Josef shook his head. “None but his brothers, Ignace and Ferdinand, and once, for a very short time, his father sent him to a singing tutor. But he said he could teach him nothing, for when he thought to give him something new he found he had learned it already.”
“Surely he is a wonder child,” the stranger remarked. “Be sure to tell his father to bring him tomorrow and we will try him.”
Then he passed out, but Franz did not see him. Nor did he know a word that had been spoken until on the way home, when Josef told him that the emperor’s choirmaster had passed by and was so pleased with his singing and playing that he wanted him in the royal choir.
So little Franz Schubert became a choir boy, and the master wondered more and more that one so young could know so much of music.
Then he went to a boys’ school. His clothes were not very fine, for he was poor. But he wore the best he had, a light gray suit that was far from handsome. Some of the richer boys thought it funny and nicknamed him “the miller.” But when Franz passed the severe singing examination so well that he was given one of the gold-braided honor uniforms, they did not tease him again. No one else did as well in the orchestra as the little Schubert lad. No one else sang as understandingly as he, and his master and fellow students, like the royal choirmaster, called him a wonder child. Every boy in the school liked him, and Franz liked them all too, but especially a young man named Spaun. And Spaun’s name is remembered to this day just because once upon a time he was kind to little Franz Schubert. He was almost twenty when Franz was but eleven, but they were jolly companions and the best of friends.
One day Franz said, “If I had some paper I know I could write a song.”
But paper he had not, because his father could not afford to buy it. Spaun always had a little money to spend, however, so Franz got the paper and wrote the song, and after that his friend supplied him with writing material. He enjoyed doing it because he liked the lad, but he did not realize that it would mean much to the world. It did mean a great deal, however, for some of the songs Franz wrote during his school days are still sung as among the sweetest in the world, and perhaps but for Spaun’s paper they might not have been written.
Well, Franz grew up just as other boys grow, and still he went on loving music and working at it, playing and writing songs. Almost everything he read or saw made him think of a melody, and every melody that formed in his brain was beautiful.
One evening he went into a restaurant in Vienna for his dinner. He had a small copy of Shakespeare in his pocket, and as he waited to be served he took it out and read. His eye fell upon the lines:
Hark, hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,