Neal Zaslaw Helps My Self Esteem
08:35 AM June 13 2009
Colvin and Zaslaw’s writings (as they relate to Mozart, Colvin only discusses him for a few pages) are both fundamentally about how we’ve romanticized Mozart based on a widely read letter that leads to a perception of Mozart as someone who receives his compositions out of the blue and could conceive of them whole in his mind, as if he had a direct line to a creative source.
Mozart, according to Zaslaw, wrote at the pianoforte (as most composers do) for specific ensembles, commissions and performance opportunities. When he was younger he wrote for his father (Colvin compares Mozart, not unfairly, to Tiger Woods) and when he became older he wrote to make money for himself, as Austria slid into war and recession and he was unable to subsidize his upper middle class lifestyle (yet also unwilling to fire his servants). His music is undeniably great, and yet his compositional process was not what it is commonly made out to be.
Colvin’s point is Mozart worked really hard from a young age with expert coaching, and Zaslaw raises the point that Mozart (while undeniably a skilled composer) composed using fairly traditional means, and if he was born rich he may have not composed at all.
The perpetuation of these kinds of myths (in this case the myth is of the composer as a passive instrument from God) as they relate to the creative process is everywhere. It relates directly to a basic problem for people practicing craft in the arts, which is that personal narrative helps sell an artist, and there are really common narrative archetypes we use over and over again.
These archetypes are more often than not related to the mythology of what it’s like to be an artist and how the creative process works, and usually this kind of mythology at best puts people off of creating stuff and at worst gets used as justification for all sorts of jerky behavior.
The idea of being able to access a source of inspiration (whether divine or cosmic or whatever else the source is attributed to) is not in and of itself a bad thing, the problem is that the idea of the artist as a passive instrument is a bad thing, seeing that most people have been working really hard at this music thing for quite some time.
Hopefully these kind of revelations about Mozart (although not really revelations, the discovery of the forgery of the letter stems from Otto Jahn’s biography of Mozart circa mid 19th Century) will help people how much of music is craft, because I think ultimately stories like this are discouraging to people trying to write and perform music.
I think it would be better if people knew Leopold wrote letters to Wolfgang in his twenties calling him lazy and disorganized. Those are qualities I can relate to.
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