Follow Your Heart

 https://www.classicalwcrb.org/blog/2022-09-01/get-a-real-job

Alexander Borodin (1833-1837) was born the illegitimate son of a married 25-year old woman and a wealthy older man. Societal dictates of the day resulted in the father not acknowledging the son, but instead registering him as the child of one of his serfs, named Borodin. When Alexander was seven his biological father emancipated him from serfdom and provided for the boy and his mother with a house and private tutors, and when he was 17, he enrolled in the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy to become a doctor. One can imagine how important it was to him to shed the shame of “illegitimacy” and to “become somebody.” He served a year as a military surgeon, and then went on to do advanced study in the sciences. He returned to the medical college as a professor of chemistry and spent the rest of his career in teaching and research there. He was highly regarded as a medical chemist and always considered that his actual career, while music became an avocation. In fact, he didn’t even begin music lessons until age 29 when he began studying composition with Mily Balakirev. He became an accomplished cellist, and a respected composer of symphonies, chamber music, and opera.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was given music lessons by his musician-father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, from when he was a young child. Due to ill health, which modern medical researchers now suggest could have been caused by severe asthma (he was a violin virtuoso, but couldn’t ever produce enough air to play wind instruments), the teenaged Antonio gave up his dream of becoming a musician and studied for the priesthood, instead. He gained the nickname, “The Red Priest,” because of his red hair. He served as a priest for only about one year, however, before turning back to music.

The story gets a bit muddy here. Some accounts say he couldn’t concentrate on saying the Mass because a musical phrase would jump into his head and he’d just leave the altar mid-Mass to write it down! Other stories emphasize that the mysterious illness, which included a tightening of the chest, made him too weak to finish saying a Mass completely. He was given special dispensation from having to say Mass as part of his priestly duties, and instead became a music teacher for the girls at a Church-run orphanage in his native Venice. Boys would leave the school around age 15 after learning a trade, but the orphanage included musical instrument training so the girls would learn desirable skills to become governesses.

Vivaldi is credited with writing over 600 concertos, (over 500 of which have been found so far), and a number of them were pieces he wrote to highlight the musical abilities of his students. Wealthy patrons of the orphanage would be invited to school recitals and hire governesses for their children based on the girls’ musical talents. In his spare time, Vivaldi also accepted commissions from royalty and wealthy patrons. He eventually moved to Vienna, concentrating on staging his own operas. He died there in 1741.