Perhaps, someday, we will have a great leader who was a decidedly mediocre student in spite of starting life with every conceivable advantage, and then went on to fail miserably in industry before entering public office and winning on the strength of his own name.
Yep, maybe we'll get someone like that.
how very sly you are, doggie . . .
As sly as a blimp, as sharp as a truncheon, and as precise as precise as Ray Charles with a handgun.
I just hope no one thinks it was a Hitler comparison...
Franz Josef Haydn was recruited for the cathedral choir in Vienna while still a small boy, basically the son of prosperous peasants. He was bright, and quickly learned musical notation. At age 12, he was offered the opportunity to get a life sinecure at the cathedral by volunteering to become a castrato--he declined. He was therefore summarily dumped, and put on the street in Vienna, with no money and the clothes on his back. A member of the cathedral orchestra gave him a floor to sleep on with his family, with the caveat that he had to feed himself. He sang on street corners in the day time, when his changing voice did not crack, and afternoons and evenings, he used his knowledge of musical notation to earn some cash copying musical scores, a rare and valuable skill in that day. Eventually, he was recommended to Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, the compositional lion of Vienna in his day, and the court's favorite composer. From Gluck, Haydn learned composition. He eventually earned a reputation as a careful, speedy copyist, and one with sufficient compositional skill to help out the aristocratic amateurs who in those times were eager to appear accomplished composers.
Eventually he got a series of jobs with members of the aristocracy, culminating with an open ended contract with Prince Ezsterhazy, possibly the richest man in Europe in the mid-18th century. Along the way, he invented the string quartet, and took the sinfonia concertante and created from it the modern symphony, by adding an additional movement, changing tempos without regard for the compositional "rules" which the Italians had successfully imposed on the European musical world for centuries, and adding horns and woodwinds to the symphony scores, thereby laying the ground work for the modern symphony orchestra. He is credited with having composed 104 symphonies, although in fact, the number should be 108, without counting the partial revisions, alternate movements, and the complete recomposition of symphony number 67. He married, raised a large and apparently happy family, and his son, Michael Haydn, followed in his father's footsteps. When Prince Ezsterhazy died, Haydn declined to continue in the service of the family, and was paid off for more than thirty years of contract service, making him overnight the wealthiest composer in Europe. He went to Paris, where he was lionized and well paid, and then took up an offer which Mozart had declined, to do the Solomon concerts in the Hanover Rooms, which generated some of his most famous symphonies, and earned him even more money. At that point, he was so well known, people would pay a reduced admission to enter the concert hall after the performance, simply to look at him, so that they could boast of it to their acquaintance.
Hard to find a better rags to riches story than his, especially in consideration of the continued popularity of his work, and the places which both the string quartet and the symphony orchestra have occupied in musical circles ever since.
There is much on the news about Conrad Black....
I don't see any leaping to defend him.
Think Rupert Murdoch, only in Canadia . . .
