Einstein×Mozart

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on STUDY HALL, Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. They take up On who taught them to work hard, not how to be brilliant.
2. 00:11
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Wolfgang, people always ask me about the theories, the equations. They want to know how I thought of relativity. But nobody asks who made me sit at the desk long enough to finish the calculations.
3. 00:22
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Ha! Yes, exactly this! Everyone thinks I just sneezed out symphonies. They don't ask about my father dragging me to the clavier at five in the morning. Five! When I wanted to be sleeping or eating cake.
4. 00:36
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Your father was Leopold, yes? The violin teacher?
5. 00:38
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Violin, composition, everything. He was... how do I say... very determined that his children would not be lazy. My sister too, Nannerl. We practiced until our fingers bled. Well, almost. I exaggerate, but only a little.
6. 00:54
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   I had no such father. Hermann Einstein was a gentle man, really. Kind. He and my uncle Jakob had their electrical business, but he never pushed me. My mother, Pauline—she insisted on the violin lessons, but I was terrible at practicing. I hated the mechanical drills.
7. 01:11
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   You played violin? This I did not know!
8. 01:13
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, but badly at first. I only loved it later when I understood the music, the Mozart sonatas especially. The structure. But as a child? I wanted to do my own thinking, not what the teacher demanded. This got me in trouble.
9. 01:27
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   So who made you work, then? If not your father?
10. 01:29
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Necessity, I suppose. And maybe my uncle Jakob. He would give me algebra problems like they were puzzles, games. He made me prove things. Show your work, Albert. Don't just say you know—demonstrate it. This was the discipline, hidden inside play.
11. 01:43
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ah, clever! My father was not so clever about this. It was just: practice now. Perform tonight. Write a new sonata by Thursday. No games. All business.
12. 01:54
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you did it. You wrote how many compositions? Six hundred something?
13. 01:57
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Six hundred twenty-six, by the catalog they made after I died. Which is strange to think about, actually. But yes, I wrote constantly. Because my father made me understand—this is our living. We are performers. If Wolfgang cannot play, the family does not eat.
14. 02:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That is a different pressure than I knew. My family wanted me to be practical, yes. Get a teaching position, something secure. But not so desperate as that.
15. 02:23
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    From age six, we were traveling. Courts, palaces, rich people's parlors. Everyone wanting to see the little wonder boy. And I had to deliver wonder, every single time. No bad nights allowed. You know what this teaches you?
16. 02:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    What?
17. 02:39
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    That talent is nothing if you cannot produce it on command. My father said this to me once—I must have been seven or eight—he said, God gave you the gift, but I am teaching you not to waste it. The gift makes you special. The work makes you useful.
18. 02:54
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The work makes you useful. Yes, this is good. I was the opposite problem, I think. I had ideas all the time, too many ideas. But finishing them? Writing them properly? This was agony. My friend Michele Besso at the patent office, he would let me talk through everything. He never contributed the physics, but he made me articulate it clearly.
19. 03:15
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    He made you organize the chaos?
20. 03:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Exactly so. I could see the relativity in my head, the whole thing, but turning it into mathematics that others could follow—this required discipline I did not naturally have. I wanted to skip to the next idea already.
21. 03:29
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I never had this problem. For me, the ideas came fully formed. I could hear an entire symphony in my mind, all the parts at once. The work was just writing it down fast enough before I forgot.
22. 03:41
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But someone taught you to write it down, yes? The notation, the form?
23. 03:45
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    My father. Every day, theory and composition. He was not a great composer himself, but he knew all the rules. How to structure a movement, how to develop a theme, where the cadences must go. I learned this before I could write words properly. He would test me—Wolfgang, here are four measures, now finish the phrase. If it was lazy, he would make me do it again.
24. 04:09
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So he gave you the tools, even if you had the vision.
25. 04:12
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Yes, and also—I must say this honestly—he gave me the fear. Not of him, exactly. But the fear of failing. Of being ordinary. He said to me once, when I was being a little fool, making jokes instead of working: Wolfgang, there are a hundred talented boys in Europe. What makes you think you are special? Only the work makes you special.
26. 04:34
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is harsh for a child to hear.
27. 04:36
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    It was harsh! But also... true? I see now what he meant. Talent is common enough. Even great talent. But the discipline to use it every day, to finish what you start, to polish until it shines—this is rare. This he drilled into me.
28. 04:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I wish someone had drilled this into me earlier. At the Polytechnic in Zurich, I skipped so many lectures. I thought I could learn it all myself from books. And I could, mostly. But I made enemies of my professors, and this hurt me later when I needed their recommendations. My friend Marcel Grossmann, he was the diligent one. He took beautiful notes, and he shared them with me. He saved me.
29. 05:15
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    So you had friends who taught you discipline that your family did not?
30. 05:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, and my first wife, Mileva, also. She was a physicist too, and very systematic. When I was working on the special relativity paper in 1905, I would get stuck on the mathematics. The tensor calculus was... complicated. Mileva would work through it with me, check my calculations. She had the patience I lacked.
31. 05:40
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You needed others to finish what you started.
32. 05:43
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I needed others to keep me honest, yes. To make me show the work, not just claim the insight. This is embarrassing to admit, but it is true.
33. 05:51
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    It is not embarrassing! I also needed this, but earlier. My father was my Mileva, in a way. Later, when I was grown and he was not watching so closely, I became lazy sometimes. I would drink too much, stay up gambling, not work. And my compositions from those times—they are not as good. You can hear it. I lost the discipline.
34. 06:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you always came back to it.
35. 06:15
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Because the habit was so deep. Even when I was being stupid, some part of me could not stop working. My father put the work so deep into my body that it became automatic. Like breathing. Even if I wanted to be lazy, my hands would find the piano.
36. 06:31
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I envy this. I never achieved automatic discipline. Even late in my life, I would start projects and abandon them. The unified field theory—I worked on it for decades and never finished. Maybe if I had your father standing behind me...
37. 06:44
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You would have hated him! He was very annoying. But yes, you would have finished more papers. Although, Albert, you finished enough, I think. You changed how humans understand the universe. This is not nothing.
38. 06:56
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And you wrote six hundred twenty-six pieces of eternal beauty. Also not nothing. But I think we both know—the brilliance was the easy part, yes? The ideas came. The melodies came. What was hard was staying in the chair until they were perfect.
39. 07:13
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Staying in the chair! Yes! This is the whole secret, and nobody wants to hear it. They want to hear about genius, about inspiration, about God touching your forehead. But really it is just: sit down, shut up, and work. Every day. Even when you do not feel like it.
40. 07:31
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Especially when you do not feel like it. This is what separates the ones who achieve from the ones who only dream.
41. 07:37
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    My father used to say: God gives the seed, but you must water it every day or it dies. I hated this expression because it was so boring and practical. But he was right. The seed dies without the watering.
42. 07:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I had no one to teach me the watering when I was young. I had to learn it the hard way—through failure, through needing help, through friends who showed me by example. This took much longer than if someone had simply made me do it from the beginning.
43. 08:03
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But you learned it. This is what matters. Some people never learn. They stay in love with their own potential forever, and they die having done nothing. You and I, we actually did the work. Eventually.
44. 08:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Eventually, yes. Thanks to the people who would not let us waste what we had been given.
45. 08:19
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    To the annoying people who made us practice! To the strict fathers and patient friends! Without them, we would just be two lazy boys with interesting thoughts and nothing to show for it.
46. 08:30
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I will drink to that. If we were drinking. Which we are not, because we are on the radio.
47. 08:35
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    We could be drinking on the radio. Who would stop us?
48. 08:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Wolfgang, you are a bad influence.
49. 08:40
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    This is also what my father said. And he was also right about that.