Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood Adeline Mueller Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021 pp. xiii + 287, ISBN 978 0 226 62966 7

Abstract

Childhood is new. While every society certainly organizes itself in some form or another around age, the particular values that contemporary European and North American societies place on childhood and children are relatively recent and idiosyncratic. These include the valorization of childhood innocence (which might as easily be called naivety or even ignorance); the association of children with nature, in the sense both of animals and of essences; the expectation that children are vulnerable and must be sheltered, not only from work but also from participation in public life more generally; and the naturalization of expectations about ‘normal’ and universal trajectories of human development that have adult rationality as their end-point. In fact, as scholars in the maturing field of childhood studies often argue, the intensification of ideological and cultural investments in children and childhood was and is a defining feature of modernity. Since the early 1990s, such scholars – primarily in history, sociology, anthropology and literature – have traced how ideas about children and childhood developed in fields ranging from politics, law, philosophy and science to literature. The study of music and childhood has developed over a similar period in fits and starts, initially through the work of music-education scholars adopting ethnomusicological perspectives and then through individual efforts by music historians and ethnomusicologists, who have slowly sought each other out and begun to consolidate a subfield. I give this background because Adeline Mueller’s new book, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood, marks a major milestone. It makes a compelling case for the centrality of music to the historical study of childhood, and it shows clearly how rethinking familiar music history through the lens of childhood can reveal striking new insights. Mueller demonstrates that music was not simply one more domain that was swept along by the social, political and ideological revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century, but in fact that music was at the centre of the emergence of what we now recognize as the concept of the modern child. Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood is a nuanced, rigorous and thoughtful exploration of a broad range of fields in which Mozart – as a public figure and as an individual actor – was central to specific pivotal transformations in the European understanding of children and childhood. Mueller makes this case very effectively in her first chapter, which argues that modern childhood was understood very early on as a public identity, forged in and through the circulation of texts. This is an important claim, in part because modern ideologies of the public sphere emphasized rationality and the sublimation of individual particularity into the abstractions of textual circulation – qualities that were quite explicitly associated with maturity and adulthood (in addition, of course, to racial and gender hierarchies). So while Mueller shows that, as a child, Mozart was a public spectacle who influenced ideas about what childhood is or could be, her argument is much more significant than simply an account of representation and changing ideas about capabilities (that is, since this one child can do X, perhaps other children can as well). Rather, for Mueller,