I'm not sure calling Mozart and Chopin prodigies qualifies as throwing terms around [lightly]. With so much recorded music being created over the millennia (since the invention of musical notation), these two, among a few others, stand out as undeniable geniuses of their craft. It also so happens that they started to make waves very early, which wasn't that easy to accomplish in an artist's lifetime back then, especially when you consider that Chopin gave only some 30 public performances in the last 19 years of his life spent in Paris and away from oppressed Poland. Chopin was seven years old when he composed two critically-acclaimed Polonaises, in G minor and B-flat major. Would you really not call him a prodigy?