I have long had a love of classical music, starting when I was in the orchestra in junior high school. I learned to play the cello when I was 12 and I my love for classical music grew from there. I always enjoy attending concerts with the local Philharmonic whenever the opportunity arises. I also have a collection of classical music on Amazon.
Every once in awhile, I come across a book about a composer and I always check it out to read about their life.
Biographies of composers are a relatively recent genre; those of Mozart were among the first examples. Mozart was, from his early years, an international celebrity whose very personality posed questions beyond the eternal riddle of creativity. How could a mere child - he started performing publicly on the clavichord at the age of six - be so astoundingly versatile? As he toured Europe, going from court to court and salon to salon with his father, Leopold, and his older sister, Maria Anna - a talented musician as well - the delightful little boy in his nattily embroidered outfits enchanted his listeners, readily obliging them with requests, however crass: now playing with the keys covered, now with only one finger, to delighted applause.
All this technical skill and musical inventiveness appeared to be self-taught, a somewhat counterintuitive notion. But the six-year-old Mozart turns out to be smarter than his elders. In one story, his father comes home to find that the boy has tried to compose music. The notation on the page appears to be a blotchy blur, but on close examination it proves to be perfectly sound musically. On another occasion the boy asks a famous violinist why his instrument is mistuned by a quarter tone. The violinist pooh-poohs him; the instrument is brought forth, and Mozart is found to be right.
Their father immediately grasped the marketability of both Wolfgang and Maria Anna and whisked them off on tour in the fullest possible glare of publicity. On May 17, 1764, just three months after Wolfgang’s eighth birthday, the readers of London’s The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser read an announcement of the forthcoming appearance of the greatest Prodigy that Europe or that even Human Nature has to boast of.
He had his detractors.
It was on that visit to London that the boy, confined to their digs while his father recovered from a throat infection, wrote his first, slight, but highly accomplished symphony, quickly following it with a second and third; he had already written a set of violin sonatas, much admired.
He never ceased, almost to the end of his short life - he died at 35 - to be a peerless performer and an astonishing improviser, but as he grew older his compositional genius began to assert itself. At 14 he wrote the opera seria Mitridate, re di Ponto, and at 16, Lucio Silla, very ambitious and very long - three and a half hours of music. After being eclipsed for many decades by the later operas, both are now regularly performed.
Mozart’s early biographers had limited access to information about his touring years as well as the last 10 years of his life in Vienna. Le nozze di Figaro was embraced in 1786 after its less than rapturous initial reception in Vienna and Don Giovanni had its triumphant premiere in 1787.
Curiosity about the life of the unaccountable genius was growing.
The English musical essayist Edward Holmes had in 1845 produced the first coherent and thoroughly researched life of Mozart.
The Romantic sense of Mozart as emblematic of the doomed artist was by then already well established. Even at the time of his death, the curious circumstances of the anonymous commission of a Requiem Mass, left incomplete on his deathbed, became the subject of stories that he believed himself to be writing his own requiem. Not much later, sensational rumors that he might have been poisoned by the composer Antonio Salieri, his Viennese rival, made the rounds. In 1825 Alexander Pushkin, in political exile on his mother’s estate, became fascinated by newly revived rumors that some years after Salieri attempted to kill himself, he confessed to murdering Mozart.
From then on, Mozart belonged as much to the dramatist and the poet as to the musicologist.
The 19th-century view of Mozart was increasingly one of a huge talent tragically snatched away from the world when it had only begun to come into its own.
After World War II, in both Britain and in America there was a new curiosity about forgotten performance practices, whose discovery seemed to strip layers of varnish from 17th- and 18th-century music in particular. In addition, a fuller probing of the theatrical potential of the operas of Handel and Mozart revealed unsuspected depths and dimensions in them.
What is most extraordinary about Mozart’s style is the combination of physical delight - a sensuous play of sonority, an indulgence in the most luscious harmonic sequences - with a purity and economy of line and form that render the seduction all the more efficient. It is only through recognizing the violence and the sensuality at the center of Mozart’s work that we can make a start toward a comprehension of his structures and an insight into his magnificence.
Into this ferment of Mozartean exploration, Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus exploded like a hand grenade in 1979. Mozart was not, at that time, particularly present in the minds - or indeed the ears - of most theatergoers. For the general public, Mozart was a rococo figure, his music tasteful, pretty, harmless: if you had heard Eine kleine Nachtmusik you would have pretty well gotten the measure of him.
The Mozart literature is vast, a mighty corpus of scholarship, an Aladdin’s cave of research, a great collective attempt to reveal this most extraordinary of composers in all his many facets, both as a quintessential figure of his time and a unique and utterly original individual.
Europe was wavering on the brink of the modern world, and Mozart became the key artist of the modern world because his music was so richly fired by so many of the factors and energies at work in this process.
At the end of the 19th century Wagner was held to be the quintessential artist of the modern world and Beethoven lauded as a revolutionary, Mozart, not so often. Mozart was the sharpest analyst of this world, and his music lets us listen in to the heartbeat and the brainwaves of modern experience in the throes of its emergence. There is more to Mozart than meets the ear. Thinking more deeply about the world in which he worked should also change how we hear his music; our ears should open to more of what those beautiful sounds chase after.
Mozart was as unaccommodating as Beethoven, and the sheer physical beauty, prettiness, even, of so much of what he composed masks the uncompromising character of his art. It cannot be fully appreciated without recalling the uneasiness and even dismay that it so often evoked in its time, and without recreating in our own minds the conditions in which it could still seem dangerous.
Maybe the shock of his mother’s death came not so much from the pain of her loss as from the fact that it had happened just as he was bracing himself for the seriousness and solitude that his creative identity would bring. Hereafter a side of him would be alone with his art, pressed up with it against the losses and promises of a modern world.
Mozart’s acceptance of the scale of his own talent set him apart from even those closest to him.
The Enlightenment - its aspirations, its contradictions, and its limitations - is almost a secondary character in the book, the increasingly unstable intellectual environment in which Mozart functioned.
One reason to keep calling Mozart a classical composer in the widest sense is that his flights and expansions keep arching back towards comprehensiveness and coherence.
Mozart’s finest concertos and symphonies can reveal themselves as brilliantly flexible narratives of errancy and homecoming, can amount indeed to existential allegories of the fates of psyches and societies pitched into change.
Mozart’s voracity toward the past of the art, and also its present possibilities, powers the openness that threw his music into the future. His oeuvre bulges with ways of being both brilliantly and creatively unoriginal, of adapting or siphoning or twisting the music or projects of others; it can feel as if we were listening to hearing itself taken to a maximum level of hunger and creativity.
The vivid ardour of Mozart’s requiem is built to survive on the darkening historical terrain that was coming. The sweet decorative glee of the 18th century has been purged almost wholly from the requiem, right at the same time as it drains from history. But the music does not pause to regret what it jettisons, because its commitment is to the passionate artistic adventurousness that it safeguards and extends even as it does so. The weather in Vienna late in 1791 was especially awful. As the nights lengthened around Mozart’s dim apartment, he was composing something that would move beyond the ambiguities of his world and his situation precisely by grasping them so deeply.
In the end there is only love. As it always did in the end for Mozart, love reigns, a love of hearts and minds and bodies.
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