Page:Anecdotes of Great Musicians.djvu/204

192

Perhaps more talent than the world has ever known, more genius than it has ever recognized, has been repressed and coffined by the obstinacy, stupidity, or prejudice of parents. Many a child, born to astonish the world in some line of art, has been pushed into some uncongenial occupation and its talents lost to humanity.

But in some cases chance, a strong will, or Providence has overruled the plans of the parents, and genius has run its course. There are enough of these cases in music alone to warrant our previous statement that in many instances where the parents' will has prevailed the world has been the loser.

We have only to mention that Händel's parents had arranged that he was to be a lawyer; that Tartini was to be moulded into a priest; that Schubert was compelled to teach school for many a day at a mere pittance; that Schumann could hardly escape from the court room, following his parents' will, to his congenial music; that Weber was kept for some time from his chosen profession; that Zelter was apprenticed to a stone-mason; that Berlioz' parents were determined to make a poor doctor where a great musician was the result; that Bülow became a doctor of law ere he realized that music was his life work,—we have only to realize all these instances and to partially grasp what these men have been to the world to believe that but a part of the talent and genius that the race is endowed with comes to the surface. We can never know the number of cases in which it is repressed, stifled, murdered beyond resurrection in this life.