wonder child

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The Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño (1853–1917) performed in New York at the age of nine.

Child prodigy is a term for people who, as a child, show skills in certain areas that are usually only achieved in adulthood or not at all. In colloquial language, gifted children with outstanding skills in special disciplines are often referred to as child prodigies.

Use of the term

Immanuel Kant called Christian Henrich Heineken , born in 1721 , who had already mastered Latin and French at the age of two and wrote a history of Denmark at the age of three, was brilliant at mathematics and died at the age of four and a half, an "early prodigy of ephemeral existence" and one of the "digressions of nature by its rule ”. The expression caught on in the 19th century, especially in concerts. The description of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a “child prodigy” is particularly common today . Examples of musicians celebrated as “child prodigies” in the 20th century are Yehudi Menuhin , Ruggiero Ricci , Heintje Simons and Anne Sophie Mutter . Moritz Frankl , who was born in 1873 and was passed around as a living calculating machine when he was a child, was a mathematical “child prodigy” .

The term “child prodigy” is mostly used in the media today. According to the description “a genius is born, one is made a child prodigy”, especially those children who perform in front of an audience are called “child prodigies”. That is why the name is mainly associated with musicians. In chess , too , there are regular reports about “child prodigies”, such as Samuel Reshevsky , Bobby Fischer and Judit Polgár . In contrast, gifted children who perform particularly well in mathematics , natural sciences or languages appear less often in the media. The term is also used in literature and film, the short story Das Wunderkind by Thomas Mann is particularly well known .

In contrast, science avoids the term “child prodigy” as well as the term genius. Only very rarely does it appear, largely synonymous with giftedness, to describe children who achieve the performance of adults in a subject, already largely independently applying the rules and methods of their subject and often developing innovative solutions to problems. If the children are young savants , then the special abilities are sometimes accompanied by limitations in other areas. While some “child prodigies” maintain their level of performance, others lose their creative impartiality.

criticism

The staging of gifted children as “child prodigies” was often associated with considerable income, which is why they were not infrequently the victims of ambitious parents. If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart already suffered from his father, his contemporary, the cellist Zygmontofsky , was so docile, exhausted and consumed by his father with hunger and beatings that he died at the age of eleven. There was criticism from an early age that the children were being presented like trained monkeys as circus acts or fairground attractions. The attitude of George Frideric Handel 's father was a rare exception . The latter resisted the profitable promotion of his talented son, "because it just serves nothing other than amusement and greed". Only after the intervention of Duke Johann Adolph von Sachsen-Weißenfels did he give in. More recently, child stars like Michael Jackson have been linked to the issue.

The psychiatrist Andrew Solomon portrayed in his book Far from the Tribe: When children are very different from their parents primarily children with physical and mental disabilities, but decided to also portray so-called "child prodigies" and their families, because he is convinced that the fact Having a gifted child can be no less isolating, confusing, and debilitating than raising a child with a severe disability. Solomon comes to the conclusion that such a highly gifted child can shift the play of strength within a family no less than a child suffering from schizophrenia or the most severe disability. He points out that many artists marketed as child prodigies are very self-centered, but that it is often the parents who act out a narcissistic drive through their child. Solomon goes on to write that they often focus their own hopes and ambitions on their children, and instead of cultivating curiosity in them, they pursue fame. Solomon continues to take the view that the marketing of child prodigies has increased in the classical music industry over the past 30 years, because many managers are convinced that this is the only way to reach a group of buyers, but that this is often at the expense of healthy mental development of the children. The pianist he interviewed, Mitsuko Uchida , suggested that listeners to a child prodigy should ask themselves whether they would be willing to be represented in court or operated on by a gifted child of the same age. Music critic Janice Nimura told Solomon that the appearance of a child prodigy was the polite form of a freak show . While it is now considered politically incorrect to stare at a boy with a deformed face in a sideshow , it is still socially acceptable to have a six-year-old pianist appear on the Today Show , for example , and it is even considered inspiring because you thereby show what achievements people would be able to do. The personalities portrayed in greater detail by Solomon who were already in the center of public attention as so-called child prodigies include Yevgeny Igorewitsch Kissin , Leon Fleisher , Yefim Bronfman , Lang Lang and Vanessa-Mae and their respective families.

literature

  • Gerd-Heinz Stevens : The child prodigy in music history. Münster 1983 (dissertation).
  • Oliver Vitouch : Acquisition of musical expertise . In Thomas H. Stoffer, Rolf Oerter (Hrsg.): Allgemeine Musikpsychologie . (Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol. D / VII / 1, pp. 657–715), Hogrefe, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-8017-0580-3 . Overview of the problems of and alternatives to child prodigy theories

Web links

Wiktionary: Wunderkind  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Commons : Child prodigies  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Immortality of the Early ( Memento from July 21, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Feuilleton, January 17, 2004, p. 15)
  2. ↑ Wunder, Kinder, Schinder ( Memento of July 21, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feuilleton, January 22, 2004, p. 35)
  3. ↑ Text accompanying the exhibition Wunderkinder ( Memento from October 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Andreas Lang: Talented children - when they start school in the dead angle ?: Promotion of talent in primary school with special consideration of the beginning lessons. Tenea Verlag Ltd. 2004, ISBN 3-86504-064-0 ( limited online version (Google Books) )
  5. ↑ a b c d Child prodigies rarely become wonder men (Die Welt, February 13, 2004)
  6. ^ Solomon: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity . Scribner, New York, 2012, ISBN 978-1476706955 . Chapter Prodigies .
  7. ^ Solomon: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity . Scribner, New York, 2012, ISBN 978-1476706955 . Chapter Prodigies . E-Book position 8973. In the original the quote is: While many performers are self-involved, it is often the parents of prodigies who are most obviously narcissistic. The may invest own hopes, ambitions, and identities in what their children do rather than who their children are. Instead of cultivating curiosity, they may sprint for fame.
  8. ^ Solomon: Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity . Scribner, New York, 2012, ISBN 978-1476706955 . Chapter Prodigies . E-book position 9023. The original quote from music critic Janice Nimura reads: The child prodigy is the polite version of the carny freak. Gawking at the dog-faced boy in the sideshow is exploitative, but gawking at the six-year-old concert pianist on the Today show is somehow okay, even inspiring, demonstrating just how high human potential can soar.