Bob Draper writes:

>It is tedious for me to keep putting in criticisms of the man.  But the
>subject is always raised by others here first.  I just respond.

That is not the way it appears to me.  You seem obsessed.  I don't remember
any communications of the "Mozart is our deity, Haydn is the pits" variety.

>Even a few of the Mozart fans here are admitting that the admiration goes
>far beyond common sense.  I would be the first to concede that 20-30 of
>the early Haydn symphonies aren't up to much.  But some people would have
>us believe that Mozart is a deity.  I'll never buy that.

You cannot let go of this Haydn - Mozart thing.  Most folks love em both.

>I think that as a society the need for people to have heros and the
>manipulation of this fact by the media often leads to a blind faith
>far divorced from reality.  Einstein is another example of over the top
>adoration.  Just as he gets the credit for the work of Newton, Lorenz,
>Poincre, Minkovsky, Plank, Reinmann, Michelsohn and Fitzgerald so Mozart
>gets credit due to Haydn, CPE Bach, Handel and Gluck.

Einstein hardly gets the credit for Newton-his work was a sharp break with
Newtonian concepts of space and time.  Michelson was an experimentalist
who found that the ether was undetectable- Einstein cannot possibly get
the credit for that since he did no experiments as far as I know.  Poincare
and Plank are renown in their own right.  Reimann and Minkowski provided
mathematical tools.  Most of special relativity and all of general
relativity are due to Einstein, as well as his analysis of Brownian
Motion which clinched the existence of atoms.

But at least in Einstein's case science is a collective and communal
enterprise so it is reasonable to ask who did what.Mozart no doubt learned
from those mentioned composers- quite explicitly in the case of Haydn.
But so did Beethoven - that is the nature of the game.  But I don't believe
that any of those composers helped Mozart write the K 563 trio or Don
Giovanni or the viola quintets, or the K 491 piano concerto.  Correct me
if I am wrong.

>Also, I have often read that Mozart developed the symphony.  In
>the face of such intimidation is it little wonder I occassionally hit back?

Why do you make it so personal between you and Mozart? It is ridiculous.
And why does such an innocuous thing intimidate you? But enough - never
again will I waste time answering Bob.

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University