Read Talent Is Overrated for Free Online Page A

whole sections, jotting down fragments and putting them aside for months or years. Though it makes the results no less magnificent, he wrote music the way ordinary humans do.
    Recent scholarship has put his abilities as a prodigy performer in a new perspective as well. Researchers constructed a “precocity index” for pianists; they figured out the number of years of study needed by a pianist under modern training programs before publicly performing various works, and then compared that with the number of years actually needed by several prodigies throughout history. If the average music student needs six years of preparation before publicly playing a piece, and a given prodigy did it after three years, that student would have an index of 200 percent. Mozart’s index is around 130 percent, clearly ahead of average students. But twentieth-century prodigies score 300 percent to 500 percent. This is another example of rising standards. The effects of today’s improved training methods apparently swamp the effects of Mozart’s genius as a performer.
    To repeat, these facts obviously don’t affect our regard for Mozart’s music. But they drain a lot of the magic and romance out of how it was created, and some people don’t like that. In a paper titled “Mozart as a Working Stiff,” Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw describes what happened when he suggested at a Mozart conference in Vienna that the adult composer was focused on turning out product because he needed the money and rarely if ever wrote a work for which he wasn’t being paid. “I was quite taken aback at the vehemence with which my remarks were attacked,” he recalls. “The moderator of the session took it upon himself to denounce me from the chair.” The offense was suggesting that Mozart was merely a human performer with human motivations, not a demigod propelled solely by the divine spark.
    That incident raises a significant issue that recurs in judging the greatness of anyone whose field is creative and artistic. We can measure quite precisely the achievements of athletes, chess players, and others whose work can be evaluated objectively. In the world of finance, fund managers and other investors are judged by criteria that can be carried to several decimal places. Even scientists can be judged fairly objectively, if not too precisely, by the influence of their work in the years after it was done. But composers, painters, poets, and other creators are judged by standards that inevitably shift, so we must at least be careful in drawing conclusions based on their greatness. Some artists have been celebrated in their lifetimes and then forgotten by posterity; others were ignored in life and “discovered” only later. J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, now widely regarded as one of the greatest musical works ever written, was apparently performed only twice in his lifetime; though the fact strikes us today as incredible, Bach’s music in general was not especially esteemed after his death until Felix Mendelssohn championed it decades later. (Mendelssohn’s own music would be widely scorned after his death, though it’s highly popular today.) The important point is that if we had been studying greatness in 1810, we probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to Bach, or in 1910 to Mendelssohn. As for Mozart, the angry moderator of Zaslaw’s panel insisted that Mozart’s music could not even be compared with that of his contemporaries because it “belonged only to the highest spheres of creativity.” To which Zaslaw responded that “Mozart’s music ascended into the higher ether only in the course of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, it was right down on the ground along with that of the other composers.”
    Regarding how he produced this music, however it’s evaluated, the New Yorker ’s music critic, Alex Ross, sums up much of the recent