Mozart. It's a name that's almost synonymous with musical talent and genius. Millions of CDs are sold every year promising to make people smarter by letting them listen to Mozart's music. Pregnant mothers are encouraged to play Mozart's music to increase their babies's IQs while in utero. People go on and on about his purported ability to write music completely in his head, and how he was buried in a pauper's grave despite his incredible musical abilities. Musical prodigies are constantly compared to him, with clickbait titles like "the modern Mozart" or "Mozart's true successor has arrived." Even people who know nothing about classical music know his name and have a blind belief in his genius.
But amidst all this noise, I find myself growing more and more weary of telling people that Mozart is my favorite composer. Why? Because Mozart's perception in popular culture greatly cheapens his music, and in my opinion obscures the greatest aspects of his genius.
First of all, Mozart's music does help people perform better on cognitive tests, but this is not something at all unique to his music. Play any type of music to a random sample of people and there will be the same effect. There is nothing special about Mozart's music that helps it raise people's IQs.
Additionally, Mozart and his music have been mythologized and romanticized beyond belief in the centuries after his death.
It started with Mozart's colleague Antonio Salieri. In his final years, Salieri developed severe dementia and started claiming that he had killed Mozart decades ago, despite always having a friendly relationship with Mozart and having no reason to do something like this. Salieri's dementia-laced words, along with the sudden death of Mozart decades ago, created the conspiracy theory that Salieri had poisoned an otherwise healthy Mozart to death.
The generation of composers that grew up in the wake of Mozart's death distorted and romanticized aspects of his life, creating the myths that Mozart was greatly unappreciated during his lifetime and was buried in a pauper's grave despite bringing priceless musical gifts into the world. Mozart's music was held up as a pinnacle of sweetness and grace, making Mozart akin to a musical Christ who had suffered for the supposed sins of man.
In reality, critics of the time viewed Mozart as an unparalleled genius, but one with a very eccentric style that they hated (in other words, Mozart wasn't boring enough for them). Additionally, it is true that Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave, but this was because of Emperor Joseph II's mandate for all graves to be unmarked regardless of class.
Eventually, the myths and romanticisms, along with the Salieri conspiracy theory, became the basis for a play named Mozart and Salieri by Russian playwright Alexander Pushkin. This play was later adapted into Peter Schaffer's play Amadeus, which was then adapted into a movie by the same name.
It was the movie Amadeus that, in order to create a more compelling story, introduced the myth of Mozart always writing compositions entirely in his head.
Not only is this untrue (there are surviving drafts of Mozart's music), but it is also incredibly misleading. It is not at all uncommon for professional composers to be able to write the majority of their work in their heads, only writing down short prompts to help them retrieve memories.
By the time the movie Amadeus premiered, the rumors, myths, romanticisms, and conspiracy theories had taken on a prima facie truth of their own from constant reinforcement over the centuries. And they have been consistently believed by the general public all the way through the present day.
Mozart's true gifts -- an incredible ear for melody and harmony, an unparalleled imagination, a finely-tuned sense of balance and proportion, an ability to be both profound and flippant, and the unique ability to write idiomatically for every instrument -- don't fit as easily into the Romantic imagination of the general public. So they are inevitably ignored in favor of shallow myths, conspiracies, and romanticisms that appease the commercial interests of the Austrian tourism and international CD industries.
The boring truth is that Mozart was really not much different from most of us. He certainly showed great musical ability and interest from an early age, but none of that ability would have amounted to anything significant without his overbearing father Leopold, who was basically the Austrian 18th century equivalent of an Asian tiger dad.
It was only because of Leopold's teaching (and prodding) that Wolfgang became one of Europe's premiere composers by 23. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Mozart's early compositions are not particularly noteworthy. It was only through Wolfgang's own efforts (and Leopold's sometimes merciless prodding) that Wolfgang began regularly producing masterpieces in the last decade of his life.
There's a famous quote by Ira Glass that explains this concept beautifully:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one [project]. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Maybe it's just me, but I find that far more creatively encouraging than the oft-repeated myths about Mozart and his music.
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