"Which power raises man the higher? Love or music? It is a great question. It seems to me that love alone cannot give an idea of music, but music can give an idea of love - why separate them? They are the twin wings of the soul." So once declared Hector Berlioz, and his life, all permeated with love and music, was certainly a demonstration of that sentence.

To striving, ambitious musicians there cannot be a more inspiring figure than Hector Berlioz. His whole life was a continuous struggle, a battle against critics, public, musicians of the old school. If he succeeded in overcoming the most discouraging, seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the most obdurate adverse criticism, there is no doubt that everybody else, also possessed of the same amount of pertinacity, energy and diligence, will be able to do the same.

From earliest youth he had to fight against the narrow-mindedness of his parents. His father, Louis Berlioz, was a country doctor with a large practice, and his mother, devout in all religious observance, looked upon an artistic career as a terrible temptation and shrank in horror from the idea of a life so little in accord with the traditions of respectability.