Greg Stepanich

The subject was money, and Mozart

I've been pretty busy the last couple days doing concert reviews (American Chamber Players and the Orquestra de Cadaques), and I want to mention an upcoming concert this weekend that will feature some new music, but I'll need some more time before I write that.

In the meantime, I bumped into this book excerpt on the Web and found it very interesting. It's called Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and it's written by F.M. Scherer, an emeritus professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. I found myself lingering over the chapter excerpt here and now I'm thinking of getting the book.

Scherer's book came out in 2003, and apparently what he's done here is do an economic analysis of how it became possible for composers to start becoming freelancers and leave the creepy prince-archbishops behind. I like this statement here about what he's trying to do:

This book is written by an economist who recognizes that economic analysis cannot predict the appearance of genius. True genius is an extremely rare phenomenon. Even if everything else could be held constant .... which can hardly be assured, an increase in the number of individuals pursuing musical composition as a profession implies at best in a very weak statistical sense that one or a few will be outstanding geniuses. A composer as great as Mozart might emerge next year, or, as Joseph Haydn speculated on learning of Mozart's death a year before Beethoven moved permanently to Vienna, "Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years!"

This reminds me of one of the things I found fascinating about Volkmar Braunbehrens' Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791, which came out in its original German in 1986 (the English translation, by Timothy Bell, came along three years later). Braunbehrens does an absorbing chapter about what money was worth in those days as compared to the present (the late 1980s, in this case). He points out that Mozart made about 4,000 florins in 1791, which in 1988 dollars works out to about $80,000:

Not only was Mozart's income exceptionally high in comparison with the earnings of most of his musical colleagues, but it showed every sign of being on the increase.

Mozart had high-life tastes, he sent his wife to expensive spas and one of his two survining sons to a pricey boarding school, and he was able to pay off those loans to Michael Puchberg that take up so much of his late correspondence. Had he lived, he very well could have made a great deal of money, and I'll bet he probably would have.

It must have been exhilarating for him to break away from court sponsorship and test his luck out in the emergent free market. He was a canary in the meritocracy coal mine, but he showed how it could be done.

It also shows how the fundamental role the market plays in assessing artistic works hasn't changed much since then, either. Even musicians without Mozart's talent, and that's most musicians, walk in his footsteps when they offer their goods in the square and see who might want to buy them.