Student life Parisĭrawing of Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet While yet at age 12, as recalled in his Mémoires, he experienced his first passion for a woman, an 18-year-old next door neighbour named Estelle Fornier (née Dubœuf). Berlioz appears to have been innately Romantic, this characteristic manifesting itself in his love affairs, adoration of great romantic literature, as well as Shakespeare and Beethoven, and his weeping at passages by Virgil (by age twelve he had learned to read Virgil in Latin and translate it into French under his father’s tutelage). The majority of his early compositions were romances and chamber pieces. He learned harmony by textbooks alone-he was not formally trained. He became proficient at guitar, flageolet and flute.
As a result of his father’s discouragement, he never learned to play the piano, a peculiarity he later described as both beneficial and detrimental. The other two, Nanci and Adèle, remained close to Berlioz throughout his life.īerlioz was not a child prodigy, unlike some other famous composers of the time he began studying music at age 12, writing small compositions and arrangements. He had five siblings in all, three of whom did not survive to adulthood. His father, Louis Berlioz, a respected provincial physician and scholar who is widely credited for first experimenting and recording the use of acupuncture in Europe, was responsible for much of the young Berlioz’s education. Louis was an agnostic, with a liberal outlook his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was a devout Roman Catholic. Hector Berlioz was born in France at La Côte-Saint-André in the département of Isère, near Grenoble.
His influence was critical for the further development of Romanticism, especially in composers like Richard Wagner, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and many others. He specified huge orchestral forces for some of his works, and conducted several concerts with more than 1,000 musicians. Berlioz made significant contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation. Hector Berlioz ( French: 11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande messe des morts (Requiem).
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