The Youngest Composers: Masterpieces Written Before 18

Music is the prodigy art. No child has ever painted a great fresco or written a great novel, but the repertoire contains masterpieces — works professionals perform today, on their merits — composed by children and teenagers. Here are the youngest composers ever to write something immortal.

The ladder, by age

• Age 5 — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The first minuets, written down by his father in 1761. By eight he had a symphony; the full impossible catalogue is here.

• Age 7 — Frederic Chopin. The Polonaise in G minor, published in Warsaw in 1817 — the earliest printed work of the composer who would refine the piano's poetry for all time. Warsaw's press compared the boy to Mozart on the spot.

• Age 9 — Sergei Prokofiev. His first opera, The Giant, written out (with help) after piano lessons from his mother on a country estate. He arrived at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at 13 with four operas in his suitcase, to the examiners' astonishment.

• Age 11 — Erich Wolfgang Korngold. His ballet Der Schneemann premiered at the Vienna Court Opera in 1910 — an eleven-year-old on the imperial stage. Mahler, hearing the boy, pronounced him a genius; Richard Strauss admitted the scores gave him "shudders of awe." Korngold's second act came decades later in Hollywood, where his Oscar-winning scores invented film music's symphonic language.

• Age 14 — Clara Schumann. Her Piano Concerto in A minor, begun at 13, premiered with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when she was 16 — the soloist being the composer herself, already one of Europe's touring virtuosos, and one of history's great prodigies.

• Age 16 — Felix Mendelssohn. The Octet for strings, Op. 20: by wide critical consent the greatest piece of music ever written by a sixteen-year-old — many say by any teenager, in any art. One year later he wrote the A Midsummer Night's Dream overture, whose fairy scherzo textures no adult has bettered.

• Age 17–18 — Franz Schubert. Gretchen am Spinnrade at 17 and Erlkönig at 18 — the two songs that essentially founded the German Lied. In 1815, aged 18, he wrote well over a hundred songs, some of them in a single day.

• Age 10, for perspective — Camille Saint-Saens made his formal Paris debut at ten, and famously offered, as an encore, any of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas from memory. He composed until his death at 86 — a 79-year career, possibly music's longest.

"The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between."

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Why music, and almost nothing else?

The pattern has a real explanation: musical syntax, like language, is absorbable in early childhood; a ten-year-old can have a decade of immersion. Novels require lived experience; frescoes require scaffolding rights. But a child at a keyboard commands the full material of the art. What the prodigies still needed — and what separates this list's names from ten thousand forgotten wunderkinder — was something rarer: having absorbed the language young, they went on to say something new in it.

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Watch: Mendelssohn: Piano Works

The unbeatable entries

Chopin's publication-at-7 and Korngold's imperial premiere-at-11 belong to vanished worlds of salons and court theatres. Mendelssohn's Octet, though, holds its record on pure merit — and every sixteen-year-old composer since has had to hear about it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the greatest work composed by a teenager?

By wide critical consent, Mendelssohn's Octet, written at sixteen — with his Midsummer Night's Dream overture, at seventeen, close behind.

How young was Chopin when he was first published?

Seven — his Polonaise in G minor was printed in Warsaw in 1817.

Why does music produce so many child prodigies?

Musical syntax is absorbed in early childhood like language, and a child at a keyboard commands the art's full material — unlike novels or architecture.