“I am going to leave forever
This dear land and my sweet love,
So alas! must fond hearts sever,
As my tears and grief do prove!
River, that has served so gaily
To reflect her lovely face,
Stop your course to tell her, daily,
I no more shall see this place!”
Although it joined the quintettes in the fire before I went to Paris, yet in 1829, when I planned my Symphonie Fantastique, this little melody crept humbly back into my mind; it seemed to me to voice so perfectly the crushing weight of young and hopeless love that I welcomed it home and enshrined it, without any alteration, for the first violins in the largo of the opening movement—Rêveries.
But the fatal hour of choosing a profession drew rapidly nearer. My father made no secret of his intention that I should follow in his footsteps and become a doctor, since this he considered the finest career in the world; I, on the other hand, made no secret of my opinion that it was, to me, the most repulsive.
Without knowing exactly what I did want, I was absolutely certain that I did not want to be tied to the bedsides of sick people, to pass my days in hospitals and operating theatres, and I determined that no power on earth should turn me into a doctor.
My resolve was intensified by the lives of Gluck and Haydn that I read about this time in the “Biographie Universelle.” “How glorious,” I cried, “to live for Art, to spend one’s life in her beautiful service!” and then came a mere trifle which threw open the gates of that paradise for which I had been so blindly groping.
As yet I had never seen a full score; all I knew of printed music was a few scraps of solfeggi with figured bass or bits of operas with a piano accompaniment. But one day I stumbled across a piece of paper ruled with twenty-four staves, and, in a flash, I saw the splendid scope this would give for all kinds of combinations.
“What orchestration I might get with that!” I said, and from that minute my music-love became a madness equalled only in force by my aversion to medicine.
As I dared not tell my parents, it happened that by means of this very passion for music, my father tried decisive measures to cure me of what he called my “babyish antipathy” to his loved profession.
Calling me into his study where Munro’s Anatomy, with its life-size pictures of the human framework, lay open on the table, he said:
“See, my boy, I want you to work hard at this. I cannot believe that you will let unreasoning prejudice stand in the way of my wishes. If you will do your best, I will order you the very finest flute to be got in Lyons, with all the new keys.”