Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
'A Prodigy of Nature'
By Robert Craft
Leopold Mozart's description of his eight-year-old son might well have added that the boy was also a prodigy of Leopold himself, whose expert tutelage and unrelenting ambition had cultivated and exploited the child's gifts. Leopold's teaching and guidance were a sine qua non, for without the father's long and omniscient supervision, the son would doubtless have become a different composer from the one whom the world adulates. But this does not imply that a Leopold-father or any kind and amount of education can explain the unfathomable miracle of Mozart.
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