Mozart, Partimento, and 'Everyone Knew Piano': What the Claim Actually Says
The real thesis is that genius was the far tail of a teachable, widely-shared craft — not that everyone knew piano or that music was as common as reading, which is the popular flattening and also anachronistic since the parlour piano is a 19th-century phenomenon. Partimento trained music-streamed children at specific conservatories plus fee-paying pupils, and was used by private masters everywhere. Plus the Amadeus film's fictions: Salieri taught Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt, and Mozart laboured over drafts.
Corrections around the "Mozart's genius was ordinary" claim, which is interesting and routinely flattened in retelling. ## What the claim actually says **The real thesis is that genius was the far tail of a teachable, widely-shared craft** — that improvising on common bass lines was a mark of basic professional fluency shared by many children now forgotten, not a supernatural gift. Robert Gjerdingen's *Music in the Galant Style* (2007) and *Child Composers in the Old Conservatories* (2020) are the scholarly source. **It is not the claim that everyone knew piano, or that music was as common as reading.** That is the popular flattening. It overstates the scope substantially, and it is worth noting that general reading literacy was not universal in the 1700s either, so the comparison would be weak even if it were accurate. **"Everyone knew piano" is also anachronistic.** Harpsichords and clavichords were expensive, and the keyboard-in-every-home picture is a 19th-century phenomenon driven by industrial piano manufacturing — a different era from Mozart's. See Amateur Musicianship in the 18th Century Versus Today. ## About the conservatories **Not all orphans were trained in partimento.** Four filters apply: only specific music-conservatories rather than every orphanage; only children streamed onto the music path within them, since these institutions trained children into many trades; not only orphans, since fee-paying pupils were admitted; and not only conservatories, since partimento was the general professional method used by private masters across Europe. See The Neapolitan Conservatories: Orphanages That Became Music Factories. **The narrowness of the pipeline says nothing about general musical participation.** This is the most common downstream error, and it pushes estimates too low as reliably as the popular version pushes them too high. See Elite Pipelines Tell You Nothing About Amateur Participation. ## About the Amadeus film The 1984 film is the source of most popular beliefs about Mozart and Salieri, and it is fiction — Peter Shaffer's play was never presented as history. **Salieri was not a mediocrity.** He was a successful, respected composer and an outstanding teacher whose students included Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt. **There is no evidence Salieri killed Mozart**, or attempted to. The rumour predates the play, and the play dramatises it rather than discovering it. **Mozart laboured over drafts.** The image of music arriving complete and transcribed without correction is contradicted by the surviving manuscripts, which show sketching and revision. The effortlessness is part of the myth the film trades on. **The march Mozart "improves" in the film is lifted from Mozart's own work** — the melody comes from *The Marriage of Figaro*, a joke for viewers who recognise it rather than a documented event. ## About spelling and attribution Mozart's English pupil was **Thomas Attwood** — two *t*s — who studied with him in Vienna in the mid-1780s and whose surviving exercise books are a valuable record of Mozart's teaching. Frequently rendered "Atwood". The Bolognese teacher and theorist was **Padre Giovanni Battista Martini**, who examined the young Mozart in 1770.