Authors: Eric Weiner
Mozart loved Vienna. He loved not only its musicality but also its tolerance and its seemingly bottomless reservoir of possibility. Most of all, I think, he loved its high standards. The Viennese, like the Florentines, were a picky bunch, “and even the most unassuming citizen demanded good music from the wind band just as he demanded good value from the landlord,” observes Stefan Zweig in his memoir, adding, “This awareness of being under constant and pitiless observation forced every artist in the city to do his best.” The city brought out the best in its musicians because it accepted no less.
Mozart wanted to reach a broad audience, yet not everyone has the same “musical intelligence.” What to do? Dumbing down his music was not an option; he was too much the virtuoso for that. So Mozart happened upon a solution that was way ahead of his time. He constructed his symphonies the way Pixar constructs movies: designed to appeal to two distinct audiences at the same time. In the case of Pixar, those audiences are children and their parents. Much of the humor soars over the kids’ heads, but the parents get it and appreciate it. Mozart also had two distinct target audiences. He explains his approach in a letter to his father, dated December 28, 1782: “There are passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction, but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.” Perhaps all works of genius—from
The Magic Flute
to
The Incredibles—
are like that. They operate on several levels simultaneously. Like the Parthenon, their linear appearance is an illusion; all great works contain hidden curves.
It’s been said that originality is the art of concealing your sources. There is more than a little truth to that, and Mozart borrowed heavily from his fellow composers, living and dead. He was deeply influenced by the Italian operatic tradition, by his teachers Padre Martini and Joseph Haydn, by the music of Bach and Handel. He copied these masters’ scores by hand, as if the mechanical act might enable him to channel their greatness. Mozart’s first four piano concertos, written when he was only eleven years old, were skillfully crafted but not exactly original. He simply pieced them together from the works of other composers. He wouldn’t
write a truly original piano concerto until he was seventeen years old—still young, of course, but not freakishly so.
The child prodigy is a fiction. Sure, some young musicians play exceptionally well, but rarely, if ever, do they produce anything innovative at a young age. One study of twenty-five exceptional pianists found that, while they all had support and encouragement from their parents, most didn’t truly distinguish themselves until much later in their careers. Yes, young children sometimes display remarkable skill, but not creative genius. That takes time.
Why then does the myth of the child prodigy persist? Because it, like all myths, serves a purpose. Sometimes myths inspire, like those of Horatio Alger.
If a poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks can make it big, then maybe I can, too!
Sometimes myths serve as pacifiers: they let us off the hook.
Mozart was a one-off, a freak of nature. I could never compose music like him so there’s no sense trying. Now where did I put the remote?
Mozart adored his teachers, but as a student of Italy he was no doubt aware of Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that “the pupil who does not surpass his master is mediocre.” Mozart absorbed his teachers’ knowledge and techniques, but then developed a style wholly his own. That could not have happened anyplace but Vienna, a giant laboratory for musical experimentation.
The musicality of the city was only one reason Mozart loved Vienna. He also went there for the same reason young people through the ages have moved to the big city: to make a name for themselves, to test themselves in the big leagues, and most of all to escape the suffocating embrace of a parent.
Overbearing in the extreme, Leopold Mozart was the original helicopter parent. An accomplished but unremarkable musician himself, he was determined to avenge slights, real and perceived, through his genius son. It was a recipe for disaster.
Sure enough, when Mozart set out on his own, their relationship began to show signs of strain. In one letter, from September 1781, Wolfgang sounds remarkably like any young man bristling to demonstrate his independence.
From the way in which you have taken my last letter—as if I were an arch-scoundrel or a blockhead—or both—I am sorry to see that you rely more on the gossip and scribbling of other people than you do on me—and that in fact you have no trust in me whatever. . . . Please trust me always, for indeed I deserve it. I have trouble and worry enough here to support myself, and the last thing I need is to read unpleasant letters.
The greatest asset a city provides the aspiring genius, I realize, is not necessarily colleagues or opportunities but distance. A buffer between our old selves and our new.
Much separated Mozart and Beethoven. Fifteen years. A few hundred miles (Beethoven was born in Bonn, Mozart in Salzburg). Musical styles. Temperament. Body type. Sense of humor. Fashion sensibility. Hair. These two musical giants crossed paths only once, in 1787. Beethoven, a mere sixteen years old but already cocky, was visiting Vienna. He listened to Mozart play the piano, then pronounced his style
zerhackt
, choppy. Did the two meet privately? Here the historical record is less clear, but some evidence suggests they did.
Oh, to be at that meeting! The current and future king, side by side. According to biographer Otto Jahn, Beethoven played a short piece for Mozart, who, assuming it was a “showpiece prepared for the occasion, praised it in rather a cool manner.” Beethoven knew he had to make a stronger impression and pleaded with Mozart to give him a theme for improvisation. Mozart did, and this time Beethoven nailed it. Mozart, the story goes, walked silently to his friends sitting in an adjoining room and said, “Keep your eyes on him; someday he will give the world something to talk about.”
Mozart died before he could see his prophecy realized. Yet the ghost of Mozart haunted Beethoven throughout his life. He assiduously avoided even a hint of imitation, conscious or otherwise.
Places crowded with genius are a mixed blessing. While inspiration is everywhere you turn, there is always the danger of mimicry, even if
unintentional. That fear shadowed Beethoven throughout his career but also propelled him down new, less taken roads.
A century later, the Viennese novelist Robert Musil captured this dynamic beautifully: “Each thing exists only by virtue of its limitations, in other words, by virtue of a more or less hostile act against its environment: without the Pope there would be no Luther, and without the heathens, no Pope, and so it cannot be denied that man’s most deeply felt association with his fellow-men consists in dissociation from them.” Mozart reacted to Haydn, and Beethoven to Mozart. Billiard balls, ricocheting off one another, sending each other in new and wonderful directions.
Five years after his brief meeting with Mozart, Beethoven moved permanently to Vienna, more accomplished and even more cocky. The city and its suburbs, writes biographer Edmund Morris, “were to enfold him more and more, until he became as unbudgeable as a hermit crab.”
I walk past the iconic Burgtheater and the nearly equally iconic Café Landtmann, Freud’s favorite, then hike up five flights of stairs to a small, stiflingly hot apartment. It is shabby and worn, unpolished, like its former tenant.
Beethoven lived here. That, though, is a statement that could be said of many places in Vienna. Beethoven made Mozart look like a homebody. He moved constantly—anywhere from twenty-five to eighty times during his thirty-six years in Vienna, depending on which account you believe.
If you could time-travel to the Vienna of, say, 1808, you’d certainly want Ludwig van Beethoven as a drinking partner, and a fun-loving, if unreliable, friend. You would not want to have him as a tenant. He was a landlord’s nightmare. Visitors (often attractive young women) came and went at all hours. His apartments were littered with rough drafts—Beethoven, unlike Mozart, was constantly revising his scores and always worked on more than one piece at a time. His bathing methods were . . . unconventional. Sometimes, in the throes of composing, loath to interrupt his muse, he’d simply douse himself right there in the living room. It
gets worse. Here is a distinguished French visitor describing what he saw when he called upon the young genius:
Picture the dirtiest, most disorderly place imaginable—blotches of moisture covered the ceiling; an oldish grand piano, on which dust disputed the place with various pieces of printed and manuscript music; under the piano (I do not exaggerate) an unemptied
pot de nuit
[chamber pot]; beside it . . . a quantity of pens encrusted with ink . . . then more music. The chairs were covered with plates bearing the remains of last night’s supper, and with clothing, etc.
Might Beethoven’s slovenly ways help explain his musical genius? Many of us certainly hope so. After all, what slob hasn’t been heartened by that famous
Life
magazine photograph of Einstein’s desk, with papers strewn everywhere?
Psychologists at the University of Minnesota recently conducted a series of experiments aimed at shedding some light on that age-old question, is my pigsty of a desk the mark of genius or simply of piggishness? In one study, participants were divided into two groups and asked to fill out a questionnaire in an office setting. They were then asked to come up with creative uses for Ping-Pong balls. Some were assigned a tidy room, while others completed the task in a messy one, cluttered with papers and supplies. Both groups generated the same number of ideas, but those produced by the messy-room folks were rated more “interesting and creative” by a panel of judges.
Why? Kathleen Vohs, the lead researcher, suspects that a messy setting “stimulates a release from conventionality.” You see disorder around you, everything is off-kilter, so your mind follows this vector into unknown territory. Vohs and her colleagues have begun to investigate the role of messiness in the digital world. Preliminary findings suggest a similar mechanism at work: “clean” websites cultivate less creative thinking than “messy” ones. Beethoven didn’t have the benefit of these studies, but I can’t help but wonder if his messy ways represented a subconscious effort to stir his creative pot, a sort of self-induced chaos.
Any sign of Beethoven’s slovenly manners has studiously been erased from his apartment.
You clean up real good, Ludwig
. But to call it a Beethoven museum is to do both the institution and the man an injustice. So halfhearted, so pathetically cursory, is the effort that I can’t help but like it. The past feels closest when unadorned. No billiards tables or leatherbound editions here. No lovingly curated displays. No wise Voice to guide me. Just a few mementos—some handwritten (sloppily, of course) scores, a printed invitation to his overture “Coriolan,” and in one otherwise empty room Beethoven’s piano. It’s much smaller than I expected. It looks as if it belonged to a child, not a musical giant.
Yet here Beethoven wrote his first, and only, opera,
Fidelio
, and a sweet little bagatelle called “Für Elise.” The piano, a sign informs me, dates back to Beethoven’s “last creative period.” That strikes me as unduly harsh. Did Beethoven think of it that way? Sure, he knew he was going deaf and agonized over the loss of the one sense that “ought to have been more perfect than in all others.” Yet his deafness never disrupted his creative output.
Many geniuses suffered from illness and disability. Edison was partially deaf, Aldous Huxley partially blind. Alexander Graham Bell and Picasso were dyslexic. Michelangelo, Titian, Goya, and Monet all suffered from various illnesses that actually improved their artwork. Michelangelo, for instance, was in great agony as he painted the Sistine Chapel, twisting his body and bending backward to paint the enormous ceiling. As the project progressed, his personal discomfort was reflected in the figures he painted; they, too, began to take on a twisted form. Later, this became the artist’s hallmark and ushered the way for mannerism, the next great art style. What doesn’t kill you will not only make you stronger but also more creative. The Power of Constraints manifesting itself on a personal level.
Is that what happened, I wonder, with Beethoven? The sign doesn’t say. Where is the Voice when I need it?
Throughout his life, Beethoven couldn’t seem to shake restlessness, evidenced not only in the frequent changes of address, but also the fast-paced walks across town, his beaver hat flapping in the wind, and the frequent trips to coffeehouses. All this movement, I suspect, represented
Beethoven’s attempt to diffuse his attention, trigger something inside him. It didn’t take much. “Any change of scene, whether from town to country or just out onto the street, was enough to stimulate his creativity,” writes Edmund Morris in his biography of the composer.
That old stereotype of the “sensitive artist” is truer than we think. Creative people, research shows, are
physiologically
more sensitive to stimuli. In experiments, they consistently rate various stimuli—electric shocks and loud noises—more intensely than less creative people.
This helps explain why creative people periodically retreat from the world. Proust in his cork-lined bedroom. Dickens, who, when deep into a manuscript, avoided any social events, for the “mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” Psychologist Colin Martindale speculates that creative types engage in a feast-and-famine dynamic. They deprive themselves of novelty, for a while, so they will crave it, and appreciate it, later. Hunger is the best spice.
Vienna provided composers such as Mozart and Beethoven with both stimulation and isolation, allowing them to live simultaneously in the world and apart from it. A perfect balance.
“Would you like to go on a musical adventure?” asks Friederike over the phone.