Abstract: Abstract Chapter 6 explains how Mozart became child-friendly. Toward the end of his life and for some years afterwards, he was characterized by many as an eccentric composer of difficult and artificial music. Another strain of Mozart reception, however, emphasized the elegant, light, and simple qualities in his music, and it is this version of Mozart that dominates his popular reception to this day. Some clues as to how "child-friendly Mozart" took hold in the popular imagination can be found in the forms of print through which he was marketed to youth in the first decades after his death: biographies and biographical sketches for young readers; youth-oriented works spuriously attributed to Mozart; and finally, the print debut of Mozart's earliest compositional sketches. These publications helped to smooth out Mozart's perceived eccentricities, while completing the process Leopold had first set in motion when he printed Mozart's Opus 1-4: the merging of the juvenile and the monumental. When a spurious lullaby was included among Mozart's works due to its "mozartisch" qualities, the circular logic affirmed the essentializing of qualities such as the naïve, whimsical, and pleasing as fundamentally mozartisch—a semantic shift that epitomizes Mozart's legacy to the modern child.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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