The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (37 page)

No, she says, talent alone was not enough. “You also need marketing. Beethoven wouldn’t be known as a genius if he wasn’t good at marketing. Mozart had a built-in marketing machine with his father.” The notion of the lone genius, she agrees, is a folktale, a story we like to tell ourselves.

“If you don’t have the possibility to sell yourself, to be known, you won’t be a genius. You cannot just sit under a chestnut tree and write or paint or whatever. I know five painters who are real geniuses, but no one has discovered them. You can be as good as Rembrandt, but if no one discovers you, you will only be a genius in theory.” She leaves unsaid the inevitable conclusion: a genius in theory is no genius at all.

And here, she says between sips of spritzer, Mozart was a true virtuoso, navigating the treacherous waters of palace politics, biding his time until he could break out on his own. Soon after arriving in the city, he nuzzled up to one Countess Thun. A woman with “a most unselfish heart,” as one English visitor put it, she loved nothing more than to connect people. She opened doors for Mozart, and he didn’t hesitate to walk through. He resented nobility, though, and occasionally his disdain boiled over. “Stupidity oozes out of his eyes,” he said of Archduke Maximilian, the emperor’s brother.

Mozart could get away with this sort of insubordination partly because he was so talented and partly because the times were changing. The age of the freelance musician was beginning to stir. This must have been liberating—and terrifying. Uncertainty defined the freelance life (still does), and Mozart was the first musician to experience this. It caused him endless grief and might even have hastened his death, but it also kept him on his toes. Comfort is the enemy of genius, and thank goodness, Mozart never got too comfortable.

Circumstances matter. Not only when and where you’re born, but which gender. Mozart’s sister Maria Anna—better known by her nickname Nannerl—was also an extremely talented musician, “but she was a woman, and it was her fate to bear children,” says Friederike. “It was the same with Mendelssohn and his sister. Women geniuses are always forgotten.” She says this without any audible bitterness but as if stating a simple law of nature, such as “plants need water.”

Later, I would dig deeper into the life of Nannerl Mozart, curious to find out more about this genius in theory. She was an accomplished pianist and harpsichordist. Five years older than her brother, she was very much a role model in his early years. Three-year-old Wolfgang would look over her shoulder during lessons and, later, tried playing exercises from her notebook. They were close outside the music studio, too, even inventing a secret language and the imaginary Kingdom of Back.

When Mozart wrote his first symphony, at age eight, it was Nannerl who actually put pen to paper, transcribing the notes her brother intended. Was she more than a stenographer? Was that symphony her own? No one knows. We do know, though, that Nannerl’s musical career was cut short when she married and had children.

Today Wolfgang’s music is held up as a pinnacle of human achievement. And Nannerl? She has an Austrian liqueur named after her. Apricot schnapps. I hear it is very good.

Why is history so bereft of women geniuses? The reason is simple: until recently, most of the world wouldn’t allow it. We get exactly the geniuses that we want and that we deserve. If anything underscores the importance of environment to the making of creative genius, it is the glaring paucity of women in the pantheon. Historically, women were denied the resources required for creative excellence: access to mentors, rewards (intrinsic and extrinsic), patronage, an audience. At the age when most geniuses produce their first notable works, their twenties, women were burdened with child care and housekeeping. They couldn’t very well lock themselves in cork-lined studios like Proust or only open the door for someone bearing food, as Voltaire did.

The Romans had a saying,
libri aut liberi
, “books or children.” For
most of history, that was a choice women were not permitted to make. Yes, there were exceptions, Marie Curie being the most notable, but the two-time Nobel Prize winner is, unfortunately, the exception that proves the rule.

If women were given a chance, it was inevitably because of extraordinary circumstances. Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, recalls that when she was accepted into the graduate program at the University of Illinois in 1941, just as the United States entered World War II, she was only the second woman allowed to matriculate. (The previous one had enrolled in 1917.) “They had to make a war so that I could go to graduate school,” she said, only half joking.

Our food arrives, and I take the opportunity to shift gears. I’m curious about Friederike’s radio show. Her listeners, she explains, are not connoisseurs, but “normal people.” Her job, she says, is to “seduce them into listening to music.” I notice she says
music
, not
classical music
. This is no accident. Put the modifier
classical
or
classic
in front of a work—of music, of art, of anything—and you suck the life out of it, kill it. Friederike would never do that to a piece of music. Besides, Mozart and Beethoven did not write a single note of classical music. They wrote contemporary music that we now classify as classical. There is a big difference.

We finish our meal, and I have to admit the spritzer was not bad. Back in the Peugeot, I tell Friederike about my plans to see a performance of Schubert and how I worry I might not “get it.” In this regard, I am a strict Freudian. The good doctor was a brilliant psychologist but also famously tone-deaf. Me, too. Sure, I played the trombone in grade school. For a while. But complaints from family members, neighbors, and the local branch of the ASPCA quickly, and mercifully, put an end to my musical career. So how am I supposed to appreciate the musical subtleties of a Schubert performance?

“Listen for five minutes,” she says.

“And what if I still don’t get it?”

“Listen for another five minutes.”

“What if it still doesn’t resonate?”

“Then leave.” I feel a rush of relief until she adds, “But be aware that by doing so you are losing an entire cosmos, a world, that you won’t ever find again.”

I don’t know what to say. I’ve misplaced many things in my life—car keys, wallets, modifiers—but never an entire cosmos. I’m not about to start now. I promise to heed her advice.

We pull up to the Adagio. We say good-bye, then slowly, adagio, I step out of the Peugeot. As Friederike pulls away, I can hear her saying something to her car. I can’t understand a word, but, to my ears, it sounds like music.

Golden ages need their wild ones, their enfants terribles, but they also need their grown-ups. In the case of Vienna, that would be Franz Joseph Haydn. He is best described by what he was not. He was not prone to scatological humor. He did not embark on gambling benders. He did not have wild affairs. He did not fit our image of the difficult genius, and so these days Papa Haydn, as he was known, ranks lower in the musical pantheon. That doesn’t seem right. Not only was Haydn a brilliant composer, he was also a teacher and mentor to both Mozart and Beethoven. He spanned the entire golden age and was, in many ways, the glue that held it together. Haydn was composing before Mozart was born, and by the time Papa died, in 1809, at the impressively old age of seventy-seven, Beethoven was already a well-established composer and Schubert was an up-and-coming member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

Sadly, Papa gets few visitors these days. One morning I decide to do something about it—not merely out of pity, mind you. Papa Haydn, I bet, holds important clues to the musical genius that was Vienna.

Haydn is not easy to find. Unlike Mozart’s and Beethoven’s apartments, Haydn House is located far from the city center, as if old Papa were hiding. I hop on the subway, which, like everything else in this city, runs flawlessly, and, before I know it, emerge aboveground in a different world, one of leafy streets and vegetable vendors, and no tourists. In Haydn’s day, this neighborhood, called Windmühle, was a summer retreat for nobility and the well-to-do. It took an hour by carriage to get
downtown, a journey Haydn avoided if at all possible. He preferred life among the apple orchards and vineyards.

I walk for a while, past boutiques and coffeehouses, before spotting Haydngasse, a small, especially pleasant street with kids playing and flowers blooming. Haydn House is a compact, cream-colored building, handsome but not the least bit flashy, much like its former inhabitant. Haydn lived here for the last twelve years of his life. They were, by all accounts, happy years. He was finally a free man, no longer under the musical thumb of his patrons, the Esterházys. “How sweet is the taste of a certain freedom,” he wrote to a friend upon learning of Prince Esterházy’s death.

The man at the ticket counter looks surprised to see me. On this day I am the only visitor, save for a British couple, genuine aficionados on a musical pilgrimage, judging by their fluent use of terms such as
libretto
and
counterpoint
.

I enter the house and find myself eye to eye with a not-handsome but dignified man. No wild Beethoven hair or Mozart dandyism but, judging by the kind and steady eyes depicted in the watercolor, a man of character. A musical mensch.

On another wall, Haydn’s daily routine. The man lived by the clock. An early breakfast, then seated at the piano and composing by 8:00 a.m. At 11:30, he went for a walk and received visitors. Lunch was served promptly at 2:00 p.m. At 4:00 p.m., he sat down at the piano again. At 9:00 p.m. he read. Dinner at 10:00 p.m. Bed at 11:30 p.m. This was not merely the routine of a fastidious man; Haydn was tracking the trajectory of his muse, discerning the optimal rhythm for his workday. Inconveniently, for many a genius this means an early start. Victor Hugo was up by 6:00 a.m., ate breakfast, then started writing. Milton made them all look like slackers. During the summer months, he was working by 4:00 a.m. Pavlov, the Russian behaviorist with the salivating dog, was particular about his working hours; he considered 8:30 to 9:50 a.m. his most productive time.

Inspiration, it’s been said, is for amateurs. True creativity requires showing up at the desk, or the piano, even when you don’t feel like it. That’s what Haydn did. He stuck to his schedule whether he was in the mood or not. He called his morning sessions “fantasizing.” These were
rough sketches. Refining would come later, after his walk. Haydn never put anything down on paper unless he was “quite sure it was the right thing,” says Rosamond Harding, a music historian.

That happened often enough. In these rooms, he penned some of his finest work, including such masterpieces as
The Creation
and
The Seasons
. He was incredibly prolific and produced some of his finest works later in life. Unlike Mozart, he thrived in quietude, not chaos. Unlike Mozart, Haydn was unhappily married. He and his wife, Maria Anna, gave each other a wide berth. An unpleasant woman, “reputedly the most tyrannical wife since Xantippe,” as Morris put it, referring to Socrates’s brutish spouse, she took little interest in his music.

Haydn, like his student Beethoven, found comfort and companionship in nature. He collected tropical birds and paid top florin for them—once spending 1,415 florins (a typical year’s salary) for an especially rare breed. It was a ridiculous, impractical hobby, especially for an older, dignified man such as Haydn, but I find it oddly reassuring. Haydn was not an automaton, no musical robot. He had his peccadilloes. Geniuses do.

Haydn taught both Mozart and Beethoven so it’s tempting to pigeonhole him as a mentor, the Verrocchio of Vienna, but that would be unfair. Haydn was a master composer in his own right. One of his fortes was the string quartet. He did for that genre, says historian Peter Gay, with only slight exaggeration, “what Caesar Augustus did for Rome: he found it brick and left it marble.”

Haydn transmitted his passion for the quartet to Mozart, who picked it up quickly. Haydn, like Verrocchio, knew talent when he saw it and was humble enough to call Mozart “the greatest composer I have ever known by person or by name.” The two men got along famously well. I can’t help but wonder if Mozart, far from home, saw in Haydn a surrogate father, a kinder, less autocratic version of Leopold. Mozart felt deeply indebted to Haydn and spent three years working on what are now known as his “Haydn” Quartets, dedicating them to the “celebrated Man and dearest Friend,” as he enthused in a letter. It was one of the few times Mozart wrote anything for free.

I walk upstairs and spot, on the wall, some three dozen canons,
framed and yellowing, that Haydn wrote but refused to publish. Why? I wonder. Why did you not send them out into the world, Joseph? Were they not good enough? Or perhaps they were too good and you, a resolutely pious man, feared they’d be seen as trespassing on God’s turf? It’s possible. Other artists have spoken of creating a work so precious that they prefer to keep it private, lest it be tainted by criticism or, worse, praise. Sometimes, the greatest applause is silence.

In an adjoining room, various medals are on display. “Objects of honor,” the placard calls them. Haydn had another name for them: “The toys of old men.” Haydn was paid handsomely but, like many creative geniuses, didn’t care much for money. “When I sit at my old worm-eaten piano, there is no King in the World whose good fortune I envy,” he wrote.

I spot, behind glass, a draft of one of Haydn’s more romantic and radical works, a prelude called “The Representation of Chaos.” (An ironic title given his preference for order.) Musicologists suspect the work was influenced by his student Beethoven. Like Verrocchio and Leonardo, the relationship between Haydn and Beethoven, mentor and acolyte, flowed in both directions. Student as teacher, teacher as student.

Theirs, too, was a complicated relationship. They first met in Bonn. Haydn was passing through town, and Beethoven, only twenty years old but not lacking in confidence, took the opportunity to show Haydn a cantata he had written. Haydn was impressed and, in effect, told the young composer to keep at it. Two years later, in July of 1792, Beethoven’s benefactor, one Count Waldstein, dispatched him to Vienna to study with Haydn. On the eve of his departure, the count wrote a letter of encouragement that, in a few short words, captures the musical shamanism that animated Vienna at the time: “By means of assiduous labor you will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.”

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