Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood

Adeline Mueller

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226787299
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's precocity is so familiar as to be taken for granted. In scholarship and popular culture, Mozart the Wunderkind is often seen as belonging to a category of childhood all by himself. But treating the young composer as an anomaly risks minimizing his impact. In this book, Adeline Mueller examines how Mozart shaped the social and cultural reevaluation of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment. Whether in a juvenile sonata printed with his age on the title page, a concerto for a father and daughter, a lullaby, a musical dice game, or a mass for the consecration of an orphanage church, Mozart's music and persona transformed attitudes toward children's agency, intellectual capacity, relationships with family and friends, political and economic value, work, school, and leisure time.Thousands of children across the Habsburg Monarchy were affected by the Salzburg prodigy and the idea he embodied: that childhood itself could be packaged, consumed, deployed, "performed"—in short, mediated—through music. This book builds upon a new understanding of the history of childhood as dynamic and reciprocal, rather than a mere projection or fantasy—as something mediated not just through texts, images, and objects but also through actions. Drawing on a range of evidence, from children's periodicals to Habsburg court edicts and spurious Mozart prints, Mueller shows that while we need the history of childhood to help us understand Mozart, we also need Mozart to help us understand the history of childhood.

• CHAPTER 1 •

Precocious in Print

From alphabet blocks to swaddling bands, from “A sound mind in a sound body” to “We know nothing of childhood,” John Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, ou De l’éducation (1762) represent for many the alpha and omega of the Enlightenment reevaluation of the child. The narrative originates with Locke, who pioneered a child-centered system of individualized education based on the principle of natural reason and the developmental benefits of play, and established a discourse of the rights of children.1 Seventy years later, Rousseau expanded on Locke, valorizing children’s innate virtue.2 Through a carefully choreographed “negative education,” Rousseau argued, parents and educators could mitigate or even bypass the corrupting effects of inadequate and oppressive social systems.3

For all their differences, Locke and Rousseau were united by their faith in experiential learning, in benevolent guardianship as the motivating principle of education, and in education as the cornerstone of social reform at large. They also shared a new view of children as thinking, feeling beings, possessed of legitimate needs and perspectives. Despite this, theirs were still essentially top-down approaches to childrearing, presenting the child as a largely passive beneficiary of learning—whether as a tabula rasa or “empty cabinet,” in Locke’s formulation, or as a special kind of “noble savage,” in Rousseau’s.4 Their paternalistic orientation is reflected in the format they both chose to promulgate their approaches: the extended essay-treatise, addressed to parents and tutors.5 What Locke and Rousseau shared, and what their works enshrined, was a construction of the child as recipient.

In this chapter, I draw on an alternative conception of Enlightenment childhood, one that treated children not so much as “passive parrots” but rather as “artful collaborators,” to use Marah Gubar’s description of child characters in Golden Age literature.6 This reversal or at least softening of the top-down orientation saw adults begin to engage directly with children as readers, consumers, performers, and even authors—participants in their own self-fashioning. Principal among the agents of this reorientation, I argue, was Mozart. And it was not primarily as a musician that he influenced the Enlightenment conception of childhood. Mozart’s status as a publishing composer had the more significant and lasting effect.

Opus 1–4 (1764–1766), the accompanied sonatas for keyboard and violin that Mozart’s father had printed and sold throughout the family’s first European tour, along with their initial reception, are well accounted for in Otto Erich Deutsch’s documentary biography and its various addenda, and excerpts from this literature are staples of Mozart biography.7 But the sonatas are generally treated only as evidence of the extent of Mozart’s astonishing talents, rather than scrutinized for their broader historical import. Of all the aspects of Mozart historiography to which overfamiliarity risks blinding expert and non-expert alike, his precocity is perhaps the most glaring. Mozart’s sensational achievements before reaching adolescence are now so well known that we take them for granted, and we begin to think of him in a category of childhood all by himself. But treating him as an anomaly minimizes his impact.

I revisit this evidence, along with some lesser-known material, in order to recover Mozart’s place at the heart of late eighteenth-century debates about children and childhood. Like the Victorian-era child literary characters Gubar writes about, the professional child Mozart was a “highly acculturated” and “fully socialized subject.”8 In reevaluating the early reception of his first printed works, and situating him among the other precocious children to whom he was compared, I identify the assumptions about childhood that rulers, pedagogues, and men of letters had to adjust in the wake of his success. Chief among those assumptions was the minimum age of reason, whose revision down and then back up again—both times with Mozart as the standard-bearer—had repercussions not just in print culture, but in policies that affected children across the Habsburg Monarchy.

The word “reason” and its semantic neighbors—knowledge, intelligence, ability, skill, talent, genius—appear again and again in the early reception of Opus 1–4. But what did these terms mean in the 1760s? Some might see the reasoning child as merely an affirmation of Locke’s and Rousseau’s Enlightenment faith in experiential learning; the incremental process by which children acquire the capacity to reason (i.e., make informed choices, recognize truth) speeds up in those children more favorably disposed to its acquisition. But, as I hope to show, Mozart’s juvenile compositions suggested to many that children were capable of independent, creative thought, and could produce works of art and learning that were worthy of serious appraisal by adults. This was something different in kind: it went beyond the child’s successful absorption of knowledge or internalization of principles of reason to encompass a more autonomous exercise of one’s intellect and imagination. To put it another way: if childhood was defined by Locke and Rousseau largely as a time of deficiency of (or freedom from) reason—“an age,” as the historian Anthony Krupp puts it, “under the sign of ‘not yet’”—Mozart embodied a childhood under the sign of “yes, now.”9

This “yes, now” view of the child was mediated through print, but a different kind of print than Some Thoughts or Emile—not a treatise, but popular music, aimed at a broad readership and intended for domestic performance. Mozart was a child himself, one who embodied precocity and whose music enabled consumers to reenact that precocity. But this was not a precocity that can be read backwards from Romanticism, as so many scholars of Mozart’s prodigy years have done. Commentators like Peter Kivy, Maynard Solomon, Gloria Flaherty, and Peter Pesic have tended to privilege nineteenth-century constructions of Mozart as an eternal child or demigod, mistaking his early mastery of a highly conventional style for transcendent originality or divine “lack of experience.”10 Reading up to and around the years of Mozart’s prominence as a child composer, and sampling a range of responses to his emergence in the 1760s, yields a different picture. Whereas nineteenth- and many twentieth-century commentators frequently imputed Mozart’s genius to a productive deficit of reason, those attempting to account for Mozart in his own time seemed more inclined to understand him as having attained mature reason preternaturally early.

In order to ground this idea of Mozart as a thinking, reasoning child, I begin by reassessing the cultural currency of Opus 1–4. These prints were commodities, like all printed music.11 But as music, they invited a sustained, intimate, repeatable identification with their composer, implying a different notion of readership than that in a circulating image, book, or periodical.12 As texts, they were agents of legitimization, preservation, and immortalization. Imagining their performance as “acts” generates another, perhaps more evanescent, set of meanings to do with sympathy with the child author, and recognition of children’s reasoning power.13 Mozart’s importance to Enlightenment childhood originates in his status not as an anomaly, but as an exemplar—a fact that is often missed when looking at Mozartiana solely as biographical evidence.

Unlike Locke or Rousseau, Mozart did not set out to alter Enlightenment notions of children’s reasoning capacity. Nor was his influence permanent. Nevertheless, reactions to his precocity fed back into the top-down discourses of pedagogy, philosophy, and policy, discourses that to this day constitute the main themes of childhood historiography. The imperial court case I discuss later in the chapter, in which Mozart was “Exhibit A” in a debate about children’s capacity to reason, had real import for thousands of children, not just child geniuses. It is for this reason that his early career warrants reevaluation from within the historical norms to which his precocity represented a challenge.

To Be a Reasoning Child

“Picture to yourself the furore which they will make in the world when people read on the title-page that they have been composed by a seven-year-old child.” So wrote Leopold Mozart in 1764 to the wife of his friend and landlord Lorenz Hagenauer, referring to Wolfgang’s keyboard sonatas with optional violin accompaniment, Opus 1 (K. 6–7) and 2 (K. 8–9), which Leopold was preparing for publication in Paris (fig. 1.1).14 While Wolfgang had composed the sonatas when he was seven, by the time they appeared in print he was eight. So began a pattern of downward revision of Mozart’s age by one to two years, an innocuous but (for the Mozarts) advantageous slippage that became a common feature in the promotion of child prodigies.15

Figure 1.1. Title page, Mozart, Sonates pour le clavecin . . . Oeuvre premiere (K. 6–7, Paris, 1764). Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, shelfmark SA.86.C.12/1.

Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl were less than a year into their first European tour, and while the two children’s public concerts and court appearances had brought them great acclaim, child virtuosos were nothing new.16 Since the seventeenth century, precocious musicians had been familiar ornaments of the courts of Europe, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, exceptional child musicians and singers had become fixtures of public concert life in cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Child composers, on the other hand, were a genuine rarity. Prodigies sometimes performed (or claimed to perform) their own music, but they appear almost never to have printed these works, and the few isolated instances of printed music by composers under twenty either did not mention the composer’s age or were later disclaimed as juvenilia.17 For instance, Andrea Stefano Fiorè described his Sinfonie da chiesa (Modena, 1699) as “the last squalls of my infancy [infanzia], and the first expressions of my boyhood [puerizia], having just turned thirteen.”18

That division of childhood into two phases, infantia and pueritia, goes back to antiquity, and it still held in the mid-eighteenth century. The concept informs Charles Burney’s observation in 1771 that Mozart’s “premature and almost supernatural talents astonished us in London a few years ago, when he had scarce quitted his infant state.”19 However, the duration and meaning of each phase was somewhat in flux. The familiar biological rites of passage in youth—the loss of one’s baby teeth and the onset of puberty—were interpreted differently in different periods, and even by different writers within the same period.20 Most writers seem to have agreed that, up until at least age seven, children were not capable of rational thought, particularly moral reasoning. This is why from the early modern period, seven tended to be the minimum age of (limited) criminal responsibility, and of one’s first communion in the Catholic rite. Both criminal and Canon law followed the ancient Romans in presuming children under seven unable to distinguish between right and wrong: they were in the same category of doli incapax (incapable of evil intent) as the insane.21 It may also explain the double meaning of infantia as both the first phase of life and “inability to speak” or “want of eloquence.”22 In the 1741 German-Latin dictionary owned by Leopold Mozart, “infans” was defined as a child who could not yet speak, “puer” as a child of either sex up to age ten.23 Pueritia had since the early modern period often been lumped together with infancy as an “age of ignorance” or infirmitas preceding puberty.24 Criminal law followed this assumption too, usually granting some measure of leniency between age seven and twelve or fourteen.25 This dual age limit for criminal responsibility was current in the Habsburg Monarchy during Mozart’s time, being upheld by Maria Theresa in the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana of 1768.26

Locke and Rousseau both concurred with the notion that prepubescent children possessed at best a limited capacity to reason, and that intellectual precocity in children was something to treat w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures and Musical Examples
• Introduction
• chapter 1   Precocious in Print
• chapter 2   Music, Philanthropy, and the Industrious Child
• chapter 3   Acting Like Children
• chapter 4   Kinderlieder and the Work of Play
• chapter 5   Cadences of the Childlike
• chapter 6   Toying with Mozart
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index