I think if you're able to make the music you want and you can do it in the right kind of context, you don't have to be a circus ringleader to be successful.
“As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.”
“Only recently, during the nineteenth century, and then only in Europe, do we meet forms of the state which have been created by a deliberate national feeling.”