Vinci×Mozart

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Leonardo da Vinci sits down with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for ROAST NIGHT. The subject — Da Vinci roasts mozart.
2. 00:11
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Welcome, Maestro Mozart. I have been looking forward to this conversation. Though I must confess, I have heard certain things about your... comportment.
3. 00:21
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Comportment! Ha! You sound like my father. Leonardo da Vinci, the great Leonardo, worried about table manners?
4. 00:29
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Not table manners, precisely. I am concerned with discipline. With the application of genius to something beyond mere entertainment.
5. 00:40
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Mere entertainment? My operas, my symphonies, my requiem—mere entertainment? You painted pretty ladies and flying machines that never flew!
6. 00:50
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Ah, but here is the difference between us, Wolfgang. I studied the bird for twenty years before I dared design a wing. You? You composed an opera at twelve because someone dared you to.
7. 01:04
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   And it was magnificent! Apollo et Hyacinthus—performed, applauded, remembered.
8. 01:10
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Performed once. Tell me, how many of your early works do you yourself remember? You scattered notes like a farmer scatters seed, hoping something would take root.
9. 01:23
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   I wrote over six hundred works in thirty-five years. How many paintings did you complete in sixty-seven? Seventeen? Twenty?
10. 01:30
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Fifteen that I considered finished. And each one required years of anatomical study, mathematical calculation, observation of light through atmosphere—
11. 01:42
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Fifteen! I wrote fifteen masses! And that's just masses! You left half your paintings incomplete, Leonardo. The Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome, the Battle of Anghiari—started, abandoned, forgotten.
12. 01:57
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Not forgotten. Studied. When I stopped work on something, it was because I had learned what I needed to learn. The completed work, Wolfgang, is sometimes less important than the investigation.
13. 02:11
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Oh, how convenient! 'I didn't finish because I was investigating.' You know what we called that in Vienna? Procrastination.
14. 02:19
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And you know what I call producing six hundred works? Incontinence of the pen. Quantity is not quality, my young friend.
15. 02:28
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Young friend! I'm not young anymore, I'm dead! We're both dead! And people still perform my music every single day. Your paintings hang in museums where people shuffle past them in fifteen minutes.
16. 02:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    They shuffle past in fifteen minutes because that is all their necks can bear, craning upward at the Mona Lisa through crowds six deep. The Louvre moves forty thousand people past her every day.
17. 02:56
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Yes, yes, the Mona Lisa. Your famous lady with the mysterious smile. You worked on her for four years. Four years! I could have written four operas in that time.
18. 03:08
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And I could have painted four portraits in an afternoon if I wished to simply copy what I saw. But I was not interested in copying. I was studying the muscles of the smile, the way light reveals and conceals simultaneously.
19. 03:25
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Meanwhile she's sitting there, getting older, probably falling asleep while you mix your pigments for the thousandth time.
20. 03:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Tell me, Wolfgang, when you improvised at the keyboard for some archbishop's dinner party, did you ever return to that improvisation? Did you refine it, perfect it, understand why one variation moved the soul more than another?
21. 03:48
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I wrote them down later if they were good. I remembered everything. I could hear an entire piece once and reproduce it perfectly.
22. 03:56
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes, you had the memory of an angel. But memory is not understanding. You could reproduce, but could you explain why? Could you diagram the architecture of beauty?
23. 04:08
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Why would I? Music isn't architecture! It's not mathematics! It's feeling, passion, joy—
24. 04:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    It is absolutely mathematics. Pythagoras knew this two thousand years before you were born. Harmony is ratio, rhythm is division, counterpoint is geometry in time.
25. 04:28
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Fine, yes, there's mathematics underneath. But I didn't calculate each note. It flowed from me like... like...
26. 04:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Like water from a broken dam? Precisely my point. You had a gift, an enormous gift, but you spent it like a spendthrift prince spends gold. No discipline, no restraint.
27. 04:51
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Restraint! What's the point of genius if you restrain it? You, with your restraint, left rooms full of unfinished canvases and notebooks no one could read because you wrote backwards!
28. 05:02
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I wrote in mirror script to protect my observations until I understood them fully. And those notebooks contained designs for flying machines, submarines, helicopters, automated looms—
29. 05:18
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    That didn't work! None of them worked! You know what did work? My music. You could perform it the day I wrote it.
30. 05:25
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    The helicopter works now, Wolfgang. They built it exactly as I drew it, four hundred years later. Where will your music be in four hundred more years?
31. 05:37
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Still being performed! Still making people weep and laugh and dance! Your helicopters just make noise and blow dust around.
32. 05:44
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    They also save lives. They lift the injured from mountains, they rescue sailors from the sea. Your music lifts the spirit, yes, but does it feed the hungry? Does it cure disease?
33. 05:59
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You can't eat a painting either, Leonardo! And your anatomical drawings—yes, very impressive, very detailed—but they didn't cure anyone in your lifetime, did they?
34. 06:09
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    They did not. But they contributed to the understanding that did cure, eventually. Every surgeon who learns from accurate anatomical drawings stands on foundations I helped to lay.
35. 06:22
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    So you're saying your incomplete work is somehow better than my completed work because someone else finished your ideas? That's... that's ridiculous!
36. 06:30
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I am saying that I planted orchards while you picked flowers. Beautiful flowers, I grant you. But flowers that died within days while the trees I planted still bear fruit.
37. 06:44
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Oh, now music is flowers? Dead flowers? Tell that to the people who weep at the Requiem! Tell that to everyone who's been married to the sound of Ave Verum Corpus!
38. 06:53
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I do not diminish your beauty, Wolfgang. I question your depth. You skimmed across the surface of your own genius, never diving deep enough to discover what lay beneath.
39. 07:06
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I dove plenty deep! The Magic Flute has layers of Masonic symbolism, Don Giovanni explores the nature of divine justice, the Jupiter Symphony—
40. 07:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes, yes, and you composed the Jupiter in three weeks while writing two other symphonies. Do you see my point? You treated genius like a party trick.
41. 07:27
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    It wasn't a trick! It was a gift, and I used it! I used every bit of it, every day, until I died at thirty-five, exhausted and broke!
42. 07:36
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Precisely. Exhausted and broke because you never learned to husband your resources. You burned like a fire that consumes everything, including itself.
43. 07:47
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    And you? You burned so slowly that half your fuel never ignited at all. At least I burned bright while I was here.
44. 07:54
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    There is something to that, I suppose. But brightness is not the only virtue. The moon is bright too, but it is merely reflecting the sun's light.
45. 08:04
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Are you calling me the moon now? I'm reflected light?
46. 08:07
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I am saying you reflected the divine gift you were given, brilliantly, without ever stopping to study the source of that light. Where did your music come from, Wolfgang? Did you ever wonder? Did you ever investigate the mechanism of your own genius?
47. 08:26
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    It came from God! And God doesn't need to be investigated, He needs to be thanked!
48. 08:31
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    God gave you eyes and you paint with them. God gave you a mind and you think with it. God gave you genius and you simply... spend it? Without curiosity about its nature? This seems, to me, almost ungrateful.
49. 08:49
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ungrateful! I spent every waking hour writing music! I died writing the Requiem! What more could I have—
50. 08:56
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You could have stopped. One year. One year to study how sound moves through air, why certain intervals please the ear, how the human brain processes rhythm. One year to understand your gift instead of simply using it.
51. 09:15
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I couldn't stop! I had debts, commissions, a family to feed! You had wealthy patrons who let you daydream for decades!
52. 09:23
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I had patrons, yes, though I left most of them disappointed. But even so—you are proving my point, Wolfgang. Your genius was enslaved to circumstance because you never disciplined it. You were its servant, not its master.
53. 09:41
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Better to serve genius than to starve it to death through over-thinking. You know what your problem is, Leonardo? You were so busy studying the bird that you forgot to let yourself fly.
54. 09:51
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps. But you flew without ever looking down to see where you were going. And you crashed, my friend. At thirty-five, in poverty, in an unmarked grave. Is that the victory you claim?
55. 10:07
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    It's not about victory. It's about music. And my music survived me. That's enough.
56. 10:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    It is enough. You are right about that. I suppose I am envious, in a way. You lived inside your genius completely, without reservation. I always stood slightly outside of mine, observing it, questioning it.
57. 10:29
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Now we're getting somewhere. You overthought everything. Even now, I bet you're thinking about the acoustics of this radio studio instead of just talking to me.
58. 10:38
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I was noticing that the microphone creates a small echo that suggests the room is not properly dampened, yes. But I am also talking to you.
59. 10:48
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    See? This is why you only finished fifteen paintings! You can't just do something, you have to understand everything about how it's done!
60. 10:56
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And you couldn't stop doing something long enough to understand anything about how it was done. Perhaps we are both cautionary tales, Wolfgang. The tortoise and the hare, still arguing at the finish line.
61. 11:11
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Except we're both dead now, so there is no finish line. There's just what we left behind.
62. 11:16
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. And what we left behind is not so different in the end. Both incomplete, in our ways. Both reaching toward something we could never quite grasp.
63. 11:29
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    That's... actually rather beautiful, Leonardo. Did you just make peace with me?
64. 11:34
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I am observing the truth. Whether it is peace or simply accurate description, I leave for others to decide.
65. 11:42
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Always the observer. Never just the liver of life. But I suppose that's why they still study you. And why they still play me. We each did what we were made to do.
66. 11:51
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps that is the only thing genius can do. Follow its nature, whether that nature is to rush forward or to hold back. Whether it finishes fifteen paintings or six hundred compositions.
67. 12:06
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Well then. Are we finished roasting each other? Because I'm getting tired of being insulted by someone who couldn't even finish a horse statue.
68. 12:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    The bronze was requisitioned for cannons, Wolfgang. I completed the clay model, which was seventy-two feet tall. But yes, we can stop. I think we understand each other now.
69. 12:27
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Good. You're still a maddeningly slow perfectionist. But I suppose the world needed one of those.
70. 12:33
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And you are still an undisciplined prodigy who died far too young. But yes, the world needed one of those as well. Arrivederci, Maestro.
71. 12:45
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Auf Wiedersehen, Leonardo. Try to finish something in the afterlife, will you?