A famous composer is more likely to have written their best piece of music in their 20s than their 40s, and they’re almost twice as likely to have written their best piece in their 30s instead of their 50s.[8]
Nitpick: famous classical composers lived hundreds of years ago, and in several cases they were already dead before their 50s. As you can see from their table, Bellini died at 34, Bizet at 37, Chopin at 39, Mozart at 35, Mendelssohn at 38, Schumann at 46, and many of the others (like Donizetti, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven) did not arrive at age 60.
I expect that the effect size would be smaller if restricting the analysis to people who actually lived until old age (as a side note, I am also unconvinced that arbitrarily picking one piece of music as “the masterwork” from people who wrote dozens of famous pieces makes much sense).
The paper in question doesn’t do a survival analysis like it ought to for truncation, but it does note that
Table 1 shows that the average age of peak creativity is around 39 years. At the same time, for the 97 of the 99 composers who have died, the fraction of their life span when they created their best work is in the range 0.60 to 0.62.
It would be difficult for mortality bias to meaningfully affect the numbers given that most of them do seem to far outlive their best work.
Nitpick: famous classical composers lived hundreds of years ago, and in several cases they were already dead before their 50s. As you can see from their table, Bellini died at 34, Bizet at 37, Chopin at 39, Mozart at 35, Mendelssohn at 38, Schumann at 46, and many of the others (like Donizetti, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven) did not arrive at age 60.
I expect that the effect size would be smaller if restricting the analysis to people who actually lived until old age (as a side note, I am also unconvinced that arbitrarily picking one piece of music as “the masterwork” from people who wrote dozens of famous pieces makes much sense).
The paper in question doesn’t do a survival analysis like it ought to for truncation, but it does note that
It would be difficult for mortality bias to meaningfully affect the numbers given that most of them do seem to far outlive their best work.