a t I o

in the West, the layman’s vision of the creative artist is largely bound in romantic notions of inspiration sacred or secular in origin. Images are plentiful; for example, a man standing tall on a cliff top, the wind blowing through his long hair, waiting for that particular iconoclastic idea to arrive through the ether.a Tales, some even true, of genii penning whole operas in a matter of days, further blur the reality of the usually slowly wrought process of composition. Mozart, with his celebrated speed of writing, is a famous example who to some extent fits the cliché, though perhaps not quite as well as legend would have it.b a I’m thinking in particular of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting From the Summit in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. b Mozart’s compositional process is complex and often misunderstood, complicated by myth, espe-cially regarding his now refuted ability to compose everything in his head15 and his own statement