Totally Genius

Those who have probed the Einstein family tree in the reverse direction, looking for the roots of Albert’s genius, have also come up empty-handed. Einstein himself, writing on this subject shortly before his death, was convinced that such a search was pointless. “I know perfectly well that I myself have no special talents,” he wrote. “It was curiosity, obsession, and sheer perseverance that brought me to my ideas . . . Exploration of my ancestors therefore leads nowhere.”

Nor is genius necessarily recognizable in childhood. Sure, Mozart was a prodigy. But Darwin showed no special talents as a child. (He was once told off by his father: “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”) And Einstein, in an oft-repeated observation, was slow to speak. Even when genius does show up in childhood, the debate over just how far back it can be traced, and of the relative import of genes, parents, schooling, and culture, remains.

A look at Mozart’s early years can be instructive. His father, Leopold, was a talented violinist and teacher, and a minor composer to boot. He recognized his son’s latent talents and devoted himself with gusto to building young Wolfgang’s career. Mozart began playing the piano at three and began composing by four or five; by seven he was composing regularly. By that time he had mastered the violin and was able to memorize a lengthy multi-part composition (Allegri’s Miserere) after hearing it performed just a few times. He wrote his first opera at twelve.

One of the most thorough examinations, or deconstructions one might say, of Mozart’s youthful achievement can be found in a book published in 2001 by the late British psychologist Michael J.A. Howe, called Genius Explained. He begins by running through the standard list of Mozart’s accomplishments — the masterly playing, the composing of music at an impossibly early age, the nearly superhuman feats of memory. “It is hard to see how they can be explained without appealing to magic or miracles,” he writes. “Perhaps he was born possessing some innate gift that made him totally different from other children.” But already the reader can sense that a more mundane explanation is around the corner. And so Howe digs a little deeper: Mozart’s early compositions were competent, but nothing more; the first one to be considered a masterwork (Concerto no. 9 for Piano) he wrote at age twenty-one when, Howe reminds us, he had been composing concertos for a full decade. Howe cites a study by John Hayes, who examined the work of seventy-six well-known composers and concluded that in nearly every case no major work was produced before the composer had been at work for at least ten years. There were just three exceptions, in which composers had produced substantial work after nine years.

And Mozart’s performance skills? Howe reminds us that Mozart practised longer and harder than just about anyone, thanks in large measure to his father, who pushed his son to the limits, subjecting him to “an arduous and unusual regime.” Then come the numbers: let’s assume, Howe offers, that Mozart’s father made him practise for an average of three hours a day from the age of three. By the age of six—the time of his first “European tour,” in which Leopold showed off the talents of both Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl—he would have logged a staggering 3,500 hours of practice—what today’s musicians need in order to reach the level of public performer. The long hours of practice “would largely account for his standard of performing being superior to anything his audience had previously observed in a child of his age,” Howe writes. Indeed, it “would not have been at all surprising if spectators . . . could not give a rational explanation for the feats they were witnessing.”

And Mozart’s ability to remember lengthy musical works? Impressive, Howe admits, but we should note that “although Allegri’s Miserere is a lengthy composition, it is one that happens to contain a great deal of repetition. For a person as knowledgeable as Mozart, that would have lightened the burden of remembering.”

Howe concedes that this is not “a full accounting of his creative achievements,” but he believes it is a solid beginning. It begins to seem conceivable, Howe concludes, “that the underlying capabilities Mozart depended upon may not have been fundamentally different in kind from ones that are shared by numerous men and women with no claim to genius.”

It is a little depressing to see Mozart’s “gift” melt away as we peer into his daily routine and scrutinize the timeline of his major accomplishments. But then, what were we expecting ? He did not emerge from the womb humming Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and neither Shakespeare nor Rembrandt nor Einstein—nor indeed anyone—was born displaying a specific talent of any kind. But we must be careful here: Howe has not proved that nurture trumps nature. It is still possible, some say likely, that there was something special about Mozart’s brain, something that would have predisposed him to musical talent. Even so, the incredible amount of nurturing bestowed on the young Mozart could only have bolstered whatever nature had provided.

The notion that Mozart and most of his fellow musicians had ten years of practice behind them when they produced their first unambiguously great works fits well with a broader idea known to historians and psychologists as the “ten-year rule”—the idea that a person only makes a world-class contribution to a given art or science after ten years of intensive training and study. Of course, history is often less interested in documenting that laborious process than in celebrating its results, and so “genius” often appears to come out of the blue.

Einstein’s “miracle year” is perhaps the best modern case. Somehow, in the first half of 1905, he managed to publish stunningly original papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the dimensions of molecules, along with the famous text outlining the first part of his relativity theory, now known as special relativity. It is a staggering achievement by any measure, let alone for a twenty-six-year-old patent clerk whose Ph.D. thesis was still under review.