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violinist at age eight, going on to produce hundreds of works, some of which are widely regarded as ethereally great and treasures of Western culture, all in the brief time before his death at age thirty-five—if that isn’t talent, and on a mammoth scale, then nothing is.
    The facts are worth examining a little more closely. Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang’s teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children. While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades.
    So from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him. Of course his early compositions still seem remarkable, but they raise some provocative questions. It’s interesting to note that the manuscripts are not in the boy’s own hand; Leopold always “corrected” them before anyone saw them. It seems noteworthy also that Leopold stopped composing at just the time he began teaching Wolfgang.
    In some cases it’s clear that the young boy’s compositions are not original. 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 earliest symphonies, brief works written when he was just eight, hew closely to the style of Johann Christian Bach, with whom he was studying when they were written.
    None of these works is regarded today as great music or even close. They are rarely performed or recorded except as novelties, of interest only because of Mozart’s later fame. They seem instead to be the works of someone being trained as a composer by the usual methods—copying, arranging, and imitating the works of others—with the resulting products brought to the world’s attention (and just maybe polished a bit) by a father who spent much of his life promoting his son. 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.
    This is worth pausing to consider. Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily, which is something we often suppose a divine spark will do.
    Mozart’s method of composing was not quite the wonder it was long thought to be. For nearly two hundred years many people have believed that he had a miraculous ability to compose entire major pieces in his head, after which writing them down was mere clerical work. That view was based on a famous letter in which he says as much: “the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind . . . the committing to paper is done quickly enough . . . and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.”
    That report certainly does portray a superhuman performer. The trouble is, this letter is a forgery, as many scholars later established. Mozart did not conceive whole works in his mind, perfect and complete. Surviving manuscripts show that Mozart was constantly revising, reworking, crossing out and rewriting