Prodigy

Most infant prodigies are unusually terrible children who have an unusual faculty for aping their elders. Few ever graduate from the ape stage. Few ever hold the concert platform after their apishness has outgrown its disarming garb of knee britches and Dutch cuts. But once or twice in a generation appears a youngster who does his own musical thinking, can hold his own in the company of talented grownups. Such a precocity usually causes a sensation, even among hard-boiled critics.

A sensation there was last week at Manhattan's Town Hall. There, with practically no advance ballyhoo, a slight, dark-eyed, French-Canadian nine-year-old named Andre Mathieu hurried onto the stage, bowed stiffly, and pounced upon the keyboard of a huge concert grand. The audience applauded with delight at his precociously efficient playing of piano pieces by Chopin, Debussy and Ravel, but what left them wide-eyed with wonder was his musicianly performance of 14 of his own complicated and expert compositions, some of them written when he was only four. None of them was childish. Some, with descriptive titles like Procession d'Elephants, Les Abeilles Piquantes, Berceuse, showed a style reminiscent of such advanced composers as Ravel and Stravinsky. All were as deftly and strongly constructed as by a master builder. When he had finished, Manhattan critics, groping for comparisons, could find only one similar instance in musical history: famed Infant Prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who started composing at the age of five. Even then, they had to admit that Prodigy Mathieu had beaten Prodigy Mozart's trifling early tinklings by a year.

Solemn little Andre Mathieu, who speaks no English, started practicing the piano at the age of three, learned to write musical notes before he could write words. When he was seven the Quebec government sent him to study for a spell in Paris. In Montreal, where he lives with his father, mother and sister, he spends his spare time playing with tin soldiers and following the latest European war news. A bright student, specially interested in poetry and history, he has gotten all his general education from private tutors. Unlike many a composer three times his age, he has already had nearly all his compositions published (by Maurice Senart of Paris).

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