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The Victorians screwed up how we talk about geniuses forever. Turned Shakespeare and Mozart from talented and skilled men to freakish, unassailable superhumans so impossible to square with the actual historical facts about them that people can only reconcile it with conspiracy
With Shakespeare it's always "no apparently normal working lower-middle-class actor could have written these works of peerless art, it must have been a paedophile Earl" when, like, have you read them? They're incredibly thoughtful and beautiful works of entertaining pop fiction
And with Mozart it's always "this superhuman court musician also wrote silly poetry with his friends about shitting, so he must have been a tragic savant, possessed by a neurodivergent curse that made him swear in letters because that's how Tourettes Syndrome works I think"
It's easier to imagine him as a pervert or a tragic inspirational tale than to imagine an intelligent guy would write to his fav cousin in the 18th Century equivalent of extremely high irony uwu speak
The stuff about him having a superhuman ability to transcribe and just spending his time lying around waiting for this music to come to him is totally a Victorian fantasy from a time when everyone was nauseatingly romantic and it was thought ability was channelled from God
Mozart was definitely a very capable transcriber but the transcriptions of older music he made were largely from simple music and some required a second pass to correct his mistakes. He was extremely good but at a normal level for humans
He was also extremely good at playing by ear and probably his showoff tricks of perfectly replaying songs were not "perfect", just he could remember the melody and improvise an accompaniment (which we know about from how he'd only write a melody line when pressed for deadlines)
While Amadeus was playing off this older idea about Mozart and is the main source for a lot of the myths these days, it's worth pointing out one of the people who was most mad about it was Margaret Thatcher who refused to accept Mozart made shit jokes even when proved otherwise
And that sort of reveals a lot about what is going on here - it's the same classism as with anti-Stratfordianism. Easier to believe Mozart was mad or a sexual fetishist because he was a courtier, and nobody royalty adjacent could ever write about doing shitty-witty down your nose
People forget that the people he wrote his irl-shitposts to would reply in the same kind of style
Anyway whenever someone pulls out stuff like "Mozart had OCD, Tourettes, and a rare thing called 'Scatology Asperger's" it's a good indication they never had any actually smart friends when they were in their late 20s-early 30s
All the stupid people I know: "I watch irreverent TV comedy. They're so true, all the politicians are stupid. Ha ha, genders"
All the clever people I know: "lecbh mich I'm Arsche;,,,, (twinkble twinkle shittle star)"
All the clever people I know: "lecbh mich I'm Arsche;,,,, (twinkble twinkle shittle star)"
