The New York Times
January 31, 2006
Essay
A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another
By ARTHUR I. MILLERLast year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2
inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise
featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being
given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27,
250 years ago.
There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one
might think.
Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's
"was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the
universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed
much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay
the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a
"pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws
of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be
plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.
Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which
Einstein attributed his theories.
Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between
their creative processes, as well as their histories.
As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his
emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills so
trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the
house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart's sonatas.
The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, a
friend of Einstein's from high school. "When his violin began to
sing," Mr. Byland told the biographer Carl Seelig, "the walls of the
room seemed to recede — for the first time, Mozart in all his purity
appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines,
roguishly playful, mightily sublime."
From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss
patent office and doing physics research — his "mischief" — in his
spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly Mozart.
It was at the core of his creative life.
And just as Mozart's antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein
pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied
indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of
music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist.
He played the violin with passion and often performed at musical
evenings. He enchanted audiences, particularly women, one of whom
gushed that "he had the kind of male beauty that could cause havoc."
He also empathized with Mozart's ability to continue to compose
magnificent music even in very difficult and impoverished
conditions. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein was
living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult marriage
and money troubles.
That spring he wrote four papers that were destined to change the
course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in
part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in
physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories
lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of
Bach and Mozart.
In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to
the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for
inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.
"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a
difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music,"
recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all
his difficulties."
In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart,
succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.
Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful
theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the
theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be
able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.
The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought
to be. And amazingly, the universe turned out to be pretty much as
Einstein imagined. Its daunting mathematics revealed spectacular and
unexpected phenomena like black holes.
Though a Classical giant, Mozart helped lay groundwork for the
Romantic with its less precise structures. Similarly, Einstein's
theories of relativity completed the era of classical physics and
paved the way for atomic physics and its ambiguities. Like Mozart's
music, Einstein's work is a turning point.
At a 1979 concert for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the
Juilliard Quartet recalled having played for Einstein at his home in
Princeton, N.J. They had taken quartets by Beethoven and Bartok and
two Mozart quintets, said the first violinist, Robert Mann, whose
remarks were recorded by the scholar Harry Woolf.
After playing the Bartok, Mann turned to Einstein. "It would give us
great joy," he said, "to make music with you." Einstein in 1952 no
longer had a violin, but the musicians had taken an extra. Einstein
chose Mozart's brooding Quintet in G minor.
"Dr. Einstein hardly referred to the notes on the musical score,"
Mr. Mann recalled, adding, "while his out-of-practice hands were
fragile, his coordination, sense of pitch, and concentration were
awesome."
He seemed to pluck Mozart's melodies out of the air.
Arthur I. Miller, professor of the history and philosophy of science
at University College London, wrote "Empire of the Stars."
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