You have to be 16 years old to drive, 18 to vote and 21 to drink — at least in the United States.

How old do you have to be to conduct a professional symphony orchestra?

It’s a trick question, of course. There’s no minimum age requirement for standing in front of a group of 100 or so instrumentalists and getting them to perform as one. Doing so takes a rare confluence of gifts under any circumstances — physical, musical, interpersonal — and some people do start amassing them alarmingly early in life.

But that doesn’t mean it’s an uncomplicatedly good idea.

The latest musical phenom to raise this concern is Klaus Mäkelä,the 26-year-oldFinnishconductor whoholds no fewer than three major leadership posts— in Oslo, Paris and Amsterdam. Over the course of the past couple of years, he has become an orchestral golden boy, showered with praise and touted as a candidate fororchestral vacancies as they arise — not bad in a fieldwhere practitioners are considered rookies until at least their mid-30s.

Yet when Mäkelämade his debutwith the San Francisco Symphony in April, he left the impression of a gifted artist who was still very much in the early stages of his development. Recently, Alex Rossof the New Yorkerhad a similar reaction to Mäkelä’s first outing with the New York Philharmonic, and to a recent complete recording of Sibelius’ symphonies.

“I suspect that in later years Mäkelä will be embarrassed by this premature debut,”he wroteof the recording (which I have yet to hear). “… Let’s hope that (he) can ignore the oddly cultish aura that surrounds him and learn from his inevitable wrong turns.”

Ross may or may not be right about Mäkelä specifically, but the general point resonated strongly for me. This is merely the latest example of the musical world becoming fixated on an artist for whom youth is an obvious part of the attraction.

It’s not a remotely new development. In music, the tradition of child prodigies dates back at least as far as Mozart, who spent his childhood being dragged aroundto major citiesin Europe like a trained monkey so he could show off his entirely genuine skills as a violinist and keyboard player.

The prodigy playbook hasn’t really changed in the ensuing 250 years. To this day, concert halls remain awash with pianists and violinists in their teens and even younger, taking to the stage with formidable technical skills but little sense of what the music they play actually means. (The most recent example was the Spanish violinistMaría Dueñas,who made her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2019at 16.)

There’s a simple reason for that: Young people don’t know very much. Not even prodigies.

I say this with no disrespect for young people. (I’m a former young person myself!) They have countless skills and strengths that oldsters often lack — energy, ambition, the knack for learning new things.

But acquiring knowledge, let alone wisdom, is a process that requires logging a certain number of trips around the sun. And having that knowledge or wisdom is an essential part of being an artist.

The point was driven home to me yet again in my recent encounter withAlma Deutscher,the astonishingly talented 17-year-oldBritishmusician. Deutscher was at Opera San Joséto conduct “Cinderella,”the full-length opera she first composed at 10 and has since expanded and strengthened.

The scope and range of Deutscher’s abilities are truly unnerving. She’s an accomplished pianist and violinist, and she wrote the libretto for “Cinderella” as well as the full orchestral score. She’s also remarkably intelligent, articulate and charming as a conversationalist.

Yet there’s no getting around the fact that she’s 17, which puts a hard cap on how deeply she understands the world. Her ideas about music are thoughtful but callow; “Cinderella” is a work of rich ingenuity and little emotional depth.

没有羞耻——没有人能理解y more of the world than we’ve had the time to absorb — but there is a danger. The danger lies in mistaking skill for understanding, especially when that skill is so wildly out of proportion to age.

This is a temptation we’ve all felt. The spectacle of a pint-size艺术大师——在任何领域,不仅仅是μsic — feels otherworldly, and it inspires an almost lurid fascination that is difficult to resist.

It can also lead us to misconstrue the reality of what we’re witnessing. It can prompt us to mistake facility for profundity or technique for insight, whether the case involves a 13-year-old pianist, a 17-year-old composer or a 26-year-old conductor.

That’s not to say that there aren’t counterexamples. Felix Mendelssohn, for one, was as eloquent and original a composer at 17 as any adult in the Western classical tradition. (Mozart, whatever the music appreciation salespeople may tell you, was not.) There have been orchestra conductors in their 20s who had something to say about Beethoven that was worth hearing.

But those exceptions are vanishingly rare. In general, everyone involved — the artists and their audiences alike — is better served by patience and commitment. Let young musicians develop and thrive at their own pace and through their own process. There’s no compelling reason why anyone needs to hear a youngster’s Beethoven or Tchaikovsky today, when everything we know tells us it will be better — richer, stranger, more full of nuance and perception — further down the road.