Professor DiClemente5/7/13
INST 2607
Extra Credit Project
The movie Amadeus had a variety of different stories involving Mozart that seemed to be controversial to me and had me questioning what was right and what was wrong. Throughout the entire movie you are not exactly sure what to think about him and how to perceive the way he was treated when he was a child. Because, of this it makes you really want to look more into if he was a child prodigy or just a trained monkey? Life was never easy for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart between the pressure on him while he was a child and his relationship with his father Leopold Mozart it is hard to get a complete grasp of what was really going on. Through this paper I look to go into great detail about not only if Wolfgang was a child prodigy or a trained monkey, but also to examine exactly what his relationship with his father was really like.
“The insignificance of his outer appearance, the small growth of his body resulted from his early mental exertions, and from the lack of free movement in the time of his childhood”(Stafford, 86). From this insert you can tell that people believed that since he was basically told every movement to go by in his early years that he did not know how to react if he was not being told what to do or if he had nothing to do. Since Leopold would always have Wolfgang performing concerts and other performances he excreted so much energy as a child that led him to not be fully develop when he grew older. “Mozart was always a child – not merely direct and childlike, but also childish – has echoed through the literature” (Stafford, 90). This is something you hear throughout when you hear people talk about Mozart is the fact that he always acted like a child, but then when he got on a piano it was all so different because he was so graceful and his music was magnificent. In any book you read on Wolfgang Mozart you will see that his father was very involved in his life and would take him to different places to have him perform. One quote that really catches your eye is “ The Mozart’s were a closely knit family; and the relationship between father and son was close to the point of becoming (for Wolfgang) slightly overpowering in later years” (Landon, 14). This tells a lot about the relationship between them and how at times it did seem that Leopold would start to be overbearing and have too much control over his son’s actions.
From what has been written it is still very hard to fully understand the relationship between Wolfgang and Leopold because each person has a different idea of exactly what it was like. You can tell that even though Leopold may have pushed Wolfgang to hard at times he did genuinely care about him and loved to see him succeed. “Leopold was especially keen for news of the children’s triumphs to reach ears of the archbishop and other influential people in Salzburg” (Halliwell, 35). That being said it is easy to see that he took great pride in the work of Wolfgang and wanted everyone from his hometown to know of the success that he was having. “One question that was asked a lot was Leopold too absorbed in Wolfgang to encourage his daughters development beyond that of set-piece performance” (Halliwell, 42)? If that is so then it seems pretty obvious that Leopold did have a strong part in making it so that Wolfgang was very committed to his music. Even though Leopold had a strong role in the development of Wolfgang as a musician it is very obvious that Wolfgang also had something that other people do not have for music at such a young age. “ By 1759 it was clear to Leopold that his son was a musical prodigy. In a book of music Leopold wrote: ‘These previous eight minuets were learned by little Wolfgang in his fourth year. And later; ‘Little Wolfgang also learned this minuet in his fourth year” (Landon, 12). It is very obvious from this that Leopold took great pride in what Wolfgang was accomplishing at such a young age.