Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood , by Adeline Mueller

One need look no further than the toy aisles of department stores to be reminded of the links between Mozart’s music, idealized infancy and childhood, and consumer culture. “If I don’t buy these light-up balls chirping out K. 545 in synthesized cat meows,” one would be forgiven for asking, “how will my mini-Mozart ever grow to be an Einstein?” The brain of one prodigy promises to transmit the scaffolding for future astrophysical contemplation. And, as is typical of the current public thinking about music and general education, expression through sound is seen not as an end in itself but as a gateway for higher cognitive and moral activation.These layered cultural functions of Mozart’s childhood image and early compositions have a long history, and Adeline Mueller’s new book, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood, provides a rich context for the ways they were marshaled for baby-Einstein-like state and cultural projects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book is framed chronologically, beginning with a chapter on Mozart’s prodigy years and ending with one on the durability of the childlike image into the early posthumous period.Chapter 1, “Precocious in Print,” is probably the chapter a reader would most readily expect from a book of this title, in that it addresses Mozart’s reputation as a young, publishing composer. Here, Mueller dives boldly into contradictory evidence surrounding understandings of childhood in Mozart’s time: he was viewed in his early years as both innocent and mature. Concurrently with the development of this reputation, the first child labor laws were instituted in Austria, such that “a policy of child protection began to emerge”; at the same time, “the cult of celebrity urged child composers into the limelight earlier and earlier” (p. 40). Mueller argues that Mozart’s early compositions justified a view of children as “thinking subjects” (p. 36), providing fodder for the argument that children’s experiences and subjectivity should be protected by law, at least up to a point.Mueller’s contributions to scholarship accelerate in chapter 2, “Music, Philanthropy, and the Industrious Child,” which connects Mozart studies, childhood studies, and state history, and reveals some of the protections that were lacking for children under the law. Making itself relevant to the current pandemic moment, the chapter opens with the Mozart family’s experience of smallpox inoculation—a state initiative that was commemorated with state-sponsored musical performances similar to the sort of official endorsements that young Mozart and his family were sometimes hired to perform. Following the trends of recent scholarship on well-known composers of this period, Mueller then focuses on lesser-known or lost works—here, on works composed for the consecration of a church at an orphanage in 1768. A trumpet concerto, mass, and offertory were all supplied by twelve-year-old Mozart, of which (possibly) only the mass survives. Mueller reads the mass as a rare example of a work written by a child for children, and she links it to some of Mozart’s later compositions that were likewise brought to bear on state-sponsored child-welfare projects.Other examples of this kind of rare work may be found in Mozart’s early dramatic output. Chapter 3, “Acting Like Children,” examines theater performed by children or (what we would term) adolescents. Mueller’s focus here on Apollo et Hyacinthus, the intermedium for the student play Clementia Croesi, and Bastien und Bastienne adds richness to our understanding of Mozart’s Salzburg years and experience with singspiel. She outlines Mozart’s contact with prominent troupes of child actors and astutely posits the Mozart family itself as a kind of traveling troupe. Mueller takes opportunities to point out the physical abuse and exploitation that often plagued child and student actors, never suggesting that such abuse befell Wolfgang, but showing “the additional dangers he and his sister must have faced on their travels as young performers” (p. 98).Chapter 4, “Kinderlieder and the Work of Play,” marks Mueller’s entry into the more intimate and domestic experiences of child musicians and their music. Here, her focus is play, in both the ludic and the musical sense, particularly as these two modes intersect in children’s song, or Kinderlieder. As in nearly every chapter, Mueller marshals evidence from a remarkable number of German-language children’s periodicals that circulated during Mozart’s lifetime, adding to it in chapter 4 a long list of Kinderlieder collections. This is the first chapter in which she specifically addresses gender as a theme, showing that Kinderlieder participated in a gender binary by which young girls might be prematurely sexualized while young boys might perform independent spirit—though there is more nuance in the chapter than can be summarized here. Repertoire explored includes Mozart’s “Der Zauberer” (K. 472), “Die Alte” (K. 517), and “Das Kinderspiel” (K. 598), as well as songs by contemporaries like Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Georg Carl Claudius, and Johann Friedrich Reichardt.The fifth chapter, “Cadences of the Childlike,” is the most analytical and focuses for the first time almost exclusively on instrumental music and the sort of edifying interaction it afforded musical children and families. Although the repertoire here is well trodden, particularly in the work on sociability and instrumental interaction by Matthew Head, Edward Klorman, and Rebecca Cypess, Mueller finds an opening in her focus on the domestic family rather than courtship and adult conversation. Of new interest is her examination of chamber music for siblings, in particular the C major sonata for piano four hands, K. 521, which, she argues, exhibits a kind of sisterly harmony not present in earlier four-hand works. Mueller also adeptly calls attention to concertos written specifically for family units, such as K. 242, written for Countess Lodron and her two daughters.Of course, none of this material would ever have come to light or been analyzed in such a way were it not for the early nineteenth-century circumstances that cemented Mozart’s image as a childlike figure. Chapter 6, “Toying with Mozart,” examines early biographical anecdotes about him, both authentic and spurious, as well as the first efforts to anthologize his music in composition treatises and piano tutors, mostly published within thirty years of his death. Georg Nikolaus von Nissen’s biography draws particular attention to Mozart’s juvenilia, reprinting some of the music later shown to be inauthentic. Mueller pulls other problematic publications into the mix, examining, for instance, “W. A. Mozarts Alphabet,” a spurious pedagogical song attributed to Mozart in the 1820s, which was in fact plagiarized from another source.The book’s overall organization allows for neat individual chapter extraction for the purposes of either teaching or research, which is one reason why I have examined each separately here. The first half of the book would, for instance, bolster an attempt by a student or scholar to understand the many facets of a composer’s public identity and career, while the second half provides fodder for ongoing study of pedagogical literature. Each chapter lends richness to corners of Mozart’s output that are often unexplored, implicitly supporting, with great archival detail, a long and well-established trend (begun by Neal Zaslaw many years ago) to demonstrate that very particular circumstances catalyzed every piece in Mozart’s (and his contemporaries’) catalog.However, given efforts to decolonize not only syllabuses but also the field of musicology in the last several years, it is fair to wonder what more we can—or should—learn about this iconic composer. The answer for Mueller would be that this latest volume is about childhood itself as much as it is about Mozart. Each chapter intermingles rich histories of government practice and philosophical thought, including pages upon pages on which Mozart’s name never appears. Further, there is a bit of decolonizing here, at least in the sense that eighteenth-century Austria is not held up as a kind of idealized incubator of high art and culture. In chapter 1, for example, Mueller describes the forced baptism of Jewish children, showing how the debate about children’s (and in particular Mozart’s) rationality was marshaled at the state level so as to institutionalize or at least allow such things. Chapter 2 is, in part, a study of the role of Mozart’s music in state-sponsored initiatives to teach, or exoticize, people with disabilities—in this case, deafness. Even though it is fair to be skeptical of the book’s stated focus on Mozart as a central historical figure, that skepticism would, I think, be quieted by a close reading of Mueller’s evidence, particularly in the first three chapters.In the end, what Mueller presents is a strong case for a quite direct relationship between Mozart and the concept of childhood. Here is an individual who was a child performer and a child composer, wrote music for children, and continued to be received in association with innocence and a kind of pure industriousness in the years immediately after his death. In short, he was a child creator, if not a childhood creator. For that reason, I would venture to argue that “mediating” is not the primary mode through which Mozart’s music and identity interacted with childhood. For many in the eighteenth century and today, Mozart is a kind of ideal child, making his image the standard for young industriousness and his music the medium for cognitive exceptionalism

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