![]() 20 years after his death, he was largely forgotten other than his reputation as a virtuoso organist, and even then, he was only known locally, as he never really travelled.Īnyway, 100 years after Bach’s death, Felix Mendelssohn was digging through the music library at the church he worked for when he found some music written by Bach, which he decided to perform. So Bach would write something, perform it, and move on. ![]() But like the society Mozart was in in Vienna, audiences wanted new music every week. ![]() Active a generation before Mozart (Mozart actually studied with one of his sons for a time), JS Bach spent his entire career writing and performing music for churches and the monarchy in Germany/Prussia. Why is this so important? Take the story of Johann Sebastian Bach. Composers were literally racing to write new music and fulfill commissions.īut Maria Anna and Constanze knew what a great composer Mozart was, and they began compiling, copying, and selling his works, ostensibly to make money and support their families, but then end result was the preservation of the vast majority of his musical output to this day. Audiences wanted new music and only new music. At time, there was not a sense of “preserving the Classics” and “old music is superior” like so many people have today. From royal patronage to home-schooling, these five examples of child artistic prodigies in history give an intriguing look at why we've always been so fascinated by the idea of talent in the young.Scrolled for a while and haven’t seen this pointed out: It also thanks to Maria Anna and Mozart’s wife Constanze that we still have so much of his music. If we follow examples from history, though, young artists can grow up to be adult artists of phenomenal renown it's not all about hitting a crisis once you turn 18 and throwing away paintbrushes melodramatically. For every celebration of their precocious talent, there are accompanying worries: are they being exploited? Is their achievement genuine or helped along by adults? Are we being duped? Are they going to be effective humans with well-adjusted social skills and healthy ideas about failure when they grow into adult ex-prodigies? (Full disclosure: I took part in various studies on prodigy children as a kid, so I know more about this than the average observer.) Our fascination with them is both understandable and riddled with undercurrents of suspicion and concern. ![]() ![]() And then there's Marla Olmstead, who was the subject of a 2007 documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, which raised doubts about whether she was really completing her paintings by herself.Ĭhild prodigies are an intriguing subject. You've probably seen some of them: Aelita Andre, the Australian who became a toddler sensation just a few years after her birth in 2007, is one of the prime examples. Although child prodigies have obviously been around for centuries, the rise of "viral" fame has given many young kids the potential to be celebrated as the next great artistic hope while they're barely out of diapers. But there's another area to the art world, particularly in modern times, that's been increasingly expanding: the phenomenon of the child prodigy artist. Today, October 25, marks a holiday you may not know about - International Artist Day, which is a good time to celebrate all aspects of the artistic life, from promoting up-and-coming artists to giving props to those whom history forgot. ![]()
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