Answer: Mozart
Explanation: Leopold Mozart (1719–87), father and teacher of the famous composer wrote:
“The most amazing genius in musical history” is an epithet rightly more than a teense controversial, bright as the light of Amadeus did shine and continues to even today. But he was certainly a child prodigy, a boy genius, and on top of that his father was a skilled and principled didact who sacrificed a very great deal to ensure his son’s education and chances for success.
It is sometimes missed by those not thoroughly versed in Mozart’s biographical details that he came from one of the more musically prominent families of his time and place; neither he nor his talented sister Nannerl, also a skilled young musician, grew up in a vacuum. Leopold Mozart was respected throughout Europe as a violin teacher, a performer, and a composer in his own right.
The earliest pieces written by Mozart show a curious blend of precocity — from age five or six there is already a bent toward experimentation, a delight in defying expectations — and an unshakable grounding in the rules of composition which could only have come from Dad. In this sense, the child’s earliest work is that of a consummate professional. This is not “natural.” It is learned, which means that it is taught. Later, Mozart’s revelry in the game of music would blossom into searing expressive potency and a miraculous clarity of ideation. But this creativity needed a vehicle, which came courtesy of the learned professionalism instilled by the father.
When Leopold and his wife took their children on exhausting, preposterously expensive performing tours of European courts and capitals in the 1760s, it was not with the hope of earning great sums of money. Leopold knew better than this. He is sometimes criticized for turning his children into show monkeys, but that was never what he intended primarily. He wanted to introduce his children, Wolfgang in particular, to as many diverse musical influences and future professional contacts as possible. The venture nearly bankrupted the family, while greatly enriching the minds and the imaginations of the children and providing them with precious, irreplaceable experience.
In an ironic sense, a little later in life, Leopold also furthered his son’s extraordinary creative career by providing a foil: many of Mozart’s greatest achievements, and his entire working life in the capital of Vienna, were in part fueled by defiance of his father, by a desire to outgrow the kind of quiet, respectable, but also highly predictable professional life his parents had lived.
Mozart’s music stands on its own merits, certainly. But he could not have done it without his father as both a positive and negative example. The boy had seen, interacted with, and absorbed the majority of musical Europe by age twenty, and he didn’t do that on his own.