jjprobert

Today, I went to hear the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra do a performance of Mozart's 38th Symphony, a selection of aria's, again composed by Mozart, and then Gustav Mahler's 4th Symphony.

I'm not going to talk about the concert itself (wonderful though it was, and well worth going to hear, if you have tomorrow evening free).

My plan was more to think about Mozart and the concept of genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born 1756, died 1791 at the age of 35. In his life, it is estimated that he composed over 600 separate pieces, starting at age 5. So, for 30 years, he averaged an output of 20 pieces a year, including well over 40 full orchestral symphonies. Many of these both broke new ground for the format of music, while others are held as masterpieces of the art of composition. This astonishing output rate, along with the widely acknowledged quality and range of his works is, in my opinion the mark of genius that sets Mozart apart from the other composers of his era.

But, genius. It's a word that gets used a lot these days, to describe a vast range of people and skills.

Personally, I think it gets overused. Originally a Latin word describing a guiding or teaching spirit, the related verb (gigno, genui or genitus) held the meaning of bringing something into being, creation or production, and is undoubtedly etymologically related to the word genesis, which receives most of it's use these days as the name of the first book of the bible, but, in Latin and Greek, was used to talk of origin. Anyway, genius. As I said, I think it gets overused. Often, I'll hear sports commentators talk about 'moments of genius' and, occasionally, they're right. Usually, in my experience, though, they mean 'that was an incredibly low percentage thing to attempt, but it came off', or 'that was the obvious thing to do, well done lad'. Rarely are they actually describing what I would call genius, something of unique creativity. Then again, so little these days is truly original, and, for sports people, at the least, the predominance of work performed in training sessions means we rarely see someone do something for the first time. Maybe it's the first time they've done that in front of a fee-paying (or not, as the case may be) audience, but probably they've done it before.

Now, this is not to deny the creative spark and wrist power of M.S. Dhoni's 'Helicopter shot', or the wonder of a perfectly timed drive back down the ground (to take two cricket examples), and certainly, there were moments of genius in the development of the new range of cricket shots, but to describe their inventors as 'genii', I would assert, is overstating it.

I would hold that a genius is someone who produces a breadth of work that transforms a field. Mozart did do that. Albert Einstein's Annus mirabilis, in 1905 marked him out as another. In the publication of the four papers of that year, Einstein transformed the direction 20th Century science would take. No longer was there 'nothing left to discover, simply more precise measurements', instead there was a whole new field of work to explore, and foundations to be re-dug.


This is highly rambly, but, inspired by the performance I went to see today, I felt it an appropriate enough topic to talk about.