Was Mozart a Musical Genius?
About 25 percent of the United States is considered to be of a genius IQ level. A genius IQ is considered to be between 140 and 145 and higher. These people have exceptional capabilities of figuring out mechanical, mathematical, and logical problems. Nonetheless, how do we know if someone is a genius?
They are very selective about who they are intimate with as with Geniuses there is a tendency to use more of their mental capabilities when relating to others, and they are either selective with intimate partners or have none at all.
One study found that men of genius tend to have lower testosterone levels, leading to higher intelligence and a lower sex drive. A few obvious examples of such ones are, Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla.
Geniuses are not social individuals, because of their high IQ, geniuses have a hard time connecting with people. They tend to keep to themselves due to other interests that the common population are not interested in. They don’t often marry or have children and don’t fit in with the common social calendar.
Geniuses also have a hard time conversing with others. Their mind tends to only speak as needed, instead of bantering or chatting. When they do speak, it is about something very important. They may even suffer from a touch of 'social anxiety disorder' because they always feel like they don’t “fit in.”
A person of genius may seem a little odd to some, but there is a reason behind their appearance of “madness.” A genius tends to have a really high intellect, who are often very creative and engage in some seemingly odd behaviour.
Their high IQ is very beneficial to many things, people, and issues that need to be dealt with. Many geniuses have invented things that have changed the world, only to live life outside of the spotlight. This is at times to avoid conflict as, some people may feel threatened by their foibles or sharpness of mind and demonstrate unseemly hostile attitudes towards them.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often thought of as someone who was born with a natural talent. However, the earliest pieces by Wolfgang, supposedly done when he was a child, are in his father’s handwriting, making it unclear as to who wrote the music. Also, his father was a music teacher who taught Wolfgang from a young age, so that when he did start performing, he actually had been training extensively and routinely with a professional instructor for years.
Mozart was born January 27, 1756, to Anna Maria and Leopold Mozart. Anna Maria gave birth to seven children, but only Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna survived past infancy. Leopold was a composer, albeit a minor one. He was mainly a teacher, publishing an influential textbook on the violin in the same year Wolfgang was born. From the age of three, Wolfgang sat in on the music lessons for his sister and took an early interest in music.
At the age of four, he started to learn how to play the clavier, and he was apparently composing music at age five. That is where things get a bit murky. It’s impressive enough that someone at such a young age would start to play instruments. Writing original music is a bit tougher, and there is evidence that shows Mozart was at least helped as a child when he wrote his music.
First, much of the handwriting is that of his father. Second, his father, who was a composer, stopped writing music when Mozart started composing his work. So, while there is no definitive proof of how much Leopold helped, corrected, or even wrote, there are certainly some unanswered questions.
Aside from the handwriting, there is also the fact that Leopold was making money from the performances of his children, whom he billed as prodigies. They would travel around Europe and play in front of nobility. Therefore, it was in his best interest to make it seem like Wolfgang was some sort of superhuman musician as a marketing ploy.
Taking all the information into account, what seems more logical? Did a five-year-old compose symphonies, or did his father, a trained musician and teacher who made money on the talent of his kids, have a little more “influence”?
That isn’t to say Mozart wasn’t a musical genius because he very much was. He just wasn’t born that way. In his book, Talent Is Overrated, author Geoffrey Colvin argues that Mozart got to be great because of how much training he received. He was given daily lessons from his father starting at a young age. Then he was performing in front of nobility and spent much of his youth traveling around performing.
At the age of 14, he wrote his first opera, which was a minor success. However, it’s important to note that at this point he had been training with professional teachers, one whom he lived with, almost every day for nine years.
It’s also interesting to note that while they traveled, Mozart met and spent time with famous composers like Johann Christian Bach, who would have a big influence on him. He was also accepted into a prestigious music academy at the age of 14, where he developed further.
When he was employed by the ruler of Salzburg, Austria at the age of 17, he had been living and breathing music for 14 years. Going further, Mozart continued to work full-time as a musician with dry spells of unemployment, throughout his teens into his early twenties. So, by the time he achieved success and real fame with Die Entfuhrung, he was 25. He was in his early thirties when he started writing his most famous pieces using his lifetime of experience.
Mozart was a brilliant musician and incredible composer, but he became that because he worked hard at it for years. It came down to how hard he worked and how much time he put into his craft, but he wasn’t born with some miraculous gift.
There are myths and there are truths, and the former is often more entertaining than the latter. In Mozart's case, we have the glorious truths of his music but the true facts of his life have often been clouded by the mists of time and by tall tales. Our perception of Mozart has been moulded by legends.
If he seems to loom larger than life, it is partly because each generation reinvents this composer for itself. There sometimes seem almost as many Mozart’s as the staggering number of compositions that he left us.
The bare facts, Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus (or Gottlieb) Mozart was taught music by his father Leopold, a respected theorist, composer and violinist at the Salzburg court. It seems likely that his education also included mathematics, languages, literature and religious training. The child prodigy was taken on exhausting concert tours all over Europe and his skill as a composer benefited enormously from his experiences in Italy, Germany, France and England.
After such an itinerant life at many of the most important royal courts and musical cities in Europe, it is little wonder that after reaching adulthood Mozart could not settle at Salzburg, which he considered to be a provincial backwater. He spent the last 10 years of his life in Vienna, moving to a new house frequently according to his economic circumstances. Mozart died of a severe rheumatic fever on December 5, 1791, a few weeks short of his 36th birthday.
The most influential and widespread impression of Mozart was created in Milos Forman's 1984 film Amadeus which, with barefaced cheek, was advertised with the mendacious slogan 'Everything you have heard is true!' Adapted from a play by Peter Shaffer, Amadeus introduced legions of cinema-goers to the exuberant perfection of Mozart's musical genius. It firmly convinced its audience that the under-appreciated Mozart was an innate genius from childhood, doomed to be buried in an unmarked pauper's grave after being driven to a miserable premature death by his jealous enemy Salieri.
The truth is less melodramatic, Mozart had sufficient reason to be optimistic about the immediate future, with commissions flowing in and his reputation and bank balance once again on the up, right until his final illness. Salieri was among the few mourners at the funeral organised by Baron Gottfried van Swieten at St Stephen's Cathedral. Mozart's burial outside the city in a communal grave was in accordance with the prevalent custom of the time, influenced by Emperor Joseph II's reforms, proposed in 1784, encouraging simple, economical and hygienic burials.
Furthermore, a group of Mozart's friends gathered for a memorial service at St Michael's Church organised by Emanuel Schikaneder (librettist of Die Zauberflöte and the first Papageno), at which members of the court orchestra and choir performed part of Mozart's unfinished Requiem.
Yet there were some accuracies in Amadeus, Mozart did not enjoy an easy relationship with his father, nor with his Salzburg patron Archbishop Colloredo. It seems he was not prepared to accept Joseph II's alleged criticism that Die Entführung Aus Dem Serail contained far too many notes. He did not shy away from controversy in setting Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto Le Nozze di Figaro, based on a play by Beaumarchais that had been banned by Joseph II for its seditious content, although Joseph fully accepted the operatic version.
Mozart's letters reveal an unpredictable man capable of every characteristic, ranging from childish pranks to vulgar humour, artistic passion, emotional yearning, melancholy, intellectual solemnity and emotional depth. The most important truth communicated in Amadeus was that these elements abound in Mozart's music. They continue to resonate strongly with us, not least with the great interpreters of his work. Mitsuko Uchida supports the portrayal of Mozart as a child genius, 'I find his music mysteriously beautiful, and he becomes more mysterious as he gets older. He has such special expressions. It is very clear he was born a genius.
Comments
Post a Comment