![]() ![]() Of the hairdo, she wrote to her brother, in their typically playful rapport, “I am writing to you with an erection on my head and I am very much afraid of burning my hair.” Nannerl, in the foreground, has an enormous pompadour crowning her small oval face. In the portrait (top), Nannerl and Wolfgang sit together at the harpsichord while their father Leopold stands nearby. I never heard of Nannerl Mozart until I saw that family portrait. With my braided hair I was called “little Mozart” by my violin teacher, but he meant Wolfi. “Neither my music history nor my repertoire included any female composers.” “I grew up studying to be a violinist,” writes Sylvia Milo. And, moreover, she only recently began to emerge in the academic and classical worlds. She does not appear in the definitive Hollywood treatment, Milos Forman’s Amadeus. It was a source of wonder to many.ġ8th century classical audiences first came to know Wolfgang as part of a brother-sister duo of “wunderkinder.” But the sister half has been airbrushed out of the picture. Imagine an eleven-year-old girl, performing the most difficult sonatas and concertos of the greatest composers, on the harpsichord or fortepiano, with precision, with incredible lightness, with impeccable taste. “There are contemporaneous reviews praising Nannerl,” writes Sylvia Milo, “and she was even billed first.” A 1763 review, for example, sounds indistinguishable from those written about young Wolfgang. The two toured Europe together as children-she was with her brother during his 18-month stay in London. Before Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began writing his first compositions, his older sister Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed Nannerl, had already proven herself a prodigy. One such extraordinary case involves the real sister of another towering European figure whose life we know much more about than Shakespeare’s. Virginia Woolf’s tragic, but fictional, history of Shakespeare’s sister notwithstanding, the claims made by cultural critics about marginalization and oppression aren’t based on speculation, but on case after case of individuals who were ignored by, or shut out of, the wider culture, and subsequently disappeared from historical memory. We cannot know what we are not told about history-at least not without doing the kind of digging professional scholars can do. But in fairness, such questions point to the very reason that alternative or “revisionist” histories exist. But a prodigy Lievens was – a rarity in oil painting.When people ask why we have specifically black histories, or queer histories, or women’s histories, it can be hard for many who do historical research to take the question seriously. He took their shared heroic style to heights that Lievens never achieved. You can genuinely see how Rembrandt was influenced by the prodigious works of his friend – and went on being influenced by him. Lievens had a gifted contemporary in Leiden: the young Rembrandt. His youthful art is serious and profound it's not just technically, but emotionally advanced. There was a deep originality to these youthful works – their golden light, soft heroic grandeur and baroque, rollicking freedom made them stand out. When Lievens was 14 he was already amazing the town of Leiden with ambitious historical paintings and low-life scenes. Here was an artist who really did paint grown-up masterpieces when he was very young. I recently saw an eye-opening exhibition of this 17th-century Dutch artist's work in Amsterdam, where it had toured from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. We speak of late Titian and late Matisse – in fact, Matisse became interested in art as an adult.īut child prodigy painters do, in fact, exist. ![]() But there are far more examples of great artists who started late than ones who started early. A news story surfaced at the end of last week about a five-year-old watercolourist. But Mozart was composing and playing to the highest conventional standards as a child, as the performance of two pieces composed when he was eight has just demonstrated.Ī painting that Michelangelo did as a teenager is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. In fact, the influence of children on modern art was precisely to unleash the power of art brut, "raw art". Does this mean that the parts of our brains that govern music develop at an earlier stage than our visual mind? Although most children make art, it doesn't usually look like great adult art. Child prodigies are more common in music than in art. ![]()
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