Pierre Boulat
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La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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In the courtyard of Hector Berlioz's house in Côte-Saint-André, the candles testify: when he first played his "Symphonie fantastique", the orchestra was placed in the hall each musician having his score lit by a candle, and the audience was on the stagIe. -
La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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The cabinet of Dr. Louis-Joseph Berlioz, who taught him rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine. Next to his father's armchair was the small, shell-shaped stool on which he sat. On the desk was a seismograph, with which the doctor explaining to him the roundness of the earth, Hector BerliozÕs inkwell and some treatises of medicine and surgery having belonged to the doctor. -
La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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The bedroom of Hector Berlioz's parents. He was born there. On the wall, between the two windows, the doctor's portrait. The round table is the one that Hector Berlioz had in his apartment while a student in Paris as well as the cup with saucer and two glasses. The bed belonged to his youngest sister, Adele. -
La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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The music room. His parents, hostile to his vocation as a musician, always refused to have a piano at home, but the study of music was part of the education of the bourgeoisie of the time. On a desk, two Berlioz scores; on the table, under the metronome Rameau's treatise through which he learned the harmony, and the flute resting on the method with which he studied this instrument. The guitar, which he broke in a movement of anger and threw in the fire, has been restored. On the mantelpiece, the bust of Hector Berlioz by B. Feinberg. On the right of the door, the portrait of his grandmother and on the left of the window, the portrait of the magistrate Burdet, the father-in-law of Odile, his first cousin whom he had thought for a moment to marry. -
La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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The kitchen has kept its large fireplace and stone sink. -
La Côte Saint André - Hector Berlioz's birthplace
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On a table in the dining room, the testimonies of the success that Berlioz obtained outside France: Chinese cups donated by the Grand Duchess of Russia, a laurel wreath offered on December 10, 1845 in Vienna - the titles of his works are engraved on the sheets- and a silver conductor baton, gift by Germany.
Inspired Homes / 8 – Hector Berlioz’s
A refuge for Passions
The Côte-Saint-André is, in Dauphiné, a quiet village where the most famous French romantic composer, also prophet of the music of the twentieth century. A bourgeois residence, built at the end of the 18th century, with its stone staircases, exposed beams and a glass door leading to a wooden balcony, which connects all the rooms on the first floor and overlooks a small courtyard where a fountain murmuring. Berlioz loved the living room with walls full of ancestral portraits and the cluttered library of classical books.
His father, Dr. Louis-Joseph Berlioz, though an unambitious doctor, was a cultured humanist, an ultra-royalist, anti-Napoleonic and, moreover, an unbeliever. He taught him rhetoric and philosophy as well as medicine. “If you promise me,” said the doctor to his son he wanted to become a doctor, “to seriously undertake your osteology course, I will bring from Lyon for you a magnificent flute …”
Rather small in size, wild red-haired blond, nose like a bird’s beak, thin and tight lips, tough, this son of provincial bourgeois was bored in the family home. And dreaming of a fate. When he left at the age of 18, his only belongings were a flageolet, a flute and a guitar: the music already inhabited it. He will never come back to live there. But in this house, he already wore in him what would become one of his masterpieces as an accursed artist, his “Symphonie Fantastique”.
