If you have one story in mind when you consider Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a child, you have missed something essential that Adeline Mueller shows in this welcome new book: how connected his life was to broad transformations of childhood and print culture in the late eighteenth century. The contribution is well-situated not just within Mozart studies, but in the history of childhood and the Austrian Enlightenment. Through the composer, Mueller addresses an astonishing range of topics, from intellect and the age of reason to child welfare and population control within the Habsburg Empire.

I approached the book skeptical about how representative such an extraordinary individual could be, but became absorbed by the second page. Throughout, Mueller moves between Mozart’s work and the experiences of other children “as performers, reader-consumers, and subjects of musical performance” (5). She offers copious evidence that contemporary observers understood Mozart as a model imitable by ordinary children. Yet the ways in which he was unusual also draw our attention to aspects of the ideology of childhood that began in this era—for example, that his father Leopold arranged for the youth's compositions to be deposited at the British Museum as the first sheet music included in its collection. Mozart was cited in an imperial court case determining the age of reason and in a footnote of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile. Mueller persuasively presents him as “the quintessential mediated child” during a time that established attitudes toward childhood dominant today (2).

Mueller's insightful opening analysis of the Louis Carmontelle portrait reproduced on the book's cover (drawing our attention to its deliberate disproportionality) sets a pattern for careful and effective reading of images throughout, in a book that is nominally about sound. The first chapter's especially persuasive examples come from the archive surrounding Mozart's earliest compositions. The second chapter turns to the context of state reform of child welfare and education (through Mozart's connections with an orphanage and a school for the Deaf)—fascinating, although greater attention to class would have been welcome. The third chapter is an illuminating if grim examination of child performers’ vulnerability in the Salzburg theatre and Kindertruppen. Mueller makes a convincing argument about Kinderlieder as an instrument for disseminating Enlightenment values in the fourth chapter. In the fifth chapter, she takes up chamber music as a way of discussing transformations of the bourgeois family. The sixth chapter's analysis of youth biographies and music written for toy instruments is somewhat less incisive, but nevertheless engaging.

Historians of print culture will learn just as much as musicologists or historians of childhood. Mueller's attention to the materiality of the Mozart archive includes such details as the fact that sheet music for Mozart's earliest compositions could be used as a ticket to meet the family in London; that print both certified Mozart's genius and expanded his audience; and that the young Mozart exerted influence as a “celebrity endorser” of other publications. She remains engaged with music theory, as in an especially convincing analysis of how the Marriage of Figaro tune for “Se vuol ballare” was transformed into a 1789 Kinderlied.

For historians of childhood in general, and Central European childhoods in particular, the book offers a valuable perspective. While Mueller focuses primarily on adult views of childhood, she also engages with ideas about children's agency and childhood as performance, acknowledging “the relationship between parent and child as one of mutual transformation” (172). For example, she offers music as another site for the construction of what it meant to be “child-like,” where errors were celebrated as evidence of child authorship (as became true in children's correspondence of this era). Education is a key part of this story, and the book builds on a historiographic trend of recuperating the entertainment value of Enlightenment didacticism. Through her focus on pedagogical debates—from the Waisenhausstreit to the question of whether singing constituted play or training—Mueller contributes to our understanding of how these developed within the heterogeneous Austrian Empire as compared with Prussia. Theatre provides Mueller an opportunity to stage the perennial contest of pleasure and instruction. She also makes a convincing case for Mozart's role in the family-centered education of sentiments, through chamber music he composed for specific families to perform. Like sentimental fiction, this music was intended to cultivate children's finer feelings; like dance, chamber music provided “pretexts for encounter” (145). Musicians had to practice cooperation, sympathy, and taking turns. Familial affection was of course not new, as childhood studies have long shown. But as Mueller writes, “the notion that this love was worthy of sustained reflection, cultivation, and display” came into full force in Central Europe during this era (143).

This otherwise marvelous study ends somewhat abruptly, leaving me curious about how the association between Mozart and child audiences persisted and evolved in later years. While there are a handful of moments which might benefit from more explicit attention to gender or religion, it is primarily social class that demands more exploration in Mueller's analysis. After all, the transformations to which Mozart contributed were not in universal ideals of childhood, but in a highly class-specific vision. Particularly given the mediated child Mozart’s role in child welfare, labor, and criminal justice reforms, an analysis of his class position would be welcome. The recurrent exhortation to industry through Kinderlieder, or in music composed for the Taubstummeninstitut or the Normalschule in Prague of course applied differently to spinner girls and Rousseau's Sophie.

Adeline Mueller has embroidered captivating details into this book (for example, adult Mozart’s irritation at the “stupid Frenchmen” who imagined him frozen in time at the age of seven, 1) that are frustratingly beyond the capacity of this review to relate. She offers both new ideas—through her careful reading of the print archive alongside music analysis—and fresh paths through well-trodden Mozartian ground, by considering how familiar sources invited different kinds of engagement from contemporary audiences. As father-cum-promoter Leopold Mozart might have said in today's parlance: this book is a must-read.