Review: Blame Mozart: The Romantic Era is no place for child prodigies in Yiyun Lis new novel

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Set us as preferred Book ReviewMusic Against the NightBy Yiyun LiFarrar, Straus and Giroux: 352 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.We are a culture enamored of the child prodigy, the precocious upstart, the tender sprouting genius.We watch hundreds (thousands?) of YouTube videos featuring young people flashing astonishing technique — grade-schoolers who have mastered Eddie Van Halen’s impossibly knotty moves, conservatory-trained tots flying through Chopin’s Nocturnes with easeful assurance.

What we don’t want or care to think about are the 10,000 hours that have been expended so early on in life, the lost months and years of a childhood devoted to perfection; the imperious teachers, the overbearing stage parents.As Yiyun Li’s well-crafted yet somewhat static novel attests, this is nothing new.For the gifted musicians of 18th century Europe, the cult of the child prodigy was far more oppressive and exploitative than it is now, driven by greed and the hunger of audiences eager to celebrate the latest sensation.

For those with financial means, it was a kind of gilded servitude, in which the young sacrificed their waking lives to teachers who primed them for the concert hall.Blame it on Mozart, whose astonishing genius was already self-evident at age 5, when he wrote his first opus , and whose father Leopold controlled his life and career.“Music Against the Night” is the story of two children, an orphan and a musical prodigy, both of whom are born at a time when European culture was the enemy of children.

Li tells their stories in alternating chapters, loosely grounding her narrative in historical fact and Li’s own expansive imaginative powers.Books With the publication of her new novel “The Book of Goose...