When it comes to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there’s the music, there's the man… and there's the mystery.
We’re not talking about the many myths that sprang up after his untimely death, but instead the tantalising mysteries of Mozart’s creative mind. Was he born a genius, or did he become one? How did he manage to compose over 600 pieces, many of which are outstanding in quality, in his 35 short years?
And why did someone who could compose the masterful counterpoint of, say, the ‘Jupiter' Symphony and capture the subtle nuance of human emotion in operas such as The Marriage of Figaro also write letters full of toilet humour and a six-voice canon titled Leck Mich Im Arsch (obvious even without translation)?
From playwrights to psychiatrists, everyone's had a crack at Mozart
With every year, decade and century that take us chronologically further away from Mozart’s lifetime, our appetite to understand the mortal behind the miraculous music only appears to grow. He’s been prodded and poked from afar, by everyone from historians and musicologists to playwrights and novelists, to psychologists and psychiatrists.
That’s only possible because we have his letters and eyewitness accounts of his life, and the exercise is made far more appealing because Mozart is one of those composers, like Janáček or Berlioz, who writes vividly. His letters bear repeat reading and interpretation. And with every generation that seeks the secrets of Mozart’s mind, a mirror is inevitably held up not just to his era but to the present day: perhaps what we see in Mozart is a reflection of our own current preoccupations.
Even in his own lifetime, there was a sense that Mozart sat outside the ‘norm’. His musical genius was obvious. He began playing the keyboard at four, after hearing his older sister Nannerl, who was also a great talent, and also taught himself the organ and violin. One of the first times he tried writing using an inkwell, it was to compose his first clavier concerto.
At 14, Mozart did something extraordinary
Maths was a craze for a while – Nannerl recalled the young Wolfgang turning the walls into ‘slates’, and that he ‘talked of nothing, thought of nothing but figures’ – but music became his main obsession. ‘No sooner did he begin to devote himself to music than his taste for all other pursuits as good as died, and even games and toys, if they were to interest him, had to be accompanied by music,’ recalled a family friend, Johann Andreas Schachtner.
At 11, Mozart composed his first opera, Apollo et Hyacinthus. The account of a 14-year-old Mozart writing down Allegri’s Miserere after hearing it once at the Sistine Chapel is legendary, and whatever the truth, it is certain he had an acute ear and a quick memory.
His life was plagued by money worries
Perhaps more remarkable, suggests psychologist Andrew Steptoe in his essay ‘Mozart’s Personality and Creativity’, is that Mozart successfully transitioned from being a child prodigy into an outstanding composer as an adult. That meant renegotiating his relationship with his domineering father Leopold, who had brilliantly masterminded and managed the young Wolfgang’s musical education and career. Mozart worshipped Leopold: ‘Right after God comes Papa.’
And yet he wanted to break free and carve out his own career, which he did when he went to Vienna in the 1780s, even if, at first, he lacked the practical organisational skills necessary to succeed. Indeed, financial difficulties plagued his life, and even when he did rake in good money, he lived a lifestyle beyond his means, whether that was spending on his expensive wardrobe or gambling at card and billiard tables.
Unlike the misanthropic Beethoven, Mozart was a sociable creature. He had a lively spirit, always wanting to charm and please people. Yet his character was far more complex than that suggests. His letters reveal him also to be unpredictable, acerbic, arrogant, good-humoured. He could also swing into melancholy, listlessness and loneliness.
Humour was a constant in Mozart's life
Mozart was in no doubt of his own talent, yet as an adult wrote, ‘As soon as people lose confidence in me, I lose confidence in myself.’ He often swung between extremes of mood, but his humour was a constant thread throughout his life. He loved to make fun of his friends, and to play with words. His love of scatological humour seems outrageous to us nowadays, but in 18th-century Salzburg it was commonplace – his mother, in particular, relished rude jokes as much as he did.
So, what are we to make of Mozart’s character and creative mind? Over the past hundred years, thanks to the advent of modern psychology and a greater understanding of mental health, various theories have been suggested. You might hear alarm bells here, as the idea of ‘diagnosis at a distance’ is fraught, and it’s a professional no-no when it comes to living public figures – psychiatrists only offer diagnoses of people they’ve assessed in person.
‘When someone is dead I think it’s different,’ Simon Wessely, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, told The Guardian in 2016, adding that the most interesting studies don’t seek to find unknowable answers – ‘We don’t want to descend into silly arguments about what Mozart died of’ – but to look beyond that, using today’s knowledge to enrich our understanding of the past.
A 'prodigy of nature'?
When it comes to Mozart, those questions are numerous. Some have, inevitably, been silly, some more interesting. A whole industry has sprung up around him. Arguably, its roots stretch right back to Mozart’s childhood. When Leopold took an eight-year-old Mozart and Nannerl to perform in London, the pair were advertised as ‘prodigies of nature’.
Daines Barrington, a lawyer, magistrate, amateur scientist and a fellow of the Royal Society (which later published his Account of a Very Remarkable Young Musician), was sceptical, and decided to put his talents to a quasi-scientific test. Visiting the Mozart’s family lodgings, Barrington put the prodigy through his musical paces, including asking him to sightread a newly composed piece and improvise operatic arias about love and rage. Mozart, it transpired, was the real deal.
Quantifying Mozart’s genius was also the goal of American psychologist Catherine Cox, who published The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses in 1926. She employed historiometry, which uses statistical methods to study dead geniuses and human creativity – a practice that has its sceptics.
Drawing on letters and accounts, Cox estimated Mozart’s IQ at between 150 and 155 – high enough, today, to qualify him for Mensa. (Mendelssohn and Beethoven were smart enough too; Haydn fell short at around 120-130.) Whether that tells us anything illuminating is up for debate.
Was Mozart bipolar?
In more recent decades, attention has turned increasingly to Mozart’s behaviour and personality. In the 1980s, the Australian doctor Peter Davies put forward a new idea: that Mozart had, as they were called then, ‘manic-depressive tendencies’ and a cyclothymic disorder (which the NHS now describes as a mild form of bipolar disorder).
Davies found evidence for Mozart’s elevated mood, relating it to his ‘decreased need for sleep, excessive energy, inflated self-esteem, increased productivity, sharpened and unusually creative thinking, extreme gregariousness, physical hyperactivity, inappropriate joking and punning, and indulgence in frivolous behaviour without appreciation of its painful consequences’. One example of Mozart’s irrepressible nature is this gem of a letter to his father in November 1777: ‘I can’t write anything sensible today, as I am rails off the quite… I help it cannot. Warefell. I gish you nood-wight. Sound sleeply.’
Music of beauty and sorrow
If Mozart’s sarcastic humour, flamboyant behaviour, excited speech disturbance and constant fidgeting are among the clues Davies picks on for the manic side of his mood swings, the flat periods of his life, his melancholy, his lethargy, feelings of worthlessness and anxiety hint at the depressive aspects. In this reading, his character and creativity go hand in hand – and many have heard that in the juxtaposition of the great beauty and sorrow expressed in his music.
Consider, for example, Mozart's masterful Requiem, written in the final months of his life, and steeped in mystery, drama, and mortality. Musically, the Requiem is strikingly intense, with brooding harmonies, stark contrasts, and an emotional rawness rarely found in Mozart’s other works. The Dies irae blazes with apocalyptic fury, the Lacrimosa weeps with despair, and the Confutatis shifts dramatically between pleading voices and fiery judgment. Even within the context of sacred music, it feels deeply personal, haunted by the shadow of death.
Mozart was obsessed with cats, shoe sizes - and his wife’s safety
Some of those behaviours have been interpreted differently in the 21st century, thanks to the rapid advances in understanding neurodiversity. Rather than simply labelling Mozart, this offers different lenses through which to understand him.
For example, a 2012 Channel 4 documentary explored the suggestion that Mozart had Tourette’s Syndrome. It is a cluster of symptoms, the presenter James McConnel, a composer who himself had Tourette’s, explained in The Guardian, with ‘physical twitches, vocal twitches, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD)’. Mozart, he notes, was obsessed with clocks, cats, shoe sizes and his wife’s safety. He twitched, grimaced, and tapped his feet.
More recently, researchers have suggested Mozart may have had ADHD or autism. Comparing the historical record to the symptoms of these neurodevelopmental conditions is interesting. They might explain, for instance, his extreme sensitivity to sound.
Right back in 1766 Professor Samuel Tissot, who studied child prodigies and their nervous systems, wrote of Mozart that ‘wrong, harsh, or excessively loud sounds bring tears to his eyes’. His observation of Mozart’s extreme sensitivity to sound is backed up by others; Mozart couldn’t stand shrill trumpets, for instance. Today, it’s known that, for instance, hypersensitivity to sound is common in autism.
Rebellious tendencies
Ulrich Müller-Sedgwick, a consultant psychiatrist for adult neurodevelopmental pathways and a music-lover, believes Mozart does display aspects of neurodivergence, although he is quick to caveat that it’s important to remember historical context. ‘In the travel letters, there’s some inattention [which is an aspect of ADHD], but then he was also living a special form of life that’s very different from children today who have to sit in a classroom,’ he says.
Müller-Sedgwick spots other signs, however. ‘There’s this element, which I see a lot in ADHD patients, of rebelling against authorities,’ he gives as one example – Mozart was (to his relief) sacked by the archbishop in Salzburg, for instance. ‘People with ADHD are independent minded – they don’t necessarily follow the rules.’
For Müller-Sedgwick, the truly interesting aspect isn’t necessarily a diagnosis, but to ask how our current knowledge of neurodiversity can ‘help us understand better aspects of the creativity of these incredibly creative and productive composers’. So, for instance, Mozart had a seemingly bottomless well of musical ideas, so much so that he left more than 150 unfinished manuscripts. He also wrote across the whole range of genres: symphonies, operas, sonatas, string quartets, masses, songs, concert arias, string quintets… the list goes on.
What made Mozart such a genius?
‘There’s this theory that people with ADHD have reduced levels of dopamine or noradrenaline,’ explains Müller-Sedgwick. ‘Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter, so anything that promises a reward would activate dopamine, while noradrenaline is activated by novelty.’
Creating a new composition offers both novelty and reward, he explains. And for all that distractibility, Mozart also had the ability to focus intensely under pressure or when the subject truly interested him. He wrote his last three symphonies in just six weeks, for instance. ‘This flow or hyper-focus mode is a well-documented phenomenon.’
Was it thanks to ADHD Mozart could write so prolifically? Should we look to history or to psychology to explain his humour and his compositional ability? And do we yet have an answer for the eternally fascinating question: what was it that made Mozart a genius?
Even if our answers are constantly evolving, a quote written in Mozart’s Stammbuch (friendship book) by his friend Gottfried von Jacquin in 1787 always holds weight: ‘True genius without heart is a thing of naught – for not great understanding alone, not imagination alone, nor both together, make genius – Love! Love! Love! That is the soul of genius.’
Pics: Getty Images
