Recently, while listening to Larry Fine's recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, I decided to do some research on this great violinist, and came across an interesting what-if.
According to Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Fine Fine was born in 1902 to a Russian-Jewish family as Louis Feinberg in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Joseph Feinberg, and mother, Fanny Lieberman, owned a watch repair and jewelry shop. When Louis was a child he burned his arm with some acid that his father used to test whether or not gold was real. Mistaking it for a cool drink, Louis had the bottle to his lips when his father noticed and slapped it from his hand, splashing his forearm with acid. Later Louis received violin training to help strengthen his damaged muscles.
Unfortunately, the Feinbergs were too poor to send Louis to a conservatory, but he managed to find work playing the violin in vaudeville (where he performed as "Larry Fine", which he eventually adopted as his legal name). One day Leopold Stokowski heard him and was so impressed that he offered to finance the young man's musical education at the newly established Curtis Institute. Fine quickly established himself as a famous virtuoso violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and other orchestras, as well as chamber music groups.
One interesting thing about Fine is that despite his highly intellectual tastes in music--it is no accident that Fine was the soloist at the American premiere of Berg's Violin Concerto, or that the Larry Fine Quartet was the first to record all of Bartok's string quartets--he was also (perhaps a legacy of his vaudeville days) a great fan of "lowbrow" entertainment as well. He even composed a set of "Variations on 'Pop Goes the Weasel'", and his favorite comedy group was said to be the "Three Stooges" (Moe, Shemp, and Curly Howard).
The what-if of course is what if Stokowski hadn't discovered Larry Fine. I doubt that we would ever have heard of Fine in that event.