Blame Mozart: The Romantic Era is no place for child prodigies in Yiyun Li’s new novel

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

How novelist Yiyun Li learned to capture shadows

With the publication of her new novel “The Book of Goose,” Yiyun Li dives into the sources of her books’ precision, attentiveness and grief.

Sept. 20, 2022

John Field, one of Li’s two protagonists, was in fact a classical pianist of some repute, having invented the nocturne form of composition that Chopin would make famous in Field’s lifetime. A second-generation musician whose father Robert earned a respectable living as a violinist and teacher in the family’s native Dublin, Field shows evidence of budding talent while still a toddler. Robert proclaims his son a prodigy, and John’s childhood is swept away from him. “Boys in the alleyway, fondling marbles in their chilblained fingers or plotting Hurley Burley: these would remain foreign to him,” writes Li.

The book’s other co-lead, Adelaide Percheron, has two big strikes against her; a girl and an orphan, she has no recourse to rise above her station at a time when women weren’t permitted to hold proper jobs. She is born in Pondicherry, in French India. Her father, a military commander, is killed by the British Army during the French Revolutionary Wars of the late 18th century, and her mother dies during childbirth. As a foundling, Adelaide, like John Field, loses agency of her young life, as she is shuttled from distant relations to strangers who are willing to board her for a fee, until she finds sanctuary under her grandmother’s roof.

But Adelaide is hard to tame. She is possessed with preternatural intelligence and judgment; she questions everything, takes the measure of everyone. One of her governesses, Leonora, usually keen to practice corporal punishment on nonconforming children, senses this spark in Adelaide and tries to snuff it out for the child’s benefit. “People are frightened by a child they don’t understand,” Li writes. “They look for evil in her.” She is told to “know in what way a person wants to feel special, and make them feel that way.” Adelaide can’t be a beacon, only a flattering mirror.

When one of her for-hire guardians speaks of her past as a musician, playing the pianoforte (piano) for enraptured listeners, Adelaide is entranced. A trip to Paris to work for a family who needs a companion for their child leads to pianoforte lessons, but with no prospect of a public life as a musician. “The upbringing of girls — in London and Paris and Moscow and all the places in between — was a scheme against them,” writes Li. “If you were born into a good family, you were taught to sing, to dance, to paint, to play on the pianoforte … A girl’s responsibility was to turn out like all the others, so that together they could uphold the standard of attractive mediocrity.”

Author Yiyun Li attends the Time100 Gala at Lincoln Center, April 23, 2026, in New York.

(Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for Time)

While Adelaide tries to scheme her way out of the gilded cages of Victorian propriety, John Field is sent to London to study with Signor Clementi, an impresario and teacher who looks upon Field as raw material to be molded in his image. Clementi sees art as sport; only the strong survive. If Field is not the best, then he has no business playing. The drive for perfection gets into Field’s head. He is crippled by doubt, convinced that others are gaining on him. No matter: The audience is clueless about their own discernment, according to Clementi. “All people are stupid sometimes, but most people are stupid all of the time,” Clementi tells his charge.

For John and Adelaide, adults are not the only enemies. At a time of high infant mortality and short lifespans, the specter of early death hangs over them as friends and family members die with great and sudden frequency. As Li’s novel makes clear, to be young and ambitious in 18th century Europe meant having the fortitude to dream forbidden dreams, against all odds.

Years later, Adelaide and Field will find each other and marry, but it will come to nothing. History will deem Field a footnote, while Adelaide will be altogether forgotten. The once-promising prodigy will grow dissolute, remorseful and resentful of his wife, who outlives him. “A husband destined for immortality has ended up a debt-ridden, third-rate comedian, laboring over his closing lines; a gifted child squandered his promise, consorting with moneylenders,” Li writes.

Li offers hints of how Field and Adelaide’s destiny came to pass, with a preface and short flash-forward scenes that striate the narrative. This is to the novel’s detriment. Having followed the paths of these two characters for the duration of the book, the reader is primed for a union that never really comes. “Music Against the Night” is a rich evocation of the Romantic Era, but its unsatisfying conclusion feels like a symphony without its final movement.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and the Real Chinatown.”