Child singers aside, an early start is considered obligatory for instrumental stars. Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Rubinstein and Daniel Barenboim gave their debut recitals at the age of seven. Martha Argerich was six when she first appeared with an orchestra. None was harmed by it; all led rich public, personal and intellectual lives.
But these five were incubators of a rare talent, a gift that strikes perhaps twice in an epoch. Weep for the others who were extolled in short pants, forgotten at puberty.
Take the Menuhins. Yehudi was the north star of a family constellation. His sisters, Yaltah and Hephzibah, were cut adrift by the gulf between Yehudi's comet and their own slightly-above-average abilities, an unbridgeable disparity. Yaltah once told me she had always longed for a normal childhood.
Heifetz, the outstanding violinist of his lifetime ("10 per cent better than any of us," Isaac Stern would say), was mocked in George and Ira Gershwin's "Jascha, Mischa, Toscha, Sascha" as an identikit product of the St Petersburg fame school. Wrong about Jascha, the Gershwins were right in dismissing the others as makeweights. Mischa Elman was a regular on the concert circuit, but the names of Toscha Seidl and Sascha Jacobsen survive as warnings from history that the best are mortal enemies of the good. When parents hear their child hailed as the next Heifetz, they should think long and hard if he or she is not about to become the next Toscha or Sascha.
Classical music thrives, every bit as much as commercial music, on the cultivation of unrealistic expectations. Classical child stars come these days with tiger moms. The pianist Helen Huang cut her debut album at nine. Conrad Tao claims to have played a recital at four.
The Japanese-American violinist Midori, in her German autobiography, exposes with great candour the downside of a prodigy upbringing. Picked out by Zubin Mehta at 11, acclaimed by Stern as the finest child he had heard, Midori nearly died of anorexia in her early twenties. She went on to take a master's in psychology and create an educational foundation for deprived children.
Now in her forties, Midori refuses to denounce the child route to adult stardom. For one in a million, it may be the only way. Gratifying as it may be for armchair moralists to denounce the ruination of childhood, there is always a chance that this child, this special child, might — just might — be the one. I am listening to a Chinese girl, Serena Wang, play the Chopin C sharp minor Fantasy. It's out this month on the Channel Classics label. Serena is nine years old. She will play in Paris this autumn, New York next year. Believe your ears.
But these five were incubators of a rare talent, a gift that strikes perhaps twice in an epoch. Weep for the others who were extolled in short pants, forgotten at puberty.
Take the Menuhins. Yehudi was the north star of a family constellation. His sisters, Yaltah and Hephzibah, were cut adrift by the gulf between Yehudi's comet and their own slightly-above-average abilities, an unbridgeable disparity. Yaltah once told me she had always longed for a normal childhood.
Heifetz, the outstanding violinist of his lifetime ("10 per cent better than any of us," Isaac Stern would say), was mocked in George and Ira Gershwin's "Jascha, Mischa, Toscha, Sascha" as an identikit product of the St Petersburg fame school. Wrong about Jascha, the Gershwins were right in dismissing the others as makeweights. Mischa Elman was a regular on the concert circuit, but the names of Toscha Seidl and Sascha Jacobsen survive as warnings from history that the best are mortal enemies of the good. When parents hear their child hailed as the next Heifetz, they should think long and hard if he or she is not about to become the next Toscha or Sascha.
Classical music thrives, every bit as much as commercial music, on the cultivation of unrealistic expectations. Classical child stars come these days with tiger moms. The pianist Helen Huang cut her debut album at nine. Conrad Tao claims to have played a recital at four.
The Japanese-American violinist Midori, in her German autobiography, exposes with great candour the downside of a prodigy upbringing. Picked out by Zubin Mehta at 11, acclaimed by Stern as the finest child he had heard, Midori nearly died of anorexia in her early twenties. She went on to take a master's in psychology and create an educational foundation for deprived children.
Now in her forties, Midori refuses to denounce the child route to adult stardom. For one in a million, it may be the only way. Gratifying as it may be for armchair moralists to denounce the ruination of childhood, there is always a chance that this child, this special child, might — just might — be the one. I am listening to a Chinese girl, Serena Wang, play the Chopin C sharp minor Fantasy. It's out this month on the Channel Classics label. Serena is nine years old. She will play in Paris this autumn, New York next year. Believe your ears.
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