Authors: Eric Weiner
At times he got carried away. He banned the ringing of bells during thunderstorms (a harmless local superstition) and the baking of honey cakes because they supposedly caused indigestion. If they had had Big Gulps in the eighteenth century, he would no doubt have banned them, too. Kaiser Joseph was the Michael Bloomberg of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a well-meaning but occasionally tone-deaf technocrat determined to improve people’s quality of life. One way to do that, he believed, was through music, and he put the full weight of his office (and his wallet) behind Vienna’s push to musical prominence.
He didn’t have far to push; Vienna already stood on a solid musical foundation, one that dated back to Roman times. By the sixteenth century, some two hundred years before Mozart, Italian opera had arrived, and the Viennese embraced it like a long-lost relative. Music was in the
air. Private orchestras popped up like flash mobs, competing with one another for the title
best
. As in Renaissance Florence, the musicians of Vienna were responding to a demand, not only for “good” music but for new and innovative compositions.
Music was not reserved for the elites either. All of Vienna had the bug. Hundreds of organ-grinders, dragging their instruments through the streets, provided the soundtrack for the city. Open-air concerts in city squares were held regularly. Almost everyone played an instrument. In tightly packed apartment buildings, tenants coordinated practice hours so as not to drown one another out.
Music was more than mere entertainment. It provided a means of venting political sentiments. “What cannot be said in our times is sung,” wrote one newspaper critic. And it was sung in a variety of languages, for Vienna—like so many places of genius—was an international crossroads. Slavs, Hungarians, Spaniards, Italians, French, Flemish—they all converged on the city. “The number of foreigners in the city is so great that one feels simultaneously foreigner and native citizen,” remarked Baron de Montesquieu, betraying hints of both pride and regret. While such diverse cultures might have clashed anywhere else in the world, they did not in Vienna. “It was the peculiar genius of Vienna, the city of music, to resolve all these contrasts harmoniously in something new and unique,” writes Viennese author Stefan Zweig, who I turn to again and again for insights into the city. “For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, has always been that it harmonized all national and linguistic opposites in itself.” Like Athens, Vienna didn’t reject the foreign nor did it import it unquestioningly. It absorbed and synthesized and, in doing so, created something both familiar and alien. Something new.
The Vienna of today may be spotless, an urban neat freak, but in the late eighteenth century it was a dirty, crowded city of two hundred thousand. Carriages careened through the streets, kicking up grime and dust. Workers sprayed the streets twice a day in a futile attempt at sanitation. Vienna was also noisy, the sound of horse hooves clattering against cobblestone a constant intrusion. Genius blossoms not in the desert but, like the lotus plant, in the muck and the messiness.
Mozart didn’t work in a studio or some trendy “incubator space” but at home. I’m curious to see that home, to walk on its aging floors, to breathe its air. Only one problem: my GPS, befuddled by the twisting, nonsensical streets, keeps leading me astray. I find this annoying but oddly gratifying, too, and as I’m dispatched down yet another dead end, I can’t help but smile. A small victory for Old Europe. A triumph for analog.
Finally, I find it, down a cobblestoned street that my iPhone swears does not exist. No. 5 Domgasse is a handsome building but not extravagant. No Pitti Palace this. It fits the city. The scale is right, the proportions just so. A Florentine would approve.
I walk up to the third floor, just as Mozart did, a voice in my head tells me. I’ve been hearing voices for a while now. No, not
those
kinds of voices—the kind that museums plant in your minds, thanks to audio guides. Usually, I despise these gizmos. They’re ungainly. Holding one to your ear like a 1980s cell phone feels unnatural, and the narrators always sound vaguely condescending.
Only this voice is not like that at all. It is lightly accented, authoritative yet friendly. I like it, and I wish the Voice could stay in my head forever, gently enlightening me about what I am seeing and where I am heading next.
The apartment is airy and expansive. I have no musical ear, or any other musical body parts, but something about the way the light fills the rooms, the way the sound ricochets off the walls, makes me feel that even someone as harmonically challenged as myself could compose a few notes here.
Mozart only lived here a few years, though, the Voice informs me. He moved often, a dozen times in a decade. Why such restlessness? Sometimes Mozart moved for the usual reasons: he could afford a nicer place or needed more space for his growing family. Other times he had no choice. The neighbors complained about the racket, not necessarily the music but the late-night billiards games and marathon parties. Mozart, like so many geniuses, had his diversions. One of them was billiards. He loved to play and, by the time he moved to this apartment, could afford his own table.
Life at No. 5 Domgasse was hectic, to put it mildly. Children scampered underfoot, dogs barked, pet birds squawked (one, a starling, could sing Mozart’s piano concertos), houseguests milled about, friends shouted at one another in the heat of a high-stakes billiards game.
This was the way Mozart liked it and is one reason why he considered Vienna “the best place in the world for my profession.” Something about Vienna brought out the best in him. The city tolerated his vices—gambling and scatological humor among them—in a way that sleepy Salzburg did not. More than that, Vienna provided the sort of happy collisions, possibilities of coincidence, that spawn creativity.
Maybe, I think, it’s no coincidence that billiards was his preferred game. It reflected life in Vienna. The various composers ricocheted off one another, these collisions altering their speed and trajectory, often in unpredictable ways. The result of all this ricocheting and vectoring lies before my eyes: leatherbound books, a sizable collection that occupies an entire shelf of Mozart’s study.
His complete works, the Voice tells me. An impressive oeuvre for someone who died at the absurdly young age of thirty-five. Mozart, like Shen Kuo or Picasso, was incredibly prolific, often completing six sheets of music in a single day. He worked constantly, and with no set hours. Sometimes his wife would find him at the piano at midnight, or at the crack of dawn. He worked to the very end, composing the
Requiem
on his deathbed, singing the alto parts himself.
What others view as distraction, geniuses such as Mozart see as fodder. In a letter to his sister, Mozart reports from Milan, where he’s studying in an especially lively conservatory: “Above us is a violinist, below us another one, next to us a singing teacher giving lessons, in the room across from ours there is an oboist. That is amusing to compose by! Gives one lots of ideas.” Personally, it would give me lots of headaches. But not Mozart. For geniuses such as him, the environment, pleasant or not, was always a source of inspiration.
In fact, Mozart sometimes composed in the thick of the commotion. He’d be sitting in the middle of a card game or a dinner party, there but not there. To an outsider, he appeared spacey, but he was in fact composing,
thinking in music. Only later would he commit the notes to paper. This explains why Mozart’s scores are so clean, with none of the cross-outs and markups so common in other composers’ works. It’s not that Mozart didn’t write rough drafts. He did. He wrote them in his mind.
One of Mozart’s most important audiences was his wife, Constanze. She was his invisible helper and influenced his music tremendously, and sometimes unintentionally. One of Mozart’s string quartets (part of the “Haydn” Quartets, named in honor of his mentor), stands apart from the others. It’s less melodic, more piquant. “Much too strongly seasoned,” sniffed one critic at the time. Italian musicians, upon receipt of the quartet, returned it to Vienna, due to “printing errors,” not realizing those were the notes Mozart intended. Musicologists long puzzled over this incongruous piece, this outlier.
There is a reason, though, why it sounds the way it does. Mozart wrote the piece on the night when Constanze was giving birth to their first child. Not before or after her labor, mind you, but
during.
(Thoughtfully, Mozart first summoned a midwife before sitting down at the piano.) Constanze later confirmed that the quartet contained several passages that reflected her distress, especially the minuet. Mozart, like all creative geniuses, did not distinguish between inspirational moments and ordinary ones. For Mozart, everything was material, even a moment that most of us would consider exactly the least inspiring for a musical composition, or much of anything else for that matter. Here was the ultimate in commotion, an event that would, for me at least, kill any creative impulses I might have, and what did Mozart do? He composed!
What might explain Wolfgang’s ability to thrive in such a frenetic environment? Recent research points toward something called the disinhibition hypothesis, developed by the late Colin Martindale. A psychologist at the University of Maine, he spent his career investigating the neuroscience of creativity. His tools were not surveys and word-association tests but fMRI brain scans and EEGs. Martindale zeroed in on “cortical arousal.” When we concentrate intensely, the middle part of our brain, the cerebellum, is activated, and this leads to increased heart rate, quickened breathing, and
heightened vigilance. Martindale suspected that cortical arousal might be related to creative thinking, but he wasn’t sure exactly how.
To find out, he hooked up a group of people—some highly creative and others less so—to EEG machines, then gave them a series of tests that measure creative thinking. The results were surprising: the more creatively inclined subjects showed lower cortical arousal while taking the test than did the noncreative subjects.
The heightened concentration of cortical arousal is helpful when balancing your checkbook or evading a tiger, concluded Martindale, but not when trying to compose an opera or write a novel or come up with the Next Big Internet Thing. For that, we need to enter a state that Martindale called defocused, or diffused, attention. Someone in this state of mind is not scattered, at least not as we normally think of the word. Like Buddhists, they have mastered the art of “detached attachment.” They are both focused and unfocused at the same time.
But why, Martindale wondered, are some people able to benefit from this diffused attention while others are not? Creative people are no more capable of controlling their cortical arousal levels than noncreative people. Creative achievements, he concluded, are based not on self-control “but rather on unintentional inspiration.”
Unintentional inspiration? What can that mean? Martindale, who passed away in 2008, never said, but I can’t help but wonder if this phenomenon explains why creative people are often restless. By changing locations, they are unconsciously attempting to lower their levels of cortical arousal, defocus their attention.
Whatever Mozart did, it clearly worked. With astonishing regularity, he performed musical miracles, writing entire symphonies in the time it takes most of us to do our taxes. He is said to have written the overture to his opera
Don Giovanni
the night before its premiere. But—and this is crucial—he always performed these miracles when someone, a patron usually, demanded it. “Once he was moved to compose, inspiration took over but the inspiration for that inspiration was likely a commission he had just received, a performance that required a new composition, a gift
to an appreciative friend,” writes Mozart biographer Peter Gay. Mozart didn’t work “on spec.” Rarely did he write a single note without knowing precisely when and where it would be performed. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart didn’t finish everything he started. He left behind some one hundred musical fragments—unfinished compositions that he either lost interest in or, more typically, for which the commissions were withdrawn.
Mozart liked money. He earned a lot but spent even more—on fancy clothes, gourmet food, and, most of all, gambling. Mozart, alas, was a better composer than a billiards player, and he soon found himself some fifteen hundred florins in debt—more than a year’s comfortable salary at the time. These debts were a source of great misery—he was always pleading for money—but they also drove him to write more scores. In a way, we have Mozart’s gambling habit and spendthrift ways to thank for much of his sublime music. Had he been a better billiards player, or a thriftier shopper, we wouldn’t have as much of his music to enjoy.
Mozart was both extrinsically motivated—some outside force demanded something of him—and also intrinsically motivated; once immersed in a work, he was soon lost in the psychological state known as flow; time became inconsequential and he soon forgot about the demands of the world “out there.” As we’ve seen with other geniuses, this combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation brought out the best in him.
Which is not to say that Mozart was a perfectly balanced individual. Far from it. Read a few of his letters and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Baudelaire was right when he said, “The beautiful is always strange,” for Mozart had one strange, overtly scatological sense of humor. “Oh, my ass burns like fire!” begins one of his milder descriptions. Yet the Hollywood image of Mozart as some sort of emotionally stunted man-child is dead wrong. No man-child could write music as emotionally nuanced as that of Mozart. And as much as we like to think of Mozart as a genius who transcended time and space, that is not the case. He was very much a man of his times. In a way, he was
more
of his times than others, and that is precisely what made him so brilliant. His music, especially his opera scores, required “a keen sensitivity to the society on which its success or failure depended,” writes biographer Volkmar Braunbehrens.