Word: choirboy
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Dates: during 1928-1928
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...serious-minded music student for all his Irish-Italian blood and romantic ancestry: his grandfather was favorite in Napoleon's body guard at St. Helena, and had the grim duty of protecting the dead Little Corporal's heart from voracious rats. But Arthur was a sweet-faced choirboy, beloved mascot of his father's band, successful candidate for a Leipzig Mendelssohn scholarship. Returned to London, he wrote cantatas, oratorios, 56 hymns (among them Onward Christian Soldiers), and also popular lyrics (The Lost Chord), and operetta-burlesque (Cox and Box). Victoria smiled on him, the masses adored...
...become the life of his last string quartets, his quintet, the C Major and the great Unfinished Symphony. In Vienna he was first just the thirteenth child of a Moravian peasant-schoolmaster and a dreary cook in a middle-class family. He was the bushy-haired, undersized choirboy in the Imperial Chapel, the one with the thick spectacles. He was the feeble violinist in a small school orchestra. He was the round-shouldered fellow teaching in his father's parish school to dodge military service. He was the awkward, pasty-faced composer drifting about the city with never enough...