
Perhaps the most notorious writing on Mozart dates
from 1993 when F H Rauscher and others published The Mozart Effect which claimed that, after listening to
Mozart's Sonata for two pianos (K448) for 10 minutes, normal subjects showed
significantly increased spatial reasoning skills. This instantly led to a new industry of those
ascribing amazing powers to Mozart and his music. Writing in the Journal of The Royal Society of Medicine, J
S Jenkins suggested that an even “more impressive indication of a Mozart
effect is to be seen in epilepsy. In 23 of 29 patients with focal discharges or
bursts of generalized spike and wave complexes who listened to the Mozart piano
sonata K448 there was a significant decrease in epileptiform activity as shown
by the electroencephalogram (EEG)19. Some individual patients showed especially
striking improvement. In one male, unconscious with status epilepticus, ictal
patterns were present 62% of the time, whereas during exposure to Mozart's
music this value fell to 21%. In two other patients with status epilepticus
continuous bilateral spike and wave complexes were recorded 90-100% of the time
before the music, suddenly falling to about 50% 5 minutes after the music began.
The fact that improvement took place even in a comatose patient demonstrates
again that appreciation of the music is not a necessary feature of the Mozart
effect”. In other words, you don’t even
have to listen to Mozart’s music for it to do you good.
Of course, in the case of Rauscher’s experiments, the
effect lasted barely 15 minutes, while Jenkins ends his report by observing
that, “the results are not specific to Mozart's compositions but the exact
musical criteria required have not been completely defined”, but the impression
given is that Mozart has powers other composers have not.
In my case, the jury’s out. No attempt was made in my daughter’s
pre-natal existence to force-feed her, trapped in the womb, with Mozart, but
living in a household where frequent, loud parties involving orchestral
musicians took place, she must clearly have been unwittingly exposed to
everything from Bach to Reich with plenty of Mozart thrown into the mix. If it had a lasting effect on her, it has
been to head her off into the direction of, first, One Direction and latterly
BTS. Mozart has no effect on her
whatsoever. Yet, astonishingly, she does
well at school, shows above average intelligence, is pretty and popular (my wife
has started fending off the boys with a maternal determination I remember only
too well from my youth, when it was directed against me) and appears to be
mentally well-adjusted. She is living
proof that you can succeed as a child without the influence of Mozart. Yet I do
not totally repudiate all the claims about the Mozart effect, and if nothing
else, I am conscious that in certain graffiti-strewn, beggar-encrusted, urine-scented
underpasses in Northern England, the playing of Mozart’s music through
loud-speakers has driven away the vandals, drug-addicts and knife-wielding
youths. So it does have some effect on
those unwittingly exposed to it.
All pretty harmless, you may think, and if there is a
chance that Mozart might have a beneficial effect on individuals as well as on
society as a whole, then why not give it a go. But as with all these things
which are supposed to do you good (think Atkins’ Diet, which killed off an
acquaintance of mine and caused me one of my few visits to hospital) it has
serious side effects which are easily overlooked in the mad chase after the
supposed beneficial effects.
Mozart, so the common wisdom has it, was a Child
Prodigy. It’s not quite as simple as
that. Yes, his musical father pushed him
mercilessly to pursue the only activity Mozart’s father really knew about, and
through intense early lessons, the young Wolfie did show an above average
musical ability at an early age. He certainly
did not have the natural infantile prodigious musical talent of, say,
Prokofiev, Saint-Saëns or Samuel Wesley, all of whom showed far more early
musical talent with far less force-feeding from a pushy parent than Mozart, but
he was doing musical things before his 10th birthday which to most
of us seem extraordinary.
We forget, of course, that Mozart was destined by
virtue of his birth to be a musician, his education was focused totally on
music, and the concept of general schooling and preparedness for life which is
the norm in 21st century society, was unheard of in the 18th
century. So, in the context of the day,
Mozart was bound to develop musically long before his modern-day
counterparts; on top of which, the attention span of today's 5-6 year-olds stretches to 15 minutes; in Mozart's day, with less distractions to contend with, the 5-6 year-old seemed equipped with a somewhat longer attention span (although that is an assumption not supported by any facts I can find). Yet some modern-day parents,
especially from Chinese backgrounds, are so keen that their off-spring should
excel in one particular area of human endeavour as soon as possible in order to
secure their (the parents’, that is) financial security in old age, that they
see in Mozart a useful role model. Here
was a kid who, with much encouragement from his parent, was able to support
said parent in later life. Sadly, for so
many Chinese parents, the story of Mozart begins and ends with the Child
Prodigy bit, and the debts, poverty and deprivation bit gets missed out of the
popular narrative; that’s the bit the Westerners focus on, as they love to hear
of those who fall from grace.

So, knowing only that Mozart’s musical talent
flourished at an early age as a result of strong parental encouragement, and
that Mozart went on to become world famous (world-famous equals highly-paid in
this narrative), parents look for the slightest chink of musical aptitude in
their new-born offspring and, once glimpsed, exploit it for all its worth. Private music schools pop up like dandelions along
the verges of English country-lanes, buying into the Mozart myth by calling themselves
“Little Mozarts”, “Amadeus Academy”, and the like, or hawking themselves on the
idea that prodigious talent needs nurturing (the Singapore Government, no less,
talks about “nurturing young talents”, as if it is a responsibility of
government to force its children to go down the Mozart path). The end result is a culture where it is felt
music must be force-fed to any under-five who can stick a sticky finger on a
keyboard and gurgle at the noise it makes.
Crowds of kids with about as much music in their brains as meat in a
burger gather on a regular basis in these schools and are pushed beyond all
reason to reveal their prodigious talents by passing, at incredibly young ages,
those artificial steps to greatness which Mozart, sadly, was never able to
experience; the graded music exams and the recital diplomas. “My daughter did her grade 8 when she was 14”,
“MY daughter did hers at 13”, “MY DAUGTHER did hers at 12, and has just done
her ATCL”, “Well MY DAUGHTERS both passed their grade 8 at 8, their ATCLS at 9
and are doing their FTCLs at 10”. I just
know that, had the ABRSM been around in Leopold Mozart’s time, he would have
boasted that “My Wolfie done his grade 8 when he was 6, and as an encore played
the first book of Bach’s 48 Preludes with his feet, standing on his head”.
So the legend grows, and what was an inevitable
consequence of being a talented son of a musician in the 18th
century, has become an ideal to which so many parents aspire on the behalf of
their children. But they need to know the
rest of the story. Yes, debt, poverty
and deprivation are one of the consequences of following the Mozart path, but
so too is social and personal failings.
Mozart may have been a musical genius, but he was also a thoroughly awful
person; unable to manage his affairs, dishonest, unhygienic and with a number of
personal traits which, by today’s standards, would put him on the periphery of legality.


Nobody suggests that Mozart ran amok with any kind of
weapon (although you could find Islamophobia in Così fan tutte if you looked closely enough), but there are
suggestions that he indulged in sexual activities which in today’s society
would make him a pariah, and which, had he lived in an age where his talent was
exposed weekly to millions through the medium of television, he too, like Harris
and Saville, would now be a name banned from public utterance. But because he lived a long time ago and we
choose to ignore his faults by focusing on his good points, he is still seen as
a role model.
Mozart’s legacy has provided millions with real comfort
and joy in the centuries since his death, but in his day that talent was recognised
by only a very few. Most people recognised
him as a selfish, weak and disreputable individual. We must not make the mistake of judging
Mozart as we judge those talented people of our day who balance their talent
for spreading happiness with one for spreading misery, but neither should we elevate
him to godlike status when he was in life so deeply flawed. If parents want their children to emulate
Mozart, they are in effect, sentencing them to a life of social dishonour,
misery and shame. Let your children
enjoy music for what it is, not for what it might bring in the way of fame and
fortune, as fame and fortune all too often also bring shame and disgrace.
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