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Mint
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Lessons from history's most notorious procrastinators: How delay became genius
Samiran Ghosh From Mozart, Darwin and Victor Hugo to Douglas Adams, Kafka and Einstein, the great procrastination stories of history reveal that working with our tendencies often proves more effective than fighting them. Procrastination and genius often go hand in hand. Gift this article On 28 October 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sat drinking with friends when someone reminded him about a missing overture. The premiere of Don Giovanni was hours away. Mozart calmly sat down at midnight and composed the entire piece in three hours while his wife kept him awake with stories. The orchestra played it brilliantly, and the audiences loved it, never knowing how close they came to having no overture at all. On 28 October 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sat drinking with friends when someone reminded him about a missing overture. The premiere of Don Giovanni was hours away. Mozart calmly sat down at midnight and composed the entire piece in three hours while his wife kept him awake with stories. The orchestra played it brilliantly, and the audiences loved it, never knowing how close they came to having no overture at all. This midnight miracle captures a simple truth: procrastination and genius often go hand in hand. Throughout history, humanity's greatest minds have turned delay into creative strategy, producing masterpieces under extreme pressure or using strategic postponement to enhance their work. Far from being a character flaw, procrastination, when properly channelled, can fuel extraordinary achievement. Procrastination as strategic patience: The Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus earned immortality through calculated delay. Facing Hannibal's seemingly invincible forces, Fabius refused direct engagement, instead retreating and harassing, earning the nickname Cunctator (The Delayer). His apparent cowardice saved Rome, giving rise to the 'Fabian strategy' that is studied and quoted throughout military history. This art of purposeful delay reached its zenith during Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. General Mikhail Kutuzov's refusal to give Napoleon the decisive battle he craved cost the French 500,000 casualties. By transforming Russia's winter and vast distances into a weapon via strategic retreats and delaying tactics, Kutuzov destroyed the Grande Armée without significant engagement. Charles Darwin elevated scientific procrastination to similar strategic heights. After developing his theory of evolution in the late 1830s, Darwin spent two decades studying barnacles so thoroughly that his children assumed every household kept pickled specimens. Only when Alfred Wallace threatened to publish a similar theory did Darwin rush On the Origin of Species to print. He later claimed he "gained much by my delay" – the extended timeline had allowed him to gather evidence that made his arguments unassailable. Also Read: Confidently wrong: Why AI is so exasperatingly human-like Deadline pressure as creative fuel: While some procrastinators benefit from patience, others transform last-minute panic into creative lightning. Frank Lloyd Wright's legendary procrastination produced architecture's most celebrated moment. After assuring client Edgar Kaufmann for months that Fallingwater's designs were progressing, Wright had drawn nothing when Kaufmann announced a visit. As the client drove 140 miles from Pittsburgh, Wright calmly finished breakfast, then designed the complete house in two hours. The resulting masterpiece became one of the 20th century's most celebrated buildings. Victor Hugo weaponized deadline pressure through extreme measures. Facing penalties for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Hugo locked away all his clothes and purchased only a grey shawl, effectively imprisoning himself at home. His wife noted he "entered his novel as if it were a prison," working from dusk till dawn. The method succeeded. Hugo finished two weeks before the deadline. Douglas Adams, patron saint of procrastinating writers, became so notorious that his editor locked him in a hotel suite for three weeks to force completion of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Adams loved deadlines for "the whooshing noise they make as they go by," yet this pressure-cooker method produced beloved works that might never have existed under comfortable conditions. Systematic procrastination as process: Some geniuses transformed procrastination into sophisticated creative systems. Franz Kafka's elaborate daily routine appeared inefficient—he would finish work at 2:30pm, then eat, nap for four hours, exercise naked at an open window, walk, dine with his family, and begin writing only around 11:30pm. A significant amount of 'writing time' was devoted to letters rather than creative work. Yet this seemingly wasteful process produced literature's most influential works. Leonardo da Vinci justified his legendary delays philosophically, telling patrons that "men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least." The Mona Lisa took 16 years; he abandoned The Adoration of the Magi entirely; his bronze horse monument never materialised after 12 years of promises. Yet his procrastination allowed cross-pollination between disciplines—engineering insights informing art, artistic observation enhancing scientific study. In Bengal, procrastination became a cultural practice through 'adda'—lengthy, meandering conversations over tea that outsiders dismiss as idle gossip. These sessions sparked the Bengal Renaissance, literary movements and independence struggles. What appears as collective procrastination often masks deep intellectual work, proving that apparent idleness can conceal the mind's most profound labour. Albert Einstein's transformation from a procrastinating patent clerk to revolutionary physicist demonstrates how systematic approaches can harness delay productively. Unable to secure academic positions due to his reputation for laziness, Einstein found that the routine patent work provided ideal conditions for deep thinking. His 1905 'miracle year' demonstrated that chronic procrastinators can transform their habits without altering their nature. Modern evolution: Today's creative professionals have reframed procrastination from a shameful secret to an acknowledged process. Tim Urban's TED talk on the 'Instant Gratification Monkey' drew 70 million views by normalising procrastination as a universal human experience. Steve Jobs demonstrated 'strategic procrastination,' deliberately delaying decisions while taking long walks to let ideas percolate. Research by organisational psychologist Adam Grant reveals that moderate procrastinators often produce the most creative work, occupying a sweet spot between impulsive action and chaotic delay. History's procrastinators reveal that working with our tendencies often proves more effective than fighting them. Whether it's a general refusing to go to battle until conditions favour victory, an architect designing masterpieces in two hours, or a culture institutionalising contemplative delay, procrastination becomes powerful when transformed from weakness into strategy. The key is not to eliminate procrastination, but to understand it and create systems that channel delay into genius. The author is a technology advisor and podcast host. Topics You May Be Interested In
San Francisco Chronicle
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: Esa-Pekka Salonen's next-to-last S.F. Symphony concerts promise renewal
Composer Gabriella Smith knows how to make a lasting impression. Her organ concerto ' Breathing Forests ' was a highlight of the San Francisco Symphony's 2023-24 season, a work of tremendous power and originality. Smith is back with a Symphony commission called 'Rewilding,' a paean to birds, insects and the process of returning the Earth to its natural state by undoing human damage and disruption. The 33-year-old Berkeley native has been dedicated to environmental concerns since her high school days, and these issues are major sources of inspiration for her music. 'Rewilding' had its world premiere on Friday, June 6, at Davies Symphony Hall on a program conducted by outgoing Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The audience's enthusiasm for Salonen overmatched the poignancy of his impending departure. Before the performance, Smith talked about her work in ecological restoration, most recently on a project to rewild a former military runway in Seattle. She cited the failure of current politicians to address the climate crisis but ended on a message of hope. 'There are people all around (you) who are taking action,' she said Like 'Breathing Forests,' 'Rewilding' is a work of startling inventiveness, a cascade of astonishing sounds unfolding over about 25 minutes. Smith's music has an immense sonic palette, owing not only to her expressive skill with orchestration but also her penchant for unusual instrumentation. Bicycle frames, unshelled walnuts, metal mixing bowls, water bottles, twigs and branches are some of the everyday objects put to musical use. In Smith's orchestra, you can't always tell where a particular sound is coming from. Strings slither from one note to the next while the winds bend their pitches, clouding the texture for the sake of achieving a particular color. 'Rewilding' may incorporate certain minimalist techniques — and the score introduces an element of chance by instructing the strings to play out of sync with each other — but the music's scope and riotous colors are anything but minimal or random, even if the structure isn't always clear. The orchestra hummed, buzzed and yipped with the imagined sounds of insects, birds and maybe even canines. Popping noises arose, frogs ribbitted, a chorus of woodpeckers went wild. The sonorities pass from one group of instruments to another, thickening, bubbling, thinning out. 'Rewilding' builds, fades, builds again. A high-pitched section gives way to the lower strings and then to massed brass. After the last fade-out, you hear only bicycle wheels turning. Listeners curious about where Smith will go next can get another peek into her imagination next April, when she's scheduled to curate a pair of SoundBox concerts for the Symphony. Salonen opened the evening with a swift, sometimes very loud account of Richard Strauss' early tone poem 'Don Juan' — the same titular libertine who inspired Mozart's 'Don Giovanni.' In under 20 minutes, Strauss' vivid scene-setting does nearly as much with the character as that three-hour opera does. The performance was a blazing display of the orchestra's virtuosity, starting with the sleekly lustrous strings and trumpets. Highlights included principal oboe Eugene Izotov's lyrical solo and his interplay with principal clarinet Carey Bell and principal bassoon Joshua Elmore. And then there was the brilliant horn section, led by guest Daniel Hawkins, a former member of the orchestra and now principal horn of the Dallas Symphony. Hawkins and company took charge in 'Don Juan' and in the program's concluding selection, 'Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks,' also by Strauss. If you've ever wondered whether music can be sarcastic, this is the place to look for it. Salonen's interpretation had all the wit and cheek required. Alexander Barantschik nimbly dispatched the brief violin solo, and Matthew Griffith shone on E-flat clarinet. The evening also included Jean Sibelius ' mysterious Symphony No. 7, the Finnish composer's final completed work in that form. (Sibelius is believed to have labored for some years over an Eighth Symphony, burning whatever existed of the score sometime in the 1940s.) Brooding, monumental and yet compact — consisting of only a single 20-minute movement — the Seventh, like other Sibelius works, implies a vast physical and spiritual landscape. Salonen led the music with solemn grandeur, shaping it firmly.
New York Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With a Different Ending, ‘Don Giovanni' Becomes a Requiem
Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov's new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart's 'Don Giovanni' and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. 'Here,' it says, 'the dead teach the living.' At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. 'It's a requiem,' Serebrennikov said in an interview, 'for all of us.' His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of 'Don Giovanni,' a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem. That work was left unfinished at Mozart's death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni's soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites. 'The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,' Serebrennikov said. 'It was written, like 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead,' not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.' Serebrennikov's production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni's funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a 'dramma giocoso': 'funny tragedy,' Serebrennikov said, 'the mixture of all genres, all intentions.' Hubert Zapior, who sings the title role, said in an interview that the process of working on a Serebrennikov show involves 'struggle' against preconceptions and the expected. The reward, he said, is getting to 'make the character new, and interesting, giving it a whole new quality.' James Gaffigan, who took up the music directorship of the Komische Oper in 2023, said, 'I never would have taken this job at this house if I didn't like these sorts of things.' Referring to the liberties the production takes with 'Don Giovanni,' he added: 'Would I choose to do it all the time? Not necessarily. But when you have someone as brilliant as Kirill, I want to make this work.' (As if to illustrate the point, Gaffigan's office is decorated with a large red neon sign that says 'Yes.') Serebrennikov sought to broaden Don Giovanni's tastes as a seducer. To that end, Donna Elvira has been transformed into Don Elviro, sung by the male soprano Bruno de Sá. That role, a character often written off as a harridan, requires ferocious energy and includes both sustained high singing in two enormously difficult solo arias as well as low notes in ensemble singing. 'It's a weird range for any soprano, or mezzo-soprano,' de Sá said. 'But I think I've never had this deep a connection with a character. He's so misunderstood. He just has a broken heart.' In a traditional production, de Sá would readily go on as Elvira in drag, the way that mezzo-sopranos strap down their chests to play trouser roles. 'But the fact that it's a man in this show brings something else,' he said. The Catalog Aria, in which a mourning Elvira learns from Leporello about his master's many conquests, 'becomes a whole different universe.' 'But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if it's a man, or a woman, or a trans person,' he added. 'Human emotions are always there.' Gaffigan said that the idea works for the opera. 'How great is it that Don Giovanni's not just seducing women, he's seducing everyone?' he said. 'This is not a check box to say, 'Let's do something crazy.'' Critics have mostly agreed. In Die Deutsche Bühne, Joachim Lange described the 'casually irreverent creativity' of Serebrennikov and the production, writing that the show 'sounds more cerebral than it appears onstage' and that 'Serebrennikov manages to tease out the humor of the whole thing in almost every scene.' Ulrich Lange, writing in the Tagesspiegel, praised de Sá's 'heart-piercing' singing and the orchestra's 'sharp Mozart sound.' The Komische Oper, predicated like all repertory companies on the uneasy relationship between the living and the dead, is on track to sell 92 percent of its tickets this season, an enviable figure for any house. In 2024, it was named Opera House of the Year at the International Opera Awards in Munich. But the state of Berlin, which is the house's largest funder by far, is sharply cutting culture spending, threatening the ongoing renovation of the company's longtime home theater and its annual operating budget. This season, those cuts have already led to the cancellation of one premiere, of an East German operetta adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest.' In Serebrennikov's production, Leporello holds up a sign in the second act of 'Don Giovanni' dryly noting that a tenor's aria 'was unfortunately cut due to the slashing of Berlin's culture budget.' On opening night, audience members cheered and applauded. 'We're not safe in any way, shape or form,' Gaffigan said. 'We're fighting for our survival. From year to year, we don't know what's going to happen.' In an emailed statement in German, Christopher Suss, a spokesman for the city's cultural department, said that 'there will be no halt to construction' on the house's renovation project and emphasized that 'the closure of this unique opera house is out of the question.' He wouldn't comment on further cuts because the city's budget is in the process of being negotiated. On Friday, Berlin's top culture politician, Joe Chialo, resigned his post; his resignation letter laid out his opposition to forthcoming planned cuts that, he warned, would 'lead to the imminent closure of nationally renowned cultural institutions.' 'I have never seen anything like it, where a company is doing so well, and we're terrified for our own existence,' Gaffigan said. 'Doing as well as we are doing, I thought the Komische Oper would always be there. And one night you wake up and realize, 'Maybe not.''
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
Austria Pavilion: Composing the Future
The theme for this pavilion is Composing the Future, which is highly appropriate for this land of music. The design, with its spiral rising up to the sky, represents a musical score. One highlight is a replica of the grand piano Emperor, presented to Emperor Meiji at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, symbolizing the bond between Austria and Japan. Moreover, depicting the future of music, visitors can compose music using AI and enjoy remote piano performances. In May, the pavilion will be filled with music with performances by the Vienna Boys' Choir, along with pieces from Mozart's violin concertos played on his favorite concert violin, and a splendid production of the opera Don Giovanni . Local cuisine, including the traditional meat dish Schnitzel and buttery Kaiserschmarrn pancakes, can be enjoyed too. The Austria pavilion is located in the Empowering Lives zone. ( See the official map for details.) Austria marks its national day on Friday, May 23, at the Expo National Day Hall. Another view of the pavilion spiral. (© ) (Originally published in Japanese. Reporting and text by Uchiyama Ken'ichi and Photographic assistance by Kuroiwa Masakazu of 96-Box. Banner photo © .)
Forbes
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Met Opera's 'Le Nozze di Figaro' Star Federica Lombardi Talks Travel and Opera
'Le Nozze di Figaro' Star Federica Lombardi Evan Zimmerman/ Met Opera Italian soprano Federica Lombardi stars as Countess Almaviva in the Metropolitan Opera's 'Le Nozze di Figaro' , streaming Live in HD to cinemas around the world on Saturday, April 26 at 1PM ET. Hailing from Cesena, Italy, located in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, Federica made her Met debut as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni in 2019. Currently praised as one of the most sought-after Mozartians, she is right at home singing in Le Nozze di Figaro at the Met. At the Met, Federica has also performed as Musetta and Mimì in La Bohème, Elettra in Idomeneo, and Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. In February of 2025, Federica took on the title role in Vienna's new production of Norma. Next season at the Met, she will return to again sing the role of Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. I interviewed the Mozart-pro recently about her favorite spot in Rome, her pre-performance ritual, and more, below. My favorite opera that's not my own is… 'Tosca.' It has everything! Drama, passion, and Puccini's music is glorious! 'Not my own' for now…I would love to be Tosca one day! My pre-performance ritual is… I need a few minutes completely alone. I breathe, I focus, and I remind myself why I love this so much. After a performance, I… Take off my makeup as fast as I can, change into something cozy, and eat something good! My favorite kind of operagoer (does what)… Listens with their heart. You can feel when someone is really, truly present—it gives you energy on stage. The best piece of career advice I've gotten is… 'Never settle.' Always keep growing, and remember to keep learning. Remind yourself that there is no finish line in this career. Get the most out of an opera by… Listening with your ears and your eyes. Watch the singers' faces, the small gestures, the atmosphere —opera is theatre, just get completely involved. My must-have travel item is… My humidifier! It saves my voice when it's too dry. My preferred way to destress is to… Take a long walk, ideally in nature or a quiet city street, with good music in my ears. The destination I love to travel to most for work is… Vienna! There is a special magic in the air there. Vienna has such tradition and beauty. Also New York of course! The Met is something unique to me, I love the atmosphere in the theater. It's an extremely professional experience and the audience is amazing! My favorite travel destination for vacation, not work is… Anywhere by the sea in Italy. I need sun, good food, and the sound of waves. My favorite restaurant is…where I can find a good pizza! My favorite spot in Rome is… The Orange Garden, located on the Aventine Hill. It has amazing views, and that silence—pure magic.
