Aging & Wisdom Quote by Wendy Wasserstein

Perfection arrives early, and then it haunts you. Wendy Wasserstein’s line, “Because of Mozart, it’s all over after the age of seven,” isn’t really about music; it’s about the cultural cruelty of prodigy worship and the way genius gets turned into a measuring stick for ordinary lives. Mozart, the mythic child-composer, becomes shorthand for an impossible benchmark: if you weren’t astonishing before you lost your baby teeth, you’re already late to your own story.

The joke lands because it’s exaggerated but not absurd. Anyone raised around gifted programs, piano lessons, elite colleges, or status-obsessed families recognizes the quiet panic beneath it: the fear that value is front-loaded, that potential has an expiration date, that adulthood is mostly managing the disappointment of not being exceptional. Wasserstein’s wit does what her plays often do: it turns a private anxiety (am I enough?) into a social diagnosis (who taught us to grade ourselves this way?).

Context matters here. Writing in the late 20th century about ambition, class aspiration, and the pressures placed on smart women in particular, Wasserstein repeatedly skewered the polite institutions that hand out gold stars and then demand you keep shining forever. Mozart functions as cultural capital: a name that flatters the speaker’s sophistication while simultaneously bullying them. The line’s real target is a world that treats early promise as destiny and later growth as consolation prize.

It’s funny, then it stings: not because seven is truly the deadline, but because so many people live as if it were.