“Wolfgang’s
first four piano concertos, composed when he was eleven, actually
contain no original music by him. He put them together out of works by
other composers. He wrote his next three works of this type, today not
classified as piano concertos, at age sixteen; these also contain no
original music but instead are arrangements of works by Johann Christian
Bach, with whom Wolfgang had studied in London...
Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status
confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto
No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age,
but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen
years of extremely hard, expert training.”
~ Geoff Colvin from Talent is Overrated
Wolfgang Mozart was born a genius, right? Just kinda fell out of the womb and started composing crazy great stuff, right?
Might want to re-think that one.
First, consider the fact that Mozart’s dad, Leopold, was a famous
composer who LITERALLY wrote the book on how to teach children music.
He’d been practicing for years with Wolfgang’s older sister and got to
work with little Wolfgang around the time most little doods are getting
potty trained.
Long story a little shorter, when you look at his career, you’ll see
that, as Colvin points out above, Mozart put in EIGHTEEN years (!!!) of
remarkably diligent training before he created something truly
extraordinary.
As Carol Dweck (the Stanford researcher and leading authority on motivation and achievement) asks in her great book Mindset (see Notes): “Is
it ability of mindset? Was it Mozart’s musical ability or the fact that
he worked till his hands were deformed? Was it Darwin’s scientific
ability or the fact that he collected specimens non-stop from early
childhood?”
Talent is overrated. Long live hard work! :)
R
