He doesn’t mention what the exact markers for these traits are. “At the London recital there was much amazement at Deutscher’s poise and skill,” Wroe writes. The text itself becomes an artifact of this “awed attention.” Nicholas Wroe does briefly engage with the darker side of prodigy reception in his piece, writing that they “have attracted awed attention from the general public, renowned as much for the horror stories of burnout that can surround them as for their gifts.” But then he moves on to listing Deutscher’s accomplishments with a matching age to each. This could have been an opportunity: the limits on what can ethically be written about a phenomenally talented child mean there is more space to reflect on society instead, its expectations, projections, needs. In February, the Guardian profiled Alma Deutscher, who plays the violin and the piano, and composes her own music. But since the time of Leopold Mozart, who dragged his son through the drawing rooms of Europe’s nobility like a trained monkey, the prodigal youngster has become a familiar, peculiar trope in classical music hagiography. That good journalists for major publications spend time profiling child prodigies in classical music, even the pieces they never reach the status of immortal writing, speaks volumes about our genre’s collective psyche. When journalists betray their subjects, they are at least adults they don’t need to be protected from the world and themselves. That’s why it’s wrong to write one of a child. A journalist, Janet Malcolm once wrote, preys “on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Great profiles always seem to contain an element of backstabbing.
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