Theonisis Maximagnum-Lecleaux
A final conducting class essay…with the prompt being:
You have a musically-gifted two-year-old child; you are convinced this prodigy has the musical talent to become a top-flight orchestral conductor and you are prepared to do whatever it takes to insure that this child becomes one. Drawing on your knowledge of conductors, their careers, and the music business in general, describe what you and your spouse would do to make this possible, from early education until the goal is attained. [Do not engage this process with any moral or ethical concerns regarding proper parenting!] Be sure to cite other “success stories” to support your decisions.
Since we come from a modest background, we must immediately seek to acquire wealth, resources, and high-value connections. My spouse will start a business in the retail pharmaceutical industry and work on that throughout our nurturing of Kurt Massig. He will be able to make a profit of 10 million dollars by the time Kurt is 7 years old, leveraging Kurt for marketing and investment deals from prominent rare instrument and music recording venture capitalists.
Second, we will start Kurt off with a completely homeschooled education from the start of his childhood to his adult age. We will hire, using my spouse's gained wealth, the best tutors in piano, conducting, composition, theory, and singing. In addition to his music lessons, he will be tutored in German, Spanish, Italian, French, Mandarin, and Korean. Every day of the week except for Sundays, he has class, as Sunday is when his weekly exams and music performances will occur.
Without worthwhile and strong connections, Kurt will go nowhere. We must change his name to something more exotic, as that will help attract more investors to our company and help him garner recognition for his talents. We shall call him Theonisis Maximagnum-Lecleaux, to appeal to the syllable minimum of a great conductor and to give his name a degree of cultured Latin and French influences. We will pay for visits by world-class musicians and conductors, those of the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony to come perform in our concert hall inside of our mansion that was generously sponsored by the Vanderbilt family. Additionally, we will have the great musicians of our generation come play especially for Theonisis: Yuja Wang, Kerson Leong, Tabea Zimmermann, Renee Fleming, Valerie Milot, Shunske Sato, Arturo Sandoval, Emmanuel Ax, and Yo-Yo Ma. They will be paid generously to give him masterclasses on their respective instruments bimonthly. We will also enroll him in the Juilliard and the New England Conservatory Pre-college programs with special accommodations to do his class work in our home to reduce lost travel–and thus practice–time. We will fly the most promising students in the pre-college and undergraduate level in all instrumental areas to our home to personally get to know Theonisis, enticed by our engorged fortune and possible deals for instrument and concert opportunities.
Outside of his language and his musical studies, he must be an incredibly educated man. After all, Bernstein, Mendelssohn, and Mozart mixed closely with the top intellectual circles. He must rival that of the most erudite scholar, given his already prodigious intellect in music. After he has become fluent in all seven languages and intermittent study with Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, and Japanese, he will take lessons in rhetoric, the classics, advanced mathematics, literature, history, the natural sciences and psychology. His class schedule will be organized through Bryan Johnson and Andrew Huberman alongside Matthew Walker to most precisely optimize and calibrate his health, his learning, and his sleep for recovery. His days will have every minute extracted for maximum time to hone his intellect and musical abilities.
Even if he could be the most educated and talented person in the world, his charisma and his social skills will need developing most of all. He needs to be able to talk to any person, rich or poor, in a language familiar or unfamiliar, and be able to convince them without question he is brilliant, charismatic, and affable. Thus, he will get specific coaching on social skills once he has trimmed his language courses down to a minimum that include body language, speaking, oration, relationship management, and empathy.
Modelling after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, me and my spouse will be undertaking rigorous musical training alongside Theonisis in order to ensure he is able to constantly sustain the most productive practice. We will also be in the spirit of Leopold Mozart and Reuven Heifetz and leveraging Theonisis to further grow and gain income and recognition. As a result of our strategic marketing of Theonisis’ skills and my spouses pharmaceutical company, we reach into the hundreds of millions in net worth.
By the time Theonisis will finish his 14th year, he will have performed the entire standard keyboard and conducted all of the most important standard repertoire. From the notoriety of other undergraduate students and our widespread fame and intense training, we were paid personal visits by the head directors of Curtis, Hochschule für Musik, Juilliard, and Colburn. Given the specific Leonard Bernstein Fellowship he received which allows him to conduct Tanglewood, New York Philharmonic, and New York City Symphony all simultaneously, we chose Curtis for him. He will be fluent in 7+ different languages, and through constant invitations of notable musicians, will secure a lifetime contract through the Columbia Artists Management Inc. of New York that ensures his position at one of the Big Five when he graduates from Curtis.
Theonisis will be the next Mozart, the next Bernstein, the next Szell, as his education will be the most formidable and versatile of any musician. His constant exposure to world-class music, colossal workload, and frequent high-caliber performance opportunities will allow him to have instant and widespread recognition. His abilities will be polymathic of scale–music, academics, and social engagements will be at the near-zenith of humanity and make him the ultimate conducting marvel. After graduating from Curtis in a record one year at the age of 15, he premieres with the New York Philharmonic on a world tour as dictated by his Leonard Bernstein Fellowship and conducts the Philharmonic alongside a guest conducting role with every major city’s symphony they visit.
By 18, he is a renowned world conductor, holding principal positions in Berlin, New York, and London, composing works with the distinctive fire resembling a lack of childhood and an immediate Beethoven-like intensity. Our family, now rich well into the hundreds of millions, commands a financial backing that of a lesser Paul Sacher. We give him our entire fortune to create a vast Gesamtkunstwerk of architecture, literature, sound, and performance, as a becoming an adult gift. By letting Theonisis design the largest and most acoustically magnificent concert hall in the world, he unifies his love of the classic greek and roman structures with their poetic epics, and debuting with his Theonisis Symphony Orchestra, handpicked members from the best orchestras in the world on personal payroll by our family. He also enlists his great friends, the world-class soloists that came to visit him in his youth, to play in his premiere–garnering further attention. Using his vast intellect, unsurpassed skills in composition, keyboard, and conducting, he composes the modern Ring cycle using his synthetic genius.
