Another poem of Goethe’s that he read told of a wild rose growing on a heath. A boy saw the rose and said, “I will pluck you.” The rose said, “No, no. If you do I will prick you.” The foolish boy laughed and picked the rose, and it kept its word. This is the song Schubert made of the poem:
So you see that almost everything made Franz Schubert think of music. He wrote many, many songs and much other music, and although it is almost a hundred years since he died, his name and his works will live as long as men love melody. The greatest singers in the world use his songs over and over because rich and poor alike love them, and whenever singers want to be very sure of pleasing they sing some of the songs of him who was once a boy in old Vienna, Franz Schubert.
SOURCES OF MATERIAL TO AWAKEN AN APPRECIATION OF MUSIC
BENDER: _Some Great Opera Stories_ (General Operas).
CATHER, KATHERINE DUNLAP: _Pan and His Pipes and Other Stories_; _Boyhood Stories of Famous Men_.
CHAPIN, ANNA ALICE: _The Heart of Music_; _Makers of Song_; _Stories of the Wagner Operas_; _The Story of the Rhinegold_.
CROWEST, FREDERICK JAMES: _The Life of Verdi_.
DOLE, NATHAN HASKELL: _A Score of Famous Composers_.
DUTTON COMPANY: _The Master Musician Series_.
FRYBERGER, AGNES: _Listening Lessons in Music_.
GUERBER, HELÈNE A.: _Stories of the Wagner Operas_.
HENSEL, SEBASTIAN: _The History of the Mendelssohn Family_.
PICTURES TO USE IN TELLING MUSICAL STORIES
BORCKMAN: Mozart and His Sisters before Maria Theresa; Beethoven and the Rusmnowsky Quartette.
HAMMAN: Mozart at Vienna; Preludes of Bach; Haydn Crossing the English Channel; Handel and George I of England.
ROSENTHAL: Morning Prayers in the Family of Bach.
[1] Brown, Perry, or Cosmos Pictures, or they may be obtained from Victor Talking Machine Company, especially the living artists.
STORY-TELLING TO AWAKEN AN APPRECIATION OF ART
The child who is surrounded by good pictures from his earliest years grows to love good pictures, and gaudily colored, cheap ones have no charm for him. His taste has been formed for the fine and true, and nothing else will satisfy him. To behold a beautiful painting gives him pleasure, while to see a glaring chromo produces an unpleasant sensation. This is not because he is different by nature from one to whom masterpieces have no meaning, but because he has learned to know them.