Some mistakes don’t come from a slip, but from habit. They are taught, repeated, rewarded. In the end they become “models”: they get applied to any repertory, even when they don’t work. And if they don’t work, so much the worse for the repertory.
This dossier is not a rant against academia, nor a collection of anecdotes. It is a practical reflection on a few rhetorical techniques that—in musicology and in popular writing—turn an opinion into certainty and a convenient category into historical truth.
The point is simple: in music history, without method and without sources, rhetoric takes the wheel. And when it drives, you always end up in the same place: myth, hierarchy, slogans.
The argument from authority: when “the books say so” replaces evidence
Argumentum ab auctoritate is the most profitable shortcut: instead of checking a fact, you invoke a name. In music it works brilliantly because the discipline lives on genealogies, “schools”, pantheons, and definitive lines that sound carved in stone.
The problem is that authority is not a property you can pass on like a noble title: someone can be right about A and talk nonsense about B. And above all: an authority can repeat an old mistake and make it eternal precisely because nobody puts it back to the test.
The symptom is always the same: instead of sources you get formulas like “it is well known that”, “everyone knows”, “it is universally acknowledged”. Translation: I’m not showing you the data, I’m asking for trust.
Ipse dixit: the sentence that ends research before it even begins
“He said it.” End of discussion. Ipse dixit is the perfect argument for anyone who wants to avoid the only thing that matters: verification.
This is where musical historiography often becomes a literature of quotations: comments on comments, bibliography on bibliography—while the primary source sits there, unread, uncontextualized, unmeasured.
Once this mechanism stabilizes, music stops being a historical object and becomes a pretext: it serves to confirm a story that was already written.
Case study: 1. “Für Elise” and the authority that cashes in
A perfect example of ipse dixit applied to mass culture is the story attributed to Ludwig Nohl: the claim that he copied Für Elise from a manuscript “later lost”, and the transformation of the piece into a global Beethoven icon. Even if the story is more complex, the methodological point stands: once the market and habit start moving, an attribution becomes almost irreversible.
Here the dominant fallacy is argumentum ad populum: everyone plays it, everyone studies it, so it must be so. Music “bears witness” in place of the source. And if the real document reappears with a different title, the world doesn’t change its mind: it already bought the ticket.
Case study: 2. “The Baroque runs from 1600 to 1750” (and nobody dares ask why)
A textbook example of a taught model that doesn’t hold up against repertories is the periodization “Baroque = 1600–1750”, often repeated as if it were a law of nature. In reality it is a convenient convention (above all didactic and commercial), which flattens huge differences among contexts, schools, genres, and geographical areas—and in other disciplines (art history and literature) it does not match the same chronological borders at all.
Here the fallacy is double: ipse dixit (an authoritative formula becomes the norm) and argumentum ad populum (widespread repetition makes it look “proven”). The result is that, instead of starting from sources and historical phenomena (styles, practices, institutions, musical economies), you start from the label and force the music to fit inside it. It is the opposite of method: first the box, then—if there’s room left—the content.
3) Groupthink: truth by acclamation
There is a collective variant of authority: “everyone says so.” It is argumentum ad populum, and in music it disguises itself well: “required” repertories, convenient periodizations, heroic narratives repeated until they seem natural.
The advantage of groupthink is psychological: it spares you the embarrassment of doubting. The disadvantage is historical: if everyone repeats the same sentence, it becomes almost impossible to ask “on what basis?”.
This is where the discipline of commonplaces is born: they aren’t false because someone invented them, but because nobody checks them anymore.
Case study: the “Miserere” and truth by acclamation
One of the longest-lived myths in music popularization is the claim that Mozart, as a teenager, heard Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel and then transcribed it in full from memory. The story is perfect: Rome, Holy Week, a Vatican secret, a prodigy. And that is precisely why it works so well—not because it is proven, but because it is irresistible.
Here the dominant rhetorical mechanism is argumentum ad populum, i.e., “truth by acclamation”: if many people repeat it, it becomes true. In reality, what is often mistaken for confirmation is just a chain of repetitions: one biography copies another, a textbook recycles the formula, and the frequency of the sentence replaces evidence.
The case is instructive because it also shows the other face of the same coin: ipse dixit. The legend leans on figures perceived as “authoritative” (Leopold, Schlichtegroll, then the biography attributed to Nissen but promoted by Constanze) and, once it enters that circuit, it gets reproduced without checks, as if nineteenth-century print were a notarial certificate.
But when you do what an investigation must do—return to sources and context—the construction starts to creak.
A German prince
Leopold Mozart, arriving in Rome after the celebrations had already begun, writes to his wife a report full of color and “miraculous” details: enormous crowds, armed Swiss Guards, watched doors—but also the ability to slip everywhere thanks to good clothes, German speech, and a comic-opera boldness. In the story Wolfgang is mistaken for a gentleman from beyond the Alps, even for a prince; the rented servant plays along; and, in a fairy-tale crescendo, the boy ends up between two cardinals and chats with Cardinal Pallavicini as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The staging is too perfect. And above all: it is too useful. It serves to build the image of an immediate triumph, of a “spontaneous” social elevation, and of a fame already consolidated. In other words: it is not only a story, it is a strategy of presentation.
The problem is that these details find no support in an independent contemporary chronicle, such as the Gazzetta di Mantova (20 April 1770), which describes the Holy Week functions, the papal blessing, the rite of the washing of the feet, and the presence of foreign nobility, but leaves no room for cardinals’ tables accessible to the public, nor for confidential conversations between cardinals and young “German princes” moving freely among chairs during rigidly controlled ceremonies.
This friction between a family narrative and a documentable context does not by itself prove falsehood, but it signals a key point: the primary source is embellishing facts to make them narratively and socially useful. And this is exactly where the Miserere legend is born: in an environment where biographical rhetoric has more value than checking.
The silence that matters: Burney and Rome
There is also a datum that, in an investigation, weighs more than many punchlines: the silence of independent sources. Charles Burney meets the Mozarts in Bologna on 30 August 1770 and talks at length with Leopold, but receives no triumphant story about the Miserere. Burney also knows the Roman environment well and stays in Rome for several days after the Mozarts’ passage, speaking with many people, including papal singers. If such an episode had truly spread “like wildfire” in the city, it would have been natural to find traces of it in his informational horizon. It does not happen.
The legend, instead, grows largely after the fact: Schlichtegroll relaunches it with scenic details (Mozart forced to intone the Miserere in an academy, accompanying himself at the harpsichord in front of the castrato Cristofori), and the biography attributed to Nissen—though effectively disseminated by Constanze—stabilizes it. At that point the story enters the nineteenth-century circuit of “exemplary lives” and becomes textbook material.
Musical plausibility is not optional
Another point, often ignored because it ruins the magic, is musical plausibility. Presenting as “proof” the idea that Mozart would have performed the Miserere at the keyboard in an academy amounts to misunderstanding the nature of the piece: a polyphonic composition tied to performance practices and extempore variants by the singers. Reducing it to a melodic line “to be played” means turning it into something else. This is not romantic debunking; it is simple musical logic.
What this case actually shows
The Miserere case does not show that “Mozart wasn’t good.” It shows something more useful for anyone doing history: how a fictitious fact is born. A family narrative already oriented toward promotion gets amplified by biographers chasing effect; the public adopts it because it is beautiful; and the accumulation of repetitions produces the illusion of evidence.
This is the typical shape of a systemic error: a narrative model that is “taught” and does not work on repertories and historical sources, yet continues to be repeated because it is convenient, sellable, memorable. The remedy is not a counter-myth. It is method: sources, context, control of citation chains, and a bit of hygiene against rhetoric.
4) Musical Dunning–Kruger: when ignorance disguises itself as competence
In music the phenomenon is everywhere: those who repeat the standard line tend to feel competent precisely because they sound like they “know the language.” Real competence, instead, is more inconvenient: it requires distinguishing, measuring, and saying “I don’t know” when you don’t.
The result is a paradox: those who really study often use more caution, while those who study less speak in absolutes. And absolutes, as we know, make for better theatre.
5) Ad hominem and poisoning the well: attacking the person to avoid the facts
When you cannot refute an argument, you try another road: discredit the person making it. That is ad hominem. Its preventive version is even more effective: “poisoning the well”, i.e., launching discredit before the work is even read.
It is an ancient technique, but today it has an accelerator: instant communication. You can destroy a reputation in two lines and then, with the same lightness, call it “criticism.”
In a serious context the rule should be banal: discuss the argument, not the birth certificate of whoever brings it.
6) The straw man: rewriting someone else’s claim to make it attackable
It is the most “theatrical” technique: you say one thing, your opponent builds a more extreme version and then fights that. The audience applauds because the show is clear. Pity it’s false.
The straw man is the natural enemy of any historical research: because research lives on nuance, context, and degrees of probability. The straw man, instead, lives on slogans: either black or white.
Case study: Riemann’s fake “Ugolino” and the copy-paste of experts
The most toxic case is when authority doesn’t merely err: it produces the “source.” The medieval treatise attributed to Magister Ugolino de Maltero was created out of thin air, published and commented on by Hugo Riemann to support his own theories, then taken up by scholars and institutions as an authentic document.
Here the fallacy is triple: ipse dixit (if Riemann publishes it, it’s true), institutional authority (if it enters theses, proceedings, and series, then it is “confirmed”), and finally the Texas sharpshooter: you build an interpretive target around selected—or fabricated—data until everything seems to fit. It is the point where musicology stops studying texts and starts writing them.
7) The burden of proof: the trap that mistakes habit for evidence
“It’s up to you to prove it isn’t true.” It sounds logical and yet it is often a trick: if a thesis is presented as “the standard version”, then anyone who doubts gets treated like a subversive who must justify himself.
But history works the other way around: whoever asserts must prove. And if the proof is “everyone says so”, it isn’t proof: it’s a choir.
Conclusion: less rhetoric, more workshop
Systemic errors are not corrected with another rhetoric. They are corrected with tools: reading sources, checking citation chains, comparing versions, contextualizing—and above all the willingness to change your mind when the data change the picture.
ItalianOpera exists for exactly this: to move the discussion from “people say” to “it can be shown.” Not to demolish for sport, but to make a music history practicable that isn’t mythology with footnotes.
