Authors: Eric Weiner
“Sure,” I reply, not sure what I’m getting myself into, especially since I have never met Friederike.
She is the friend of a friend, host of a popular classical-music program on Austrian radio, and, I’m told, is good at explaining music to neophytes such as myself. She knows music
and
she knows Vienna. Surely, then, she must know something about genius.
She says she’ll pick me up Friday morning and asks the name of my hotel.
“The Adagio.”
“Oh, like the music.”
“Um, yes,” I say, “like the music.”
I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. We hang up, and I immediately google the word. It had not occurred to me that Adagio
was anything other than a pleasantly Euro-sounding name concocted by the hotel chain the way pharmaceutical companies invent names for their drugs. Soothing. Reassuring. But meaningless. Professor Google sets me straight.
Adagio
is indeed a musical term. It means “slowly.” This explains a lot, I think. It explains the five-foot-high clefs painted on the walls of my room. It explains the slow service; the staff is merely keeping perfect time.
Friederike pulls up in a tired-looking Peugeot, which, I soon discover, she converses with. I find this a bit off-putting. Plus, it’s a French car but she speaks to it in German, further confusing me. I don’t understand a word she’s saying, but it sounds affectionate. I’m happy they have such a good relationship. Really, I am.
She hands me a map. It instantly comes apart in my hands. It’s an old map, she explains, from Cold War times, when Vienna was a hotbed of espionage, but she likes the relief it shows, the contours of the hills just outside Vienna. Is that where we’re heading? I ask.
Friederike doesn’t hear me. She’s talking to the Peugeot, offering what sounds like words of encouragement. Now she’s back, telling me one theory—a fantastical-sounding one, I confess—about why Vienna is such a creative place. The Alps begin here, she says. Vienna is like the head of a snake, and snakes have magical powers. It’s the sort of fuzzy-headed, New Age explanation for genius clusters I have so far avoided.
I try to make small talk by pointing out what a nice day it is—warm, with a slight breeze, and aren’t those trees blooming?
Yes, says Friederike. Chestnut trees. She concedes it is indeed a nice day but quickly adds that rain is coming from the north. Soon, it will turn bitterly cold and wet. She says this with an air of dark inevitability, and I’m reminded of the Scots. The good never lasts long in Vienna, either. One moment it’s sunny, the next moment you’re drenched. One moment you’re living in a vibrant capital city, the seat of an empire, and next thing you know you’re living in a second-rate, provincial town. Don’t be fooled by the apparent solidity of the stone buildings and the beefy palaces. It is all subject to the cruel whims of history.
Now Friederike is running through the roster of composers, rattling
off names with the same quiet fervor of a die-hard sports fan. Haydn was the adult in the room, less flamboyant and so today less appreciated. Schubert was the native son; unlike the rest he was actually born in Vienna. Beethoven was like Prometheus, “stealing fire from the gods.” She loves Beethoven. She calls his music “a box within a box within a box.” There’s always another box to discover. She’s been listening to him all her life and she’s still discovering boxes. As for Mozart, she says simply, “He was the God of all. His music is like paradise.”
Einstein also adored Mozart, once calling his music “so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.” It’s actually a very Chinese observation. Again, in the Eastern view of creativity, all discoveries are actually rediscoveries, all inventions reinventions. There is nothing new under the sun, but the old is plenty wonderful and, like Mozart’s music, just waiting to be uncovered.
We’ve left the city center far behind and are now entering uncharted territory. We pass a young woman with a large musical instrument strapped to her back. The case looks as if it has melded with her body, making it difficult to distinguish where instrument ends and woman begins. I’m reminded of one of those lumbering giant tortoises that live forever and don’t seem to have a care in the world.
I point out the woman to Friederike and mention how I’ve heard that every Austrian child plays an instrument. Is it true?
Yes, Friederike says, but quickly disabuses me of any
Sound of Music
fantasies I might be harboring. Austrian children are
forced
to play the piano or the violin at a young age, “and they hate it, just like kids everywhere,” she says as we round a bend.
Now we’re climbing and climbing, Friederike coaxing the little Peugeot.
Auf geht’s, mein Kleiner. Du schaffst das!
“Let’s go my little one. You can do it!”
What is the name of this mountain? I ask, trying to steer the conversation from the automotive to the human realm.
“Not a mountain,” she chides. “A hill.”
I forgot. We’re in Austria. We pass a terraced hillside where something is growing, though what exactly I can’t say.
“It’s a vineyard,” says Friederike, reading my mind. Vienna has some seventy, more than any other city in the world. I had no idea. Does this, perhaps, explain why Beethoven escaped to these mount—er, hills?
Yes, she says, he liked his wine, but more than that, he liked his nature. Beethoven desperately wanted to flee the heat and dust and stench of Vienna. So he did. Every chance he got, he’d hop a carriage to the Wienerwald, the rolling green hills just outside town. Away from the suffocating fans and the finicky critics and the pesky landlords, away from his audience, he was finally at peace. He would walk and think, often staying out past dusk. The notes came to him while he walked, he once said, and I think, yes, the way the questions came to Socrates, or the words to Dickens.
Friederike parks the Peugeot, congratulating it on a job well done.
“Can you still hike in these woods?” I ask.
“
One
can hike,” she says, before citing a Japanese proverb. “ ‘A tough man climbs the mountain. A wise man sits in the water.’ ”
So, okay, no hiking. I’m good with that.
We walk a few yards (walking and hiking constituting two distinct activities) before reaching an overlook.
“Look at the hills,” says Friederike. “So soft and silky.”
I imagine Beethoven standing on this very spot, two hundred years ago, his hearing fading but his mind as sharp as ever. What did he see? What did these excursions do for him? We get some inkling from his writings. He once called nature “a glorious school for the heart,” adding, “Here I shall learn wisdom, the only wisdom that is free from disgust.”
This side of Beethoven surprises me. I had pictured a gruff man, a mercurial womanizer and bon vivant, not a tree hugger. But he was. Literally. Down there, near the so-called Eroica House, where he lived while writing the eponymous symphony, a large linden tree grows. Beethoven, legend has it, would regularly wrap his beefy arms around it for inspiration. One day, I did the same, hoping some of that magic might rub off. So far, I have detected no sudden spike in musical ability, but it’s still early days.
Friederike tells me how Beethoven always had a picture in mind when he composed. “Painting with music,” Friederike calls it.
What she is describing, albeit metaphorically, is synesthesia. That’s the condition where a person’s sensory “wiring” is crossed. People with synesthesia hear colors or smell sounds. All creative people, I think, have a touch of synesthesia, in the sense that they don’t limit their source of inspiration to a single sense. A painter might find inspiration in a piece of music, a writer in a distinctive scent. Friedrich Schiller, the poet and philosopher, always kept a carton of rotten apples under his desk when he wrote. He said it reminded him of the countryside. Picasso claimed to suffer from an “indigestion of greenness” after walking in the woods. “I must empty this sensation into a picture,” he said.
We’re back in the Peugeot, and Friederike has returned to her composers’ scorecard. Gustav Mahler’s music is the most Viennese, she says. “It is some kind of happiness never fulfilled. An aching heart. So sad. That is life.” Music, she says,
good
music, is about “exporting sadness.” I like that. It gives me a whole new perspective not only on music but on all art forms. Artists are in the import/export business. They are, as we’ve seen, more sensitive than the rest of us, importing the suffering of an imperfect world; then they process this suffering, remake it into art, and export it, thus lessening their sadness and increasing our pleasure. A perfectly symbiotic arrangement.
My use of a term borrowed from biology is no coincidence. The field provides a whole new way of thinking about creative environments. “An ecology of human creativity,” psychologist David Harrington calls it. What does this mean?
For starters, it means viewing genius from a more holistic perspective, realizing that all the parts are connected. Biologists studying ecosystems know that it’s impossible to tinker with one part of that system without fundamentally altering the whole. Creatologists, Harrington argues, need to think about creative genius in the same way. For instance, take the concept of “selective migration.” That’s when organisms flock to a certain environment not because they have been displaced by some natural disaster, or because their inner GPS dictates such a move, but because they have identified that environment as beneficial. They know they will thrive there. This is precisely what Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn
did. They moved to Vienna because the habitat met their particular needs and they knew they’d flourish there.
Another term that Harrington borrows from biology is
biochemical demand
. We know that organisms place certain demands on the ecosystems that they inhabit. Plants, for instance, consume sunlight and water. If the ecosystem can meet those demands, then the organisms will survive; if not, they will perish. It’s that simple. Likewise, Harrington argues, creative people place certain “psychosocial demands” on their ecosystem—“demands that must be met if the creative processes are to flourish.” These demands include time, workspace, communication channels, and access to audiences.
Harrington, again borrowing from biology, emphasizes the importance of “organism-environment fit.” Ultimately, whether an organism survives depends not on the organism itself but on its relationship with its environment. Likewise, creative people must be a good “fit” with their environment if they are to realize their potential. For instance, some people thrive in an environment that encourages risk taking while others do not. A “good” cultural fit, though, isn’t necessarily a frictionless one. Socrates is the best, and most tragic, example of this.
Finally, as any biologist knows, environments don’t only shape organisms, they are shaped
by
them. These organisms deplete resources, yes, but also give something back. Plants suck up carbon dioxide but also emit much-needed oxygen into the atmosphere. Similarly, creative geniuses drain the cultural resources of a city—money, space, time—but deliver something in return. One look at the Parthenon or the Duomo tells you that.
So, what happens when we view the musical geniuses of Vienna from this new, ecological perspective? We see the “organisms”—Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn—engaging in selective migration, moving to the ecosystem where they are most likely to thrive, Vienna. We see them depleting resources—their patrons’ money, their audiences’ time, their landlords’ patience. We see them shaping their environment, changing it for centuries to come. Haydn inspired Mozart, and Mozart inspired other composers: Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Brahms. We see how
these musical organisms fit in the ecosystem but not too well. They push back.
Einstein’s secretary once said that if Einstein were born among the polar bears, he would still be Einstein. But unless the polar bears were well versed in theoretical physics, that is not true. Einstein would not be Einstein. Which is not to take anything away from Einstein, or the polar bears, but simply to point out that he was part of a creative ecology, and trying to isolate him from it is not only silly but futile. If Einstein had been born fifty years earlier, chances are we would never have heard of him. The field of physics was not open to new ideas at that time, and without that receptivity Einstein’s brilliant theories would have died on the vine. More likely, a bright young scientist like him would never have gone into physics but, rather, chosen a field where the big questions were still in play.
Just as it is too simplistic to think of genius as solely an internal phenomenon, so, too, is it a mistake to think of it as a direct result of a particular time and place. Vienna didn’t “produce” Mozart the way Toyota produces a new car. The relationship between place and genius is more complex (not complicated) than that, more intertwined. More
intimate
.
“Food,” says Friederike.
“Yes,” I reply. “What about it?”
“In order to understand Vienna and its music, you need to understand food.”
I flash back to my unfortunate experience with the cuisine of ancient Greece.
We park and find a little restaurant. We decide to sit outside, it being such a glorious day, the air so warm and soft. Yes, Friederike agrees, but not for long, she reminds me. The cold and the rain are coming, and everything will change.
I silently stare at my menu, afraid to contradict her. I’m starting to learn my lesson: never interfere with Viennese fatalism. It’s like taking food away from them.
I’m struggling to unscramble the menu when Friederike comes to my rescue and orders us fish soup and salad accompanied by a sort of wine
spritzer that she assures me is good, even though I’ve never had a positive experience with any beverage in the spritzer family.
The sun feels warm on my face. The air caresses my skin. I know it won’t last long, though, that a cold rain is coming, so I plow ahead with my questions. Vienna had a bounty of musical talent at the time, but was that enough to make the leap into the realm of genius?