As the title indicates, Adeline Mueller's study of Wolfgang Mozart explores how childhood was mediated during a historical period when an interest in the role of upbringing and education as well as political philosophy reshaped the understanding of children. It was also in many ways a period that bridged early modern culture and the development of social relationships and institutions that characterized the modernization of European society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a history of how childhood was mediated, exemplified by the life of Mozart and his family as revealed in printed pamphlets and through the music written and performed by Mozart and other young musicians. The study examines Mozart's upbringing and family life while also contextualizing how his music was performed and where it was staged. It is not the outstanding quality of his music that primarily interests Mueller but rather its cultural and institutional context. Mozart traveled to the European courts as well as to the theater companies, orphanages, and schools of Vienna. His childhood and persona were made visible to the public through the marketplace and communicated through prints, concerts, and images. Mueller demonstrates how the mediation of Mozart's life was both an expression of a certain understanding of childhood as well as part of its shaping.
Mozart grew up in the public eye like no other commoner before him. His childhood and work challenged understandings of children's capacity and agency and expressed cultural and social values of intimacy and familial relationships. “He may have surfed the waves,” as Mueller states, “but he was also carried along by the tide” (3). While the book builds on various strands of scholarship—musicology, childhood, and enlightenment studies, and the history of print—it is not only about childhood but also about children: the life of Mozart and the lives of children in orphanages and educational institutions. Mueller demonstrates how Mozart provoked a reevaluation of childhood that shaped and influenced welfare and educational provisions for children in the Austrian Empire and beyond. At one of the orphanages, some children were even given a chance to learn to perform in public concerts. And it was the prints and the commercial quest by the Mozarts that mediated reformist ideologies and an interest in the capacities and the emotional and familial value of children—childhood as a period of care and protection but also of creativity and capability. Mueller aims at replacing a top-down story of children, the nineteenth-century imagery of childhood as a tabula rasa for civilizing processes, with “a messier, more contingent, bottom up picture of the child as sophisticated, socially embedded subject,” a view in alignment with a childhood she sees emerging today (7). Mueller succeeds in this, even if the novelty of her claim may be a little overstated. Such ambitions have marked the field of the history of childhood for some time now, and scholars have pointed to the agency of children—childhood being also a consequence of the agency of children themselves—and the messy and conflicting meaning of childhood in different social contexts.
Mueller's original and interesting analysis of the entanglement of Mozart's work, printed media, concert performances, economic interests, philanthropic initiatives, and government regulations demonstrates a much more complex understanding of the eighteenth century than those studies that rely chiefly on the philosophical–pedagogical views of the time. Her findings also seem to underwrite the unique character of the Austrian historical experience during this period. It is an impressive and important contribution, one with a couple of aspects that I would particularly like to emphasize. Mueller's historicization of age, of maturity as situated and culturally enmeshed in different traditions, is masterful. She demonstrates how the brilliance of Mozart as a performer and composer challenged the traditional understanding of children's cognitive and rational capacities, impacting views on the appropriate methods of upbringing and the need for education for all children and influencing beliefs as to the optimal age at which children could make independent decisions—about, for example, religious matters. The resultant debates were affected by the legal traditions, ethnic prejudices, and religious conflicts characteristic of the multicultural Austrian Empire as it evolved and changed during the eighteenth century.
Mueller's discussion of the role of Mozart's work in the development and conceptualization of familial intimacy and educational provisions is also worth complimenting. In these examples, we can note the advent of an emerging middle-class childhood for which Mozart's work was a catalyst, but it also affected a more general interest in child welfare in the Austrian Empire. Other cultural changes stand out as examples of children's participation in public culture that became offensive to the emerging and socially ordered society. Children's involvement in traveling theater companies became controversial as they increasingly were associated with child abuse and prostitution; and eventually, these companies were declared unfit for children and child participation in them was prohibited. This regulation of poor children's participation in public theater is clearly consistent with the transformation during the early modern period and parallel to the development of intimate middle-class family music traditions.
This issue, the larger European context and cultural transformation in which the mediation of a modern educated familial childhood had a place, could have given the study a little more nuance and broader relevance as a part of the European civilization process. As such, this is a very interesting study that might also have benefited from a bird's eye discussion of the findings in such a context.
