February 1, 2026
Mozart, Beethoven, and the anxiety of influence
by René Spencer Saller
After hearing Mozart’s C-minor Piano Concerto for the first time, Beethoven supposedly exclaimed to a colleague, “We shall never be able to do anything like that!”
For many composers—and artists in general—the line between legacy and burden is blurry at best. What happens when a creative influence doesn’t inspire so much as inhibit? Harold Bloom wrote two books on the topic, The Anxiety of Influence and The Map of Misreading. In them, the late literary theorist argued that the strongest poets are the ones who misread their fearsome forebears, usually as a subconscious defense mechanism against the ego-corroding force of influence. This productive misunderstanding helps the strongest, most original poets protect their developing egos and reclaim their creative mojo. Replace “poet” with “composer,” and Bloom’s theory works equally well.
Bloom reframes the issue of influence in Freudian terms, but you don't need to review your Psych 101 notes to understand the related concept of ambivalence. Most of us know what it feels like to admire someone who makes us feel inferior by comparison—for me, if you must know, it's Jan Swafford and the late Michael Steinberg—so we get why the ego might develop defense strategies against this profuse admiration. Kill your idols, as the '80s punk slogan goes. It's never quite that easy, alas. Your idols might be dead already.
Story continues below...
For many composers—and artists in general—the line between legacy and burden is blurry at best. What happens when a creative influence doesn’t inspire so much as inhibit? Harold Bloom wrote two books on the topic, The Anxiety of Influence and The Map of Misreading. In them, the late literary theorist argued that the strongest poets are the ones who misread their fearsome forebears, usually as a subconscious defense mechanism against the ego-corroding force of influence. This productive misunderstanding helps the strongest, most original poets protect their developing egos and reclaim their creative mojo. Replace “poet” with “composer,” and Bloom’s theory works equally well.
Bloom reframes the issue of influence in Freudian terms, but you don't need to review your Psych 101 notes to understand the related concept of ambivalence. Most of us know what it feels like to admire someone who makes us feel inferior by comparison—for me, if you must know, it's Jan Swafford and the late Michael Steinberg—so we get why the ego might develop defense strategies against this profuse admiration. Kill your idols, as the '80s punk slogan goes. It's never quite that easy, alas. Your idols might be dead already.
Story continues below...
As a teenager in his native Bonn, Beethoven was urged by his patron Count Waldstein to make a pilgrimage to Vienna and “receive the spirit of Mozart at Haydn’s hands.” Although he dutifully complied, the pressure made him queasy. On the one hand, he wanted to enter the pantheon; on the other hand, he needed to assert his independence. Just as Beethoven’s looming presence would both inspire and inhibit his successors— “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” Schubert famously griped—Mozart provoked a similar ambivalence in Beethoven.
Although Beethoven pored over Mozart’s scores from early adolescence and would later study with Mozart’s mentor and champion, Joseph Haydn, no one knows whether Beethoven and Mozart actually met. Swafford, who wrote comprehensive biographies of both composers, believes that it’s possible, although most of their reported exchanges seem to be fabricated. Beethoven did take in some Mozart performances, both in Bonn and Vienna. But regardless of whether theirs was a literal or a purely parasocial relationship, the connection started during Beethoven’s childhood. Beethoven’s drunken wastrel of a father tried to transform himself from a small-time music instructor into Leopold Mozart, the consummate stage dad, while positioning the young Beethoven, who was about 14 years Mozart’s junior, as the hot new talent. Given expert guidance and instruction, the child might have been capable of taking on the prodigy circuit, but his father lacked Leopold’s entrepreneurial drive and discipline. Beethoven’s father seldom saw anything through, aside from the brutal beatings that he regularly inflicted on his children. He was a burden, not a provider.
Beethoven might not have been swanning around the continent and hobnobbing with royalty as a child and teenager, but he understood that he needed to sound as Beethovenian as Mozart sounded Mozartian. Paradoxically, he became most distinctively himself when he learned so much Mozart that he could channel him almost intuitively, improvise on his themes, lift his harmonic shifts, quote lines from his operas—the one form where Beethoven comes up short. (Don't fight me, Fidelio fans: I'm confident that Beethoven, who adored Die Zauberflöte, would agree.)
If the Bloomian or Freudian interpretation feels needlessly combative to you, you’re not alone. Some of us perceive creative influence as a source of joy, a way to converse and commune with formative paternal and (not that Bloom ever fully acknowledged them) maternal figures. Often the dynamic of influence seems less like a competition designed to vanquish and subjugate the problematic precursor and more like a posthumous collaboration. The most loving response to a work of art, or a sunset, or a child, or an ailing parent, is close attention. When we focus fully on another human being or on something created by another human being—large language models need not apply!—we escape the constraints of consciousness and time. Often, as Beethoven found in Mozart, we discover an ally, not an authority figure or a rival. Instead of punishment and endless one-upmanship, this form of influence offers sustenance and support.
We don’t need to kill our idols, or even maim or disfigure them. We can follow the lead of Beethoven, who undercut the occasional snippy comment—he allegedly told his student Carl Czerny that Mozart;s playing was fine but choppy, lacking any legato—with the only tribute he cared about, the musical kind. His many quotations from Mozart scores aren’t the main reason that music writers invariably refer to Beethoven’s Mozartian tendencies. Beethoven immersed himself so completely in Mozart’s sound world that he could recreate it in his own singular language. This degree of devotion is best described as love.
On a sketch in C minor from 1790, the year before Mozart’s premature death, Beethoven dashed off a note, to himself and to posterity: “This entire passage has been [inadvertently] stolen from the Mozart Symphony in C [“Linz”].” He then made a few minor adjustments to the passage before signing it “Beethoven himself.”
Whether Beethoven “misread” Mozart to enact his Mozartian magic is immaterial. For almost his entire life he was pitted against his near-contemporary, and people continued to compare them long after their respective deaths. We compulsively play the same dumb rhetorical games with different artificial binaries—Beatles vs. Stones, Kendrick vs. Drake, boxers vs. briefs—as if a fondness for one thing precludes appreciation of the other. Declaring our allegiance to Mozart instead of Beethoven, or vice versa, narrows our range of experience and deprives us of pleasure.
In his critical reappraisal of Beethoven, the late musicologist Richard Taruskin lamented what he called the “newly sacralized view of art” and blamed Beethoven for turning concert halls into museums or temples. He was right to question the Romantic myths surrounding Beethoven’s life and career, the overwhelming tendency to present his struggles as heroic, his suffering as unique and transcendent. But Taruskin also felt that Beethoven’s influence stifled his successors more than it freed them to pursue their own creative paths. Through no fault of his own, the fallible human being became a godlike authority, a scary dad, a mentor-cum-tormentor of future generations.
If you were expecting a sassy Taruskinesque takedown, sorry to disappoint. Although we do Mozart and Beethoven no favors when we turn them into distant unknowable gods, we also gain nothing by trashing them. Besides, if there’s anything sillier than worshiping the dead, it’s fighting the dead, or even defending them. The best will survive our blather. After all, they survived one another.
René Spencer Saller is a Contributing Writer for the San Francisco Symphony and the main program annotator for the Dallas Symphony. She has also written for the St. Louis Symphony and Tippet Rise Art Center.
Although Beethoven pored over Mozart’s scores from early adolescence and would later study with Mozart’s mentor and champion, Joseph Haydn, no one knows whether Beethoven and Mozart actually met. Swafford, who wrote comprehensive biographies of both composers, believes that it’s possible, although most of their reported exchanges seem to be fabricated. Beethoven did take in some Mozart performances, both in Bonn and Vienna. But regardless of whether theirs was a literal or a purely parasocial relationship, the connection started during Beethoven’s childhood. Beethoven’s drunken wastrel of a father tried to transform himself from a small-time music instructor into Leopold Mozart, the consummate stage dad, while positioning the young Beethoven, who was about 14 years Mozart’s junior, as the hot new talent. Given expert guidance and instruction, the child might have been capable of taking on the prodigy circuit, but his father lacked Leopold’s entrepreneurial drive and discipline. Beethoven’s father seldom saw anything through, aside from the brutal beatings that he regularly inflicted on his children. He was a burden, not a provider.
Beethoven might not have been swanning around the continent and hobnobbing with royalty as a child and teenager, but he understood that he needed to sound as Beethovenian as Mozart sounded Mozartian. Paradoxically, he became most distinctively himself when he learned so much Mozart that he could channel him almost intuitively, improvise on his themes, lift his harmonic shifts, quote lines from his operas—the one form where Beethoven comes up short. (Don't fight me, Fidelio fans: I'm confident that Beethoven, who adored Die Zauberflöte, would agree.)
If the Bloomian or Freudian interpretation feels needlessly combative to you, you’re not alone. Some of us perceive creative influence as a source of joy, a way to converse and commune with formative paternal and (not that Bloom ever fully acknowledged them) maternal figures. Often the dynamic of influence seems less like a competition designed to vanquish and subjugate the problematic precursor and more like a posthumous collaboration. The most loving response to a work of art, or a sunset, or a child, or an ailing parent, is close attention. When we focus fully on another human being or on something created by another human being—large language models need not apply!—we escape the constraints of consciousness and time. Often, as Beethoven found in Mozart, we discover an ally, not an authority figure or a rival. Instead of punishment and endless one-upmanship, this form of influence offers sustenance and support.
We don’t need to kill our idols, or even maim or disfigure them. We can follow the lead of Beethoven, who undercut the occasional snippy comment—he allegedly told his student Carl Czerny that Mozart;s playing was fine but choppy, lacking any legato—with the only tribute he cared about, the musical kind. His many quotations from Mozart scores aren’t the main reason that music writers invariably refer to Beethoven’s Mozartian tendencies. Beethoven immersed himself so completely in Mozart’s sound world that he could recreate it in his own singular language. This degree of devotion is best described as love.
On a sketch in C minor from 1790, the year before Mozart’s premature death, Beethoven dashed off a note, to himself and to posterity: “This entire passage has been [inadvertently] stolen from the Mozart Symphony in C [“Linz”].” He then made a few minor adjustments to the passage before signing it “Beethoven himself.”
Whether Beethoven “misread” Mozart to enact his Mozartian magic is immaterial. For almost his entire life he was pitted against his near-contemporary, and people continued to compare them long after their respective deaths. We compulsively play the same dumb rhetorical games with different artificial binaries—Beatles vs. Stones, Kendrick vs. Drake, boxers vs. briefs—as if a fondness for one thing precludes appreciation of the other. Declaring our allegiance to Mozart instead of Beethoven, or vice versa, narrows our range of experience and deprives us of pleasure.
In his critical reappraisal of Beethoven, the late musicologist Richard Taruskin lamented what he called the “newly sacralized view of art” and blamed Beethoven for turning concert halls into museums or temples. He was right to question the Romantic myths surrounding Beethoven’s life and career, the overwhelming tendency to present his struggles as heroic, his suffering as unique and transcendent. But Taruskin also felt that Beethoven’s influence stifled his successors more than it freed them to pursue their own creative paths. Through no fault of his own, the fallible human being became a godlike authority, a scary dad, a mentor-cum-tormentor of future generations.
If you were expecting a sassy Taruskinesque takedown, sorry to disappoint. Although we do Mozart and Beethoven no favors when we turn them into distant unknowable gods, we also gain nothing by trashing them. Besides, if there’s anything sillier than worshiping the dead, it’s fighting the dead, or even defending them. The best will survive our blather. After all, they survived one another.
René Spencer Saller is a Contributing Writer for the San Francisco Symphony and the main program annotator for the Dallas Symphony. She has also written for the St. Louis Symphony and Tippet Rise Art Center.
