Child Prodigy Composers

This miscellany offers a selection of childhood compositions for piano by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, R. Strauss and Bartók (written when they were under fourteen). With child composers we generally search in vain for traces of their later characteristic, individual style. They still speak the musical language that they have become familiar with up to that age and therefore, as with the portraits to be found on the title-page it is difficult to determine who is represented in some of them, similarly in the case of most of the pieces the odds are against our guessing who was the composer. It appears that it was dance music in particular that caught theimagination of these brilliantly gifted children, thus the majority of the pieces included in the volume are some kind of dance: minuet, ländler, polonaise, waltz or polka. Undoubtedly the children of today will enjoy playing the works of budding composers of their own age: their degree of difficulty ranges from really easy to the level of the most advanced music school classes, so students will be able to go on using the volume continuously for years.