scientific publication – Page 5

A Nuanced View of Mozart’s Personality

Cliff Eisen (ed.): Mozart – A Life in Letters. ISBN 978-0-141-44146-7 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reading Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s correspondence with his father Leopold, his sister Nannerl, his wife Constanze and his friends and patrons – that seemed to me to be the key to better understand Mozart’s personality. His double-sided face – gentle, loving, helpful on the one hand, arrogant, vulgar and deceitful on the other hand – was a recurrent theme in my posts on my music blog and it kept irritating me.

The letters selected by Cliff Eisen fulfilled my expectation in so far as they nuanced certain aspects of the composer’s character that the biographies I had read up to that point had empasized e.g. his at times strained relationship with his father and his tendancy to speak with much despise of some of his benefactors. The tension between the young and old Mozart triggered by some of Wolfgang’s decisions in professional matters reminds me of many other father-son conflicts such as the dispute between Franz Schubert and his father or the one between my dad and myself! Such conflicts are part of man’s personal development, and in Mozart’s case, his success in Vienna quickly reconciled the father with his maverick son.

Mozart’s inability to keep his expences under control and and thus to reduce his dependance on borrowing money from friends who quite often were not reimbursed also appears in a new light. In his letters Mozart regularly complains that the nobility – people who liked to have him around as a mark of their cultural taste – mostly expected him to perform for free without giving a thought to how the composer would feed his family and cover the expenses he had to make to be able to compose and perform. If Mozart’s morality in financial issues may appear questionable today, it must be said in his defence that his noble “friends” did not exactly set a good example.

Mozart’s letters are a lovely piece of prose, reflecting well life at the end of the 18th century in general and Mozart’s world more specifically, from mundane issues like how to get a good housemaid or find decent transport for long-distance trips to political issues and the questions of musical taste, court appointments and his apprecuation of fellow composers.

While reading Mozart’s letters I discovered a wonderful early composition, the oratorio “La Betulia Liberata”, inspired by the Book of Judith:

A Mozart oratorio about women empowerment

Changing Shape in Order to Shape Change

4th revolution copy

John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge: The Fourth Revolution – The Global Race to Reinvent the State. ISBN 978-1-846-14733-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Changing the shape of government and shaping the change of government – that’s the challenge for any Western public service. Good governance, a solid financial base, lean decision-making structures and satisfied customer-citizens – who wouldn’t like to subscribe to such a model, be it in Europe, Brazil, the United States or Japan? Micklethwait and Wooldridge provide a useful recapitulation of the past: Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb and Milton Friedman are the names of the thinkers whose ideas contributed to the creation of the modern welfare state.

However, that model is about to break down because of over-extension, as the authors rightly observe. Demographics are at work here. We are getting older and become an expensive liability for the younger generations, far less numerous than our generation. Public service has grown into a seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable monster, pervading and regulating every aspect of our lives with great inefficiency.

The authors describe in a fascinating way the challenges ahead, and relish in enumerating the many failings of present governments in almost all the fields where it should succeed: health, transport, assistance to the weak, affordable housing, security. The list of what went wrong is endless, despite the efforts of many courageous public servants to reverse the trend. However when it comes to sketch possible solutions, the ideas the authors advance are at best naive, at worst misleading. I will just list a few, significant shortcomings in Micklethwait’s and Wooldridge’s arguments.

Efficient governments as in Singapore – the Asian model – come at the price of unacceptable restrictions on human rights and high risk of corruption among the elites-in-charge. I understand the authors fascination by the fast transformation from backward, inert to avant-garde, fast-paced policy-making, but the simple fact that China’s president Xi Jinping has suggested to lift the constitutional provision restricting the number of presidential terms indicates how tempting it is for a self-declared elite of “wise men” – women do not figure anywhere in the part of this book dealing with the future – to extend their power in the name of the people’s will.

This leads me to the next point: the absence of women. They are not part of the equation. More women are better educated, more women want to work, more women want to take over responsibilities in the private sector as much as in the public sector – this totally escapes Micklethwait and Wooldridge despite the fact that it changes any model of social mobility they may use in explaining part of the evolution of the public sector. Women adopt a different management style – different as in relying more on cooperation and creativity in finding solutions – and may well be the key to change the way governmental agencies operate, but the book doesn’t say an iota about it. Boooooh!

Much admired public health systems as they have been put in place in Sweden may be cost-saving, but quick discharges from hospitals are not the only scale to measure their performance since the aspect of the quality of the treatment and the well-being of the patient is neglected. Customer satisfaction does not seem to weigh heavy in the minds of the authors since their emphasis lies on budget efficiency exclusively. The same could be said about the much less admired UK railway systems. After privatization it is still running late, the seats have not become more comfortable, the cost-per-mile-track has remained about the same and the blame-game about what went wrong isn’t even funny anymore.

My personal experience in the public service is that the information age does not automatically lead to a lean and more efficient government. The authors put exaggerated hope into technology. Quite often incompatible IT-solutions are put in place and prioritization of who buys what becomes a drama in multiple acts. In-house software development addressing specific public service issues is hampered by a lack of available IT engineers, willing to leave the private sector, and supervisors prefer to decide small issues since they quite often do not understand the bigger picture – an issue shared with the private sector where thousands of badly trained managers fail when the time has come to assume responsibility. The human factor cannot be emphasized enough and will always neutralize efficiency gains through technology. This is less ironic than it may appear.

Making government agencies more responsive is always a lovely idea. Giving citizen the option to share with government agencies pictures of problems (pot holes, graffiti, missing road signs etc.) along with GPS data through mobile phones sounds like a cheap and democracy-friendly idea but it will lead government to fund additional posts. It will feed the monster, not put it on a diet. Someone will have to process and prioritize the data, generate specific orders for work crews and provide a feedback to senders. And write reports about efficiency gains neutralized.

Finally raising pension age is not a solution per se as burn-outs are a common issue in the higher echelons of public service, partly because leaner structures – smart government is the key word here – have increased the workload for decision makers. Posts have been cut, but the work has remained the same. The resulting costs – increasing hours of sick-leave – do not show up on the authors’ balance sheet. Sure we can work longer. But will we work better at age 70 than at age 65? I have my doubts. The solution will rather lie in a reduction and a better distribution of essential tasks among public servants.

It is a pity that these two respected journalists have not managed to really understand some of the inherent problems of “big government” that make changing its shape and shaping its change so difficult. Their idea – streamline everything and cost-efficiency is our new God – is far too shortsighted as an approach. Micklethwait and Wooldridge should know better. They worked for “The Economist”.

Now, one thing the two authors got right is a fact from the world of music. While musing over labour-intensive services provided by government, Micklethwait and Wooldridge correctly state that it took four players to perform a Beethoven quartet in the 19th century and that today it still takes four players to play a piece like Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor by which Beethoven provided an early proof of his revolutionary mind:

Radically innovative – now and then

A Respectable Woman, an Outstanding Talent

R. Larry Todd: Fanny Hensel. The other Mendelssohn. ISBN 978-0-19-936638-2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ If there ever was a good biography of Fanny Mendelssohn, it is this book. Fanny Mendelssohn was an outstanding pianist and composer and happened to be the sister of Felix Mendelssohn, one of the great composers of German romanticism. This book is not exactly a page-turner, but it’s not meant to be a page-turner. Its scientific value for anyone interested in Fanny’s life and works cannot be praised enough. Todd’s painstakingly meticulous research led to a work loaded with innumerable details on Fanny’s relation to both her brother and her husband Wilhelm Hensel, with multiple quotes from her letters and diaries and with a rigorous analysis of Fanny’s compositions. A treasure trove for musicologists and freaks like myself.

If Fanny Mendelssohn is known by insiders only today, it has of course to do with women’s social position in the 19th century. A woman from a respectable family like the Mendelssohn’s would not embark on a career as a professional composer or pianist or any other career for that matter. She would marry a respectable man and raise children and devote herself to fashionable leisure activities. Composing and performing were acceptable only in a private circle, but publishing works under her own name or embarking on concert tours – that idea seemed unacceptable to both Fanny’s father and to her brother.

How ambiguous however Felix’ feelings about this were, becomes apparent when Todd explains how he encouraged his sister to perform her works at charity concerts and organize weekly concerts at their home. The “Sunday Concerts” attracted Berlin’s elite and were semi-public cultural events that not only put Fanny into the limelight but also gave her the opportunity to mingle with the brightest artists of her time, notably composers and musicians that would consider her as a peer.

On my music blog I will give female composers this year considerably more space and as an introduction to Fanny Mendelssohn’s work I suggest you enjoy some of her song cycles, a genre in which she excelled and outranked her brother:

Longing for Italy, home of Beauty

PQ-QP = h/2πi – Uncertainty as a Fate

Ernst Peter Fischer: Werner Heisenberg – ein Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten. ISBN 978-3-662-43441-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Writing a biography of a physicist presents a challenge: Should the book focus on the person or the science? Should it try to describe a human being’s life or should it explain that person’s scientific idea? At best it tries to reconcile both, but this effort quite often fails since most recent scientific discoveries are quite complicated to explain to a layman who might have a stronger interest in the person than in his ideas. Retracing the life of Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), one of the founders of quantum mechanics, is a mission that seems right from the beginning doomed to fail.

The first chapters of the book are bound to discourage the reader. The language is clumsy at times, pompous at others. Bits of philosophical ideas about science, literature and music mix with leaps back and fro in Heisenberg’s life – a complete mess. The author tries to show off with his knowledge of German Romanticism and connects Heisenberg’s scientific ideas to Heisenberg’s Romantic outlook on the world wherever he sees fit which is confusing and totally unnecessary. However after some 80 pages, the author finds a straightforward way to explain the thinking of Heisenberg as it evolved with time and one of the rather interesting aspects of Heisenberg’s scientific studies.

Heisenberg discards the idea that there is something like an “objective reality” in natural sciences that one can observe, measure and describe. He suggests that man should try to explain natural phenomena with a theoretical model and warns at the same time that man is tempted to be guided by past experiences when building models instead of being creative and coming up with radically new models. Thinking out of the box, transcending traditional paradigms – this seems to be the supreme effort for a scientist, but also for man generally. We don’t like to change our basic assumptions of life, do we? Once you start asking questions, life can become quite messy, uncomfortable, even life-threatening.

Given that Heisenberg’s expertise was quantum mechanics and the mathematical models necessary to understand them, I cannot ignore the formula in the headline: PQ-QP=h/2πi. You do not need to understand it, but you need to understand its meaning for physics and philosophy. Basically the formula asserts a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle (a part of an atom, e. g. an electron), such as position and momentum can be known.

Taking a step back it means that the scientists changes the object of his study as he studies it, for example by trying to measure its momentum or determine its position, and thus falsifies his measurement by doing it. When talking of atoms, there are things we cannot know with precision – this was Heisenberg’s revolutionary idea. It introduced an element of uncertainty and threw over board another basic paradigm of classical physics: the law of cause and effect, which does not apply necessarily to subatomic particles. Things within the atom can happen randomly. A frightening thought? Don’t worry. Your coffee-machine is not going to break apart spontaneously, at least not because of quantum physics. However Heisenberg’s scientific breakthrough makes your iPhone and computer work, as it led after many more years to the invention of the semi-conductor. Intel inside – crystals and hopping electrons!

The book explains all this reasonably well, and at the same time gives an idea of what Heisenberg’s thoughts and feelings were when the Nazis rose to power, when the SS abused him as a “white Jew” promoting Jewish physics (Albert Einstein’s relativity theory) and how Heisenberg did not build a Nazi atomic bomb. If it weren’t for the botched introduction, I’d give the book four stars. I am glad that the author got around to solid story-telling and quantum theory for dummies. I am also glad I did not give up too soon.

Heisenberg was a keen amateur pianist and cellist. “One cannot live without music. But when I listen to music, I sometimes get the absurd idea that life could have a meaning”, he wrote in 1924. In his leisure time, when he was not crunching numbers or developing models, he liked to study challenging music written by Robert Schumann, for instance his piano cycle “Kreisleriana” (Op. 16), or Ludwig van Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas.

Satire and passion for the benefit of mankind

Two cello sonatas to please the king

On Over-Seized Egos and the Rule of Fear in Politics

Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin – Parallel lives. ISBN 978-0-679-7294-5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This book is a brick. It is some 900 pages long, but it is an exceptional book about world history and power politics, meticulously researched and well written. It covers the history of the first half of the 20th century seen through the eyes of Adolf Hitler and Josef Dugashwili, later known as Stalin. The book, published before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is a huge scientific achievement and a book of utmost relevance today. It touches a number of psychological points highly interesting to anyone interested in how political leaders see and shape today’s world.

Propaganda is key

The way Adolf Hitler, a low profile soldier and artist, conquered political power and managed to put Germany under the spell of a racist ideology leading to World War II and the long list of atrocities committed by German soldiers and the SS is significant as Hitler used means very similar to those used by Donald Trump to gain access to the White House. A key element is and was the spreading of fear deriving from wild conspiracy theories among the political constituency – the Jewish worldwide alliance against Germany in the case of Hitler, Europe and China cheating on the US and the threat posed by the establishment in Washington (the “swamp” that still waits to be drained) in the case of Trump.

Both Hitler and Trump achieved this through a constant propagandistic drumbeat. Hitler excelled as an orator and dispatched Nazi speakers with a road-show to all corners of Germany saturating the public debate with his populist slogans and his foul speech while Trump uses friendly media outlets and social networks to spread lies, slander rivals and spin the public debate to suit his personal ambitions.

Vying for the disenchanted masses

Building a political career on the resentments of the constituency is another parallel. Germany’s already weak economy was heavily hit by the Great Depression and political stability was shaky after 1918. Thus Germans were hard to convince of the benefit of their first truly democratic experience and readily listened to anyone suggesting a firm leadership and quick fixes, however unrealistic they seemed to an unbiased observer. Today globalization has produced a great number of people losing out in all industrialized countries and specifically in the US. Many of those became easily convinced that Trump could make America great again and thus restore their former personal position in society.

Stalin came to power in a very different way than Hitler. He gained a foothold in politics by becoming a professional revolutionary in Georgia, his native region, and by joining the Communist cause. Once he had become part of the inner circle of Lenin, he made sure to become Lenin’s successor instead of Lev Trotzky as the leader of the Communist Party by eliminating all rivals through bureaucratic manoeuvring or by inventing conspiracies and having his rivals arrested. From the 1920s on until his death in 1953 Stalin ruled by fear. He succumbed to many economic, political and military mistakes that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, but very few people were allowed to contradict him. They could all too easily lose their position, their privileges or their life.

Alan Bullock’s description of Stalin’s grip over the Soviet Union reminds me in many respects of the ways the president Vladimir Putin rules Russia today. Of course, there are no Gulags anymore and the FSB does not deport hundreds of thousands to Siberia. The means have become more subtle, more polished to maintain the illusion of the rule of law. But the basic logic remains unchanged: Shut up or else!

Denying reality and “fake news”

Both Stalin and Hitler show how far leaders can become removed from reality, : Hitler never visited the front, he locked himself up in his bunker during the last months of World War II, unwilling and unable to acknowledge that the war was lost and that he had sacrificed Germany for a fantasy i.e. conquering “Lebensraum” (living space) for racially pure German colonists and to satisfy his own ego. Up to the last days he maintained that he was the saviour of Germany, finding an astonishing variety of scapegoats: the General Staff of the armed forces, the officer corps and the leadership of the SS, all of them having betrayed him at some point, and of course Great Britain who had failed to understand the benefit of a coalition with the Nazi regime.

Stalin isolated himself no less from reality by surrounding himself with legions of yes-sayers. Any reports not fitting with his opinion would be deemed a fabrication. The psychological mechanisms at work in the case of these two leaders remind me very much about reports on how the White House handles current affairs and the time Trump devotes to identify and denounce “fake news”.

Leaders are vulnerable

Finally Bullock’s study shows that the paramount driving force for both leaders was fear. Hitler had to prove himself everyday that Providence had chosen him to save Germany, that Germany adored him for his spiritual leadership and that Germany could rule Europe through the sheer power of will (Thank you Schopenauer for giving this man such grand ideas!). He had founded a religion and cast himself in the role of God. Omniscient, omnipotent. Fear to be proven wrong kept Hitler going until his last days in Berlin. The war could not be lost, because it would have called into question his abilities and the fate that Providence had reserved for him, Germany and the rest of the world for that matter.

Stalin fared no better: His early career as a revolutionary, forced to operate in clandestine ways, made him prone to a paranoia that took exceptional dimensions under the strain of conducting a war first against Russia’s peasants and then against Germany. Stalin would not have trusted his own shadow. And he had plenty of reasons to fear to be assassinated: He had made himself legions of enemies during the purges of the Communist Party and the armed forces, and his dramatic miscalculations in the early stages of the German offensive had led many to believe he was unfit for office.

When appreciating today’s world leaders this book offers a key to understand their true motivations and the decision-making processes that define their policies irrespective of the time. At the centre is the concept of fear – the fear to lose the power they have gained, the very same fear they use to come to and stay in power. They use fear and they know it works. And they fear it could be successfully used against them. This fear makes them corruptible for it makes them vulnerable. If we want to get rid of them, this is the weak spot we have to strike at. But before that we need to overcome our own fear.

This post would not be complete without a reference to music and I suggest Dmitry Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, Op. 60 “Leningrad”. Shostakovich lived in constant fear of Stalin’s animosity, and the siege of Leningrad was an early example of the contest of will-power between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany:

A symphony born out of rubbles