



But the wonder, certainly to a modern sensibility, is also that young Mozart thrived despite an early bombardment of demands and deadlines that sound as though they could well have waylaid, or worn out, a lesser genius. There is no question that Mozart’s youthful creativity was an amazing feat-a feat spurred on in part by his receptive cultural surroundings and, as Solomon points out, by his own avid receptivity to influence. During this 15-month interlude, the boy turned out three other symphonies, too. “Oh what a lot of things I have to do,” he wrote privately to a friend about all the symphonic copying he faced before a big concert in London in the mid-1760s, the period scholars have pinpointed as the likely origin of the symphony in D, if Mozart is the author.
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Leopold also took charge of getting the results transcribed (Mozart evidently heard his compositions all but whole in his head)-and felt free to make corrections and improvements. He steered his son toward pleasing the crowd, not toward climbing Parnassus early on, he had Mozart emulating the most fashionable figures, such as Johann Christian Bach and, it’s perfectly possible, a run-of-the-mill composer named Westermayer. As Maynard Solomon emphasizes in his acute biography, the Mozarts were embarked on a family business, and Leopold was an avid marketer attuned to popular musical culture. His father was his conduit to the larger musical culture and saw to it that Mozart was very much in the swim. He was an industrious student inundated by contemporaneous influences. In other words, young Mozart was not simply a little boy who was visited by inspirational bolts from the blue. Either he availed himself of a score by an elder and rearranged it somewhat (as he did with some early concertos), or, if the work is shown to be his, he was composing derivative music that experts could mistake for that of a mediocre adult contemporary. However scholars end up resolving the question of authorship, it highlights a side of Wolfgang his father preferred to gloss over and popular legend tends to ignore: The boy genius, for all his originality, was also an impressionable imitator. So, who really wrote it? The puzzle has sparked some notable musicological detective work. A nearly identical symphony has been unearthed in a library in Zagreb bearing the name of David Westermayer, a compatriot of Mozart’s who has long since sunk into obscurity. “All for free-who does that?” the boy’s father told CBS, adding that the family is “super thankful.The story of the mystery symphony is basically this: Scholars in Vienna recently stumbled on a symphony in D that bears Mozart’s name-but it’s a discovery with a twist.
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He also promised to tune the piano once a month for the rest of his life and pay for Jude to get professional lessons. “It’s coming from somewhere beyond.” Jude shares that belief, calling his gift “a miracle.”Īfter being moved by Jude’s story, Magnusson said he thought to himself, “What resources are left over to help this special little soul?” He then used his father’s inheritance to purchase the piano for $15,000 (a fraction of its estimated $45,000 value) and had it delivered to the family’s home. “He’s Mozart level,” Magnusson told CBS News‘s Steve Hartman. The piano was a gift from Bill Magnusson, a piano tuner who had seen a report about Jude on the local news. Related: Pearl Jam Brings Terminally Ill Fan Onstage In Berlin Things took an unexpected turn, however, when one day a grand piano mysteriously arrived at their house. from Ghana, was astounded by his son’s abilities and bought him a larger keyboard to explore his passion and obvious talent for music. His father, Isaiah, who immigrated to the U.S. The young prodigy surprised his family last year when he discovered an old keyboard in his family’s basement and immediately began playing music on the instrument.

Jude Kofie, an 11-year-old autistic child from Aurora, CO with a natural affinity for music, couldn’t believe it when a $45,000 grand piano was delivered to his house, and neither could his parents.
