Shaena B. Weitz

While charting growth and success is a staple of music-historical and cultural research, this project examines decline and failure at the moment when the idea of musical “genius” crystallized in the early nineteenth century. It focuses on the deliberate reputational demolition of five celebrated composers, showing how negative press for these “greats” exploited cognitive biases and social prejudices via strategic media campaigns promoted by interested parties who needed to make room for new idols. At stake is how this pivotal historical moment created a media and celebrity ecosystem that collapsed attention into prestige, prejudice into valor, and rumor into news, manipulating cognition in ways that have not left us.