Hector’s parents determined he should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician. The idea revolted him and he struggled against it much as Schumann combated his mother’s wish to make a jurist of a youth with the soul of a poet. Nevertheless, he made as if to comply with the parental will—though one can guess with how many unspoken reservations! And so in the autumn of 1821, he set off for Paris to study medicine. But what fascinated him there were the theatres, the opera houses, the concert halls—things which up to that time he had never enjoyed the opportunity of visiting—and not the loathsome hospitals, anatomical amphitheatres, dissecting rooms and other nauseating horrors. He had felt all along that he was never intended to spend his life “at the bedside of sick people, in hospitals and dissecting chambers”. His father had made the cardinal mistake of “using his love of music as a lever for removing his ‘childish aversion’ to embark on the study of medicine” and, as a reward for working earnestly at osteology had given his refractory son nothing less to the purpose than “a splendid flute, with all the new keys”!
In Paris Hector lost no time visiting the Opéra, the Théâtre Italien, the Théâtre Feydeau, the Ambigu-Comique. He heard Salieri’s “Danaides”, Boieldieu’s “Voitures Versées”, Dalayrac’s “Nina”. Above all, he heard Gluck’s “Iphigénie en Tauride”, and this masterpiece definitely settled the question. His life would be dedicated to music and medicine could go hang! Berlioz the scarlet Romanticist was born at the moment he solemnly made this resolve. It was farewell, henceforth, to the “human charnel house, littered with fragments of limbs, ghastly faces and cloven heads ... where swarms of sparrows fought for scraps and rats in the corners gnawed human vertebrae.” He had, to be sure, grown somewhat hardened after his first appalling impression and had even gotten so far as to “cast a shoulder blade to a great rat which was staring at me with famished eyes”! But the physical reactions he experienced to the music he loved attracted him in the same degree as the horrid displays of the hospital laboratories revolted him. In the theatre listening to Gluck and Spontini “his knees would tremble convulsively, his teeth chatter, he suffered with dizzy spells till he could not stand unsupported, he was bathed in sweat, his scalp contracted, tears choked him, he lost all sensation in fingers and toes, he was seized with chills and hot flashes....” If this was not actually a type of celestial intoxication it was certainly a romantic imagination conveyed through the empurpled diction of the hour!