Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Children enter school bright, vibrant, inquisitive, and eager to learn. Theyleave as jaded and uninquisitive adults. What better proof could you ask thatour lockstep, conformist, regimented educational system stifles creativity andinquisitiveness while it prepares children to be compliant workers, goodconsumers, conventional thinkers, and gullible voters? Three historical figuresinvoked repeatedly by adherents of this school of thought are Mozart, Einstein,and Edison. All suffered terribly, we are told, at the hands of a conformistworld that couldn't tolerate their genius. Mozart was neglected and died apauper, Einstein was told he would never amount to anything and Edison could nothave gotten into college.
You could hardly ask for a clearer example of post hoc ergo propter hocreasoning than the idea that dull adults must be the product of a regimentededucational system. And the tales of Mozart, Einstein and Edison are mostlymyth.
What a sordid and depressing tale. The greatest musical genius of all timestruggled throughout his life to make ends meet, was undercut at every turn byjealous rivals, and died at an early age in poverty. Meanwhile hack musiciansgot appointments that should, in a just universe, have gone to a genius likeMozart - yet more proof of how the world values conformity and is threatened bygenius. The film Amadeus implies that Mozart's rival, Antonio Salieri,was insanely jealous of Mozart's genius, sabotaged his career and finallycontributed to Mozart's premature death. How sad. Fortunately, apart from thedying prematurely part, most of it is myth.
Fortunately, there is a serious attempt to separate fact from fiction aboutMozart: William Stafford's The Mozart Myths (Stanford University Press,1991). Readers are cautioned that Stafford assumes the persona of believers inthe various Mozart myths and elaborates their viewpoints, from theirperspective, often for many pages. Thus, readers need to read carefully todistinguish Stafford's own views from those of others he describes.
Mozart's premature death just shy of 36 years old inspired speculation almostfrom the outset. That, in itself, is odd if Mozart was as neglected as the mythswould make him out. Poisoning was a natural suspicion. Salieri went insane in1823 and supposedly confessed to poisoning Mozart, but the document he is saidto have signed to that effect has - surprise - never been found. Apparentlyrumors of Salieri's complicity were already floating about, because friends ofSalieri's who visited him reported that Salieri denied anything of the sort.Even more bizarre poisoning theories enjoyed a vogue in the late 19th century,involving the freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Jews.
Stafford's own review of the medical evidence notes, most importantly, thatnone of the doctors who attended Mozart saw any evidence of poisoning (how doesa neglected pauper rate visits from a doctor?). He concludes that there are twolikely medical explanations: a kidney ailment or heart damage from earlier boutswith rheumatic fever.
How poor was Mozart when he died? Stafford's review of the evidence points toa fairly affluent middle-class existence. Mozart had a large apartment in themiddle of Vienna, expensive furnishings, and even a billiard table, a lavishluxury at the time. He had his own carriage and was able to send his son to aboarding school. His debts at death were substantial but not crushing, thoughthey do point to someone living a bit on the financial edge. He was buried in atypical middle-class fashion, in a small communal grave holding five or sixothers. His wife erroneously thought that the authorities erected markers anddid not visit the site until all evidence of the location had been lost. He did leave his wife in difficult circumstances because he failed to take outlife insurance. His wife helped foster the myth of abject poverty in herattempts to obtain an Imperial pension, although she stayed afloat well enoughto remarry into the upper crust a few years later. Nevertheless, Stafford statesflatly:
The report in a Vienna newspaper of 13 December 1791 that 'This man's widow sits sighing on a sack of straw amidst her needy children' is Romantic nonsense.
(And why would the newspaper report on the poverty of an unknown pauper'swidow, if Mozart was so neglected in his lifetime?)
Stafford also points out the fallacy of comparing Mozart with much older andmore established musicians, many of whom had actually been far less affluentthan Mozart at the same age. Mozart died when he was still in the dues-payingstage of his life.
How much did Salieri hate Mozart? In 1830, the Russian playwright Pushkinwrote a play Mozart and Salieri that painted Salieri as the villain ofMozart's life. The play was turned into an opera by Mussorgsky and is the basisof the plot of Amadeus. The documentary evidence reveals some sharp wordsbetween the two on occasion, but an at least equal number of cordialinterchanges. The striking thing about reading biographies of Mozart likeMaynard Solomon's Mozart, a Life (Harper/collins, 1995) or RuthHalliwell's The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context (ClarendonPress, 1998) is how little Salieri figures in them, and how peripheral theinteractions were to the course of Mozart's life. Stafford observes thatSalieri's position was secure and:
As an opera composer he was at least as highly regarded as Mozart. Mozart had a stronger motive to kill him.
A different interpretation of Mozart, to which I confess I leaned beforeresearching the subject a bit, was that Mozart was a classic self-destructivegenius, either a child-like character who created an orderly world for himselfin music (almost an idiot savant - the impression one gets from Amadeus), or else a social misfitwho alienated benefactors and threw away opportunities. Both views have haddefenders in print, neither really stands up. Mozart could be sharp-tongued attimes, but there are at least as many accounts of cordial, pleasant, and kindmoments. He screwed up at times, had successes at others. What in fact emergesfrom the biographies is a surprisingly ordinary human being with most of thecontradictions and mixture of good and bad one finds in complex people.
Part of the ordinariness is that Mozart had to work. Many of the tales of hisearly brilliance were hyped by his father, an established if conventionalmusician. Many of Mozart's early works are in his father's hand, and many thatare in his own hand bear corrections by his father. Contrary to myth, Mozart hadto learn music. As an adult, Mozart frequently got stuck on compositions and setthem aside, to return later when he had fresh ideas. Stafford speculates thatpart of Mozart's problems as an adult stemmed from his early reputation as achild prodigy and the failure of people to realize that even a grown-up prodigyhas to work hard.
So where does the Mozart myth come from?
Salieri is at least as tragic a figure as Mozart. In a commentary on Amadeus,movie critic Roger Ebert describes Salieri as a hack, ridiculed behind his back,who is insanely resentful of Mozart. Ebert describes him as condemned to knowhow bad he was and how good Mozart was (but Salieri was good enough to helpeducate Beethoven). Amadeus is to the history of music what Inheritthe Wind is to the history of science: great dramatic fiction but whollyworthless as a source of factual information. Salieri's only crime was tosucceed better, in his own time, on modest talents than Mozart did on genius,and for that he's been vilified for 200 years.
The Einstein myth is true in one respect: Einstein did poorly at school, wasdisliked by his teachers, and resented the methods they used.
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