Schubert's Family Matters

Most musicians are aware of Mozart's relationship with his father. He embraced his son's talent with open arms. He paraded young Mozart all around Europe hawking his talent and making him known to the public. He considered his whole family fortunate to have a member (or two, as his daughter, Nanerl was also of great musical talent) in posession of a talent so lucrative.

This is why, I suppose, I was so surprised to read in our exerpts for class of Schubert's father being opposed to his devoting his life to music. I suppose it seemed odd, what with he, himself being musical, and encouraging his son to study violin and music in general, even organizing a family string quartet, that he didn't envision music as his son's ticket to a successful life.

It seems that the emergence of both Schubert and Mozart's talents were similar. Both were very young, skilled at piano and violin. Both wrote small inventions of their own, and showed early promise of talent in composition in general.

The times were not so different in between Mozart and Schubert as to make me think that Schubert's father, a humble school teacher living with his family of seven in a two room apartment, would not realize the potential of having a young son so talented. Not that he necessarily should have farmed out his child's talent in exchange for money or his own personal fame. We see the effects of this "stage-parent" syndrome all over the place today (Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus- take your pick of any oversexed, underloved starlet in the tabloids today...), and it can visibly turn into a bad thing. But Mozart's story of being a tiny tot with gifted possibilites would not have been so long ago that Schubert's father would not have thought it possible for his son, of comparable talent, to also become a pint-sized rockstar.

As we know, Schubert's father obviously relented when he realized that music was what Schubert truly wanted to do. Schubert went on to have a very successful and prolific musical life. This makes me wonder: Had Mozart's father not pushed his musical talent to its utmost potential, would Mozart have been the man we remember today? What if, at seven years old, he had discovered he loved to paint, or throw pottery, or play polo, or decided to become a junior politician? The world will never know.