Everybody will be struck by Admiration to hear…a young boy of seven years of age play on the Harpsichord with such Dexterity and Perfection. The greatest Prodigy that Europe or that even Human Nature has to boast of. On May 17, 1764, just three months after Wolfgang’s eighth birthday, the readers of London’s The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser read an announcement of the forthcoming appearance of Their father immediately grasped the marketability of both Wolfgang and Maria Anna and whisked them off on tour in the fullest possible glare of publicity, much of it generated by Leopold. The violinist pooh-poohs him the instrument is brought forth, and Mozart is found to be right. On another occasion the boy asks a famous violinist why his instrument is mistuned by a quarter tone. The notation on the page appears to be a blotchy blur, but on close examination it proves to be perfectly sound musically. In one story, his father comes home to find that the boy has tried to compose music. But both the first published account of Mozart’s life, the Nekrolog (obituary) brought out by Friedrich Schlichtegroll two years after the composer’s death, and the first formal biography five years later, by the Czech philosopher and critic Franz Xaver Niemetschek, cite many instances in which the six-year-old Mozart turns out to be smarter than his elders. How could a mere child-he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six-be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna-a talented musician as well-the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.Īll this technical skill and musical inventiveness appeared to be self-taught, a somewhat counterintuitive notion since Leopold, a distinguished composer and court musician and the author of a widely read treatise on violin-playing, was a renowned teacher. Though his life was not as sensational as that of Gesualdo, for example, who murdered his wife, Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre those of Mozart were among the first examples.
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