Testing the Child Mozart: What Barrington, Grimm and Leopold Recorded

In February 1770 the Fellows of the Royal Society heard a letter that began with a giant. If someone sent them a well-attested account of a boy seven feet tall at the age of eight, wrote Daines Barrington, a lawyer and Fellow of the Society, they would think it worth their notice; a child with equally early musical powers deserved the same attention.¹ The child was Wolfgang Mozart, and what Barrington offered was not praise but a report of an examination, with the conditions written down.

That framing matters. Most of what people repeat about the young Mozart comes from later memoirs, or from stories that grew as they traveled. The best evidence is a handful of documents written while the boy was a child by people who tested him, or who sold tickets to watch him being tested. Reading them side by side shows what contemporaries measured, how they tried to rule out tricks, and how they explained what they saw.

A test in a London lodging

Barrington had heard Mozart at public concerts in London, but his key evidence came from a private visit to the father’s lodging, where he was “alone with him for a considerable time.” He offered the account as “amazing and incredible almost as it may appear.”¹

His method was simple and well chosen. He brought a manuscript duet by an English gentleman, written in five parts, with the two voice parts in the contralto clef. The point, he explained, was to have “an irrefragable proof” of sight-reading, since the boy could not possibly have seen the music before.¹ Mozart played the opening instrumental passage, sang the upper voice part while his father took the lower, and filled in the violin parts on the keyboard where they were most needed. Barrington noted the boy’s voice was “thin and infantine,” and that when Leopold went wrong once or twice, the son looked back crossly and corrected him.¹

He then asked for improvisation. Knowing that the castrato Giovanni Manzuoli, who had come to London in 1764, had taken much notice of the boy, he requested an extempore love song of the kind “his friend Manzoli” might choose in an opera. Mozart produced a few lines of nonsense recitative and then an aria on the single word Affetto; asked next for a song of rage, he improvised on Perfido and grew so heated that he “beat his harpsichord like a person possessed,” rising from his chair.¹ Barrington judged these pieces above mediocrity rather than “amazingly capital.” He also watched the boy write a bass under a given treble and play with a handkerchief laid over the keys.¹

Not everything in the report has the same weight. Barrington says plainly which things he saw and which he was told. The story that Mozart took up and worked out a fugue that “Bach the celebrated composer” (in London, Johann Christian Bach) had begun and broken off came from “two or three able musicians”; the claim that the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, doubting the boy’s authorship, shut him up for a week with nothing but music paper and an oratorio text is introduced with “I am also informed.”¹ Whatever later retellings make of the second story, Barrington himself offered it as hearsay.

Was he really a child?

Barrington’s real question was not whether the playing was good but whether the player was as young as claimed. He admitted that he “could not help suspecting his father imposed with regard to the real age of the boy,” and that most London musicians shared the doubt.¹ Against it he set behavior: while playing for him, the boy left the harpsichord when a favorite cat came in and could not be brought back for some time, and he would ride around the room on a stick as a horse.¹

Behavior was not proof, so Barrington went looking for a document. After inquiring among German musicians in London, he obtained, through the Bavarian envoy Count Haslang, a certificate copied from the Salzburg baptismal register, and printed it as a footnote. From it he concluded that the father “did not impose” and that in June 1765 the boy was “only eight years and five months old.”¹

Here the record turns odd. The certificate he printed gives the year 1756, which makes the boy nine years and five months old in June 1765, not eight; and it gives the day as January 17, where Mozart’s later editors and biographers give January 27.¹²³ The 27th is right: Leopold’s own letter of February 9, 1756 to his Augsburg publisher reports that his wife was delivered of a boy on the “27 Januarii abends um 8 uhr” (January 27 at eight in the evening), the same hour the certificate gives.⁴ The “17th” in Barrington’s text is an error, whether in the copy he received or in print. In other words, the document Barrington obtained to settle the question showed the child was older than advertised, and he did not notice. The paper was received by the Society in November 1769, read in February 1770, and printed in volume 60 of the Philosophical Transactions.¹

Barrington also tried to explain what he had found by comparison. He set Mozart beside Jean-Philippe Baratier, the scholar-child said to have understood Latin at four, and beside Handel’s reported early compositions, and hoped Mozart might reach Handel’s age, “contrary to the common observation” that such early talents die young.¹ He kept at the project: his Miscellanies of 1781 reprinted the Mozart letter beside new accounts of other musical children, among them Charles and Samuel Wesley and the toddler William Crotch.⁵ The prodigy was becoming a type, something to collect and compare.

Grimm in Paris: the critic as witness

Before London, the family had spent the winter of 1763-64 in Paris, where their most useful ally was Friedrich Melchior Grimm, a German critic who wrote a private newsletter for European courts. Leopold told his Salzburg landlord that all his letters of introduction had been worth nothing beside Grimm’s help: Grimm had brought the matter to court, arranged the first concert and alone had paid him 80 louis d’or, placing 320 tickets.⁶ Grimm was a witness, but not a neutral one.

His newsletter of December 1, 1763 opens: “Les vrais prodiges sont assez rares pour qu’on en parle quand on a occasion d’en voir un” (true prodigies are rare enough to be worth discussing when one gets the chance to see one).² He describes the boy improvising for an hour at a stretch and playing with the keyboard hidden: “on le lui dérobe par une serviette qu’on étend dessus” (it is taken from him by a napkin spread over it), with no loss of speed or accuracy.²

Grimm also ran his own test. He wrote out a minuet and asked the boy to put a bass under it; the child took the pen and did so without going near the harpsichord.² Another time a woman asked him to accompany by ear an Italian cavatina he had never seen. His first bass was not quite right, which Grimm thought only reasonable; on the repeat he played the tune and the bass together, then asked for it ten more times, changing the character of the accompaniment each time.² Grimm’s explanation was half joke and half bewilderment: he feared the child would turn his head, and said he no longer wondered that St Paul lost his after his vision.²

When the family came back through Paris in 1766, Grimm wrote again, in an entry dated July 15. The boy had hardly grown but had made prodigious progress; he had published sonatas in London and in Holland, and Grimm predicted he would have an opera staged in Italy before he was twelve.⁷ He described musicians sweating through hour-and-a-half contests with a child who left the field unfatigued, and closed by hoping that the boy’s high spirits answered the common fear that so early a fruit would fall before it ripened.⁷

The father’s tests and the father’s theology

Leopold Mozart was manager, teacher and publicist at once, and his letters show him designing tests as much as answering them. A Frankfurt notice of August 1763 promised that the boy would accompany with the keyboard covered by a cloth and name any note sounded at a distance, from instruments, bells, glasses or clocks.³ In February 1764 Leopold wrote from Paris that unbelievers were being challenged to test the boy by writing down a minuet, to which he would add a bass, and a second violin if wanted, without touching the keyboard: the same test Grimm reported.⁸ In London, Jahn records, the public was invited to come and test the boy daily at the family’s lodging and later at a tavern.³

The doubt never went away. In Vienna in 1768, when the twelve-year-old’s comic opera La finta semplice was stalled, Leopold reported to Salzburg that people now said “nicht der Knab, sondern der Vatter hat es gemacht” (not the boy, but the father, made it).⁹ His answer was a public trial. He had a volume of Metastasio opened at random and the first aria set before his son, who wrote music for it with many instruments, at great speed, in front of many people of standing. Leopold names the occasions: with Kapellmeister Bonno, Metastasio himself, Johann Adolph Hasse, the Duke of Braganza and Prince Kaunitz.⁹ His formal petition to Joseph II asked for an examination of the boy’s abilities and cited, as support, “eine gelehrte Schrift aus Paris” (a learned writing from Paris) predicting an opera by age twelve, which matches Grimm’s 1766 entry.¹⁰⁷

Leopold’s explanation was religious. His duty, he wrote, was to proclaim “der Welt ein Wunder verkündigen, welches Gott in Salzburg hat lassen gebohren werden” (to the world a miracle which God has caused to be born in Salzburg). He counted it a victory when a follower of Voltaire told him: “Nun habe ich einmahl in meinem Leben ein Wunder gesehen” (now for once in my life I have seen a miracle).⁹ The miracle language was sincere and also useful; it turned every test into a demonstration.

A year younger on paper

Set the age claims beside the baptismal date and a pattern appears. The Frankfurt notice of August 1763 called the boy “not yet seven”; he was seven and a half.³ Grimm in December 1763 said he “aura sept ans au mois de février prochain” (will be seven in February next); he turned eight that January.² Leopold in February 1764 wrote that the title page of the boy’s sonatas would call them the work of a child of seven, days after his eighth birthday.⁸ Barrington, as noted, made him eight in June 1765, when he was nine, and Grimm in July 1766 wrote “Cet enfant merveilleux a actuellement neuf ans” when he was ten.¹⁷

This comparison is our own arithmetic, from the dates each source gives. None of the sources read for this article says who started the understatement, or why, or that it was deliberate, and it should not be read as evidence of deception. But the consistency is striking, and it means that the boy Barrington examined was a year older than the boy he described. That does not make the feats less remarkable. It does show how much the public value of a prodigy depended on a number, and how hard that number was to check.

Anecdote, memory and a forged letter

Much of the familiar childhood story rests on later testimony. The best-loved scenes, such as the four-year-old writing an ink-blotted “concerto,” come from a letter that the Salzburg court trumpeter Johann Andreas Schachtner wrote to Mozart’s sister in 1792, three decades after the events and after Mozart’s death.³ Schachtner describes “a daub of notes, for the most part written over ink-blots,” and Leopold weeping with delight; it is a vivid memory, not a contemporary record. The Vienna stories of 1762, in which the emperor had the boy play with one finger and with the keys covered, are told by Jahn without a document from the time quoted, though the covered-keyboard trick itself is documented from 1763.³²

The contemporary paper trail is less romantic and more useful. Nannerl’s practice book survives with Leopold’s notes on when the boy learned particular minuets, and the earliest compositions are in the father’s hand.³

At the far end of the scale is outright invention. A letter in which Mozart supposedly describes whole works forming in his head at once, addressed to a “Baron von P.,” was first printed by Friedrich Rochlitz in 1815 and has been quoted ever since as evidence of how genius works. Otto Jahn, whose biography set the standard for Mozart scholarship, called it “incontestably a fabrication as it stands,” and set it aside.¹¹ It has no place in an account of how Mozart’s contemporaries saw him; what they recorded was a child set problems, often by skeptics, who kept solving them.

Footnotes

1. Barrington 1770, pp. 54-64. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, ed. Tourneux, vol. 5, December 1, 1763, pp. 410-412. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Jahn, Life of Mozart, vol. 1, ch. 1-2. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. Leopold Mozart to Johann Jakob Lotter, February 9, 1756 (BD 22). ↩

5. Barrington, Miscellanies (1781), Mozart account and postscript; accounts of the Wesleys, Mornington and Crotch. ↩

6. Leopold Mozart to Lorenz Hagenauer, April 1, 1764 (BD 83). ↩

7. Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, ed. Tourneux, vol. 7, July 1766, pp. 81-83. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. Leopold Mozart to Maria Theresia Hagenauer, February 1, 1764 (BD 80). ↩ ↩²

9. Leopold Mozart to Lorenz Hagenauer, July 30, 1768 (BD 135). ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Leopold Mozart, “Species facti,” September 21, 1768 (BD 139). ↩

11. Jahn, Life of Mozart, vol. 2, ch. 32, note 6. ↩