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In the concluding chapter to his study on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud (1910) made the following observation:
It would be futile to blind ourselves to the fact that readers to-day find all pathography unpalatable…. a pathographical review of a great man never results in an understanding of his importance and his achievements…. biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because…they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to a task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the
Page 126great man among the class of their infantile models…. That they should do this is regrettable, for they therefore sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature. (p. 130)
To their credit, the contributors to The Pleasures and Perils of Genius manage to avoid succumbing to the weaknesses of both the pathographer and the biographer in this collection of essays and presentations, gleaned from an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of California in San Francisco in 1991, the bicentennial year of Mozart's death.
Because limitations of space preclude my giving a detailed commentary on all 14 contributions to the volume, I will confine my discussion to those which view their subject from a unique perspective, or which make extensive use of material that is not treated elsewhere in the text.
In the first essay of the collection, “Creative Genius in Music: Mozart and Other Composers,” Dean Keith Simonton mobilizes a wealth of historiometric and statistical data to place Mozart high on the list of the greatest musical geniuses of all time. On the basis of a compilation of the relative performance frequencies of the works of 250 classical composers, Mozart comes in first, with a frequency of 6.1%; Bach and Beethoven tie for second place with a