meeting with Cherubini, a man of far-reaching influence as the director of the Conservatoire, will serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and formal precisian, had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers at the Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this world by finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous figure with a pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then arose an angry altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter to eject the offending student, and a lively chase among the desks. Berlioz, reaching the door, only stopped to announce to the enraged Cherubini that he was "soon coming back to study Gluck again." He did so; but he never conciliated the ill-will of his powerful enemy, who from that day lost no opportunity to frustrate his ambitions.