WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
The history of Western music, for those who love tidy compartments, can be divided into six recognizable periods: Mediaeval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. These labels are useful enough, as a rough guide to what went on. But they are, of course, inexact. They overlap, especially at turning-points. Should William Excestre, for instance, be catalogued as Late-Mediaeval or Early-Renaissance? And is Richard Strauss the last of the Romantics or the first of the Moderns or both? These questions are, in the end, futile. What matters is not whether an individual composer can be fitted into an arbitrary definition, but rather how an individual composition’s form and content can yield an insight into its intrinsic musical identity and, by implication, into the composer’s intentions and personality.
There sometimes emerges, from such scrutiny, a just appreciation of a composer’s whole body of work and an understanding of what that body of work stands for, what the composer set out to do and succeeded in doing. Whether one likes an individual composer more than another one is a matter of taste. But an objective account of the music can lay the groundwork for judgements that do not rely merely on taste.
Such judgements can sometimes be very succinctly expressed. A fine example, by a recent British writer, compared in thirty-one words three of the world’s most famous composers. “Beethoven,” he wrote, “tells us what it was like to be Beethoven. Mozart tells us what it is like to be human. Bach tells us what it is like to be the universe.”
While not everyone will instantly agree with the third of those sentences, no one surely will disagree with the first two. Beethoven was a towering genius, but his entire oeuvre was an inversion, an exploration of the Self. He helped found a culture that turned inward, that turned the artist into an Artist, and that spawned a creative tradition which was autobiographical, even confessional. The effect was lasting and extended far beyond artistic boundaries, into the lives and attitudes of the general populace: therapists’ offices nowadays are crowded with introspective neurotics, to whom the Journey of the Self is the be-all and end-all of the human condition. It is hard to imagine that Bach would have had any patience with such people: he would more likely have said something curt but pertinent, like “Grow up!”
Haydn and Mozart were the last two important representatives of the artist as artisan. Their extraordinary humanity does come through, marvellously, in their music. But they both were, essentially, just professionals plying a trade. Haydn was lucky to have an enlightened and generous patron, who gave him financial security and encouraged his work: in a lesser man, this might have caused complacency; in his case, it simply provided the basis for him to go on growing and developing his genius. Listeners ever since have loved his compositions, but not purely as artefacts: in them, they have encountered a lovable human being, warm-hearted, wise, good-humoured, witty, and expansive.
Mozart was less fortunate. As a professional, he knew what he was worth, but he was seldom paid what he was worth. For much of his life, he had to get by on sporadic commissions, he was often broke, and he died in poverty. Despite that, he struggled on, hand-to-mouth, and peddled his talent, indomitably, wherever he could find a buyer. None of this seems to have markedly affected the content of his work. If he was prone at all to self-pity, he confined that to his begging letters. As a composer, he just sat down at his desk and wrote down what was required: serenades for aristocratic entertainment, chamber pieces for musician friends, liturgical works for sundry churches, symphonies for various orchestras, operas for theatres in Vienna and Prague. In all this varied output, the enormous range of the man comes through. His commissioned entertainments are never merely workmanlike: they are inventive and filled with enthusiasm. His chamber music is a superb example of what that genre is about: a conversation between friends. His religious compositions are the product of a devout soul, humbly serving a cause greater than his own. His symphonic palette is complete: by turns, it is majestic, joyful, anguished, light-hearted, deadly serious, and surprising, but all these traits are passed through the filter of his professionalism; they are never tainted with the infantile posturing of the self-conscious, navel-gazing auteur, whose career amounts to no more than a voicing of “Hey, Ma, look at me!”. However, it is in his operas, most of all, that we encounter, overtly, the Mozart who “tells us what it is like to be human”.
All his mature operas, leaving aside his juvenilia, are thronged with people who come through, not as stereotypes, but as highly individual persons. Initial credit for this must go to the librettists, who gave Mozart the raw material to work on. But what is astonishing in the result is his ability to create music which, in each case, captures the personality of the character. This is everywhere evident: it is manifest in his lesser-known operas like “La Clemenza di Tito” and “Idomeneo” and “Die Entführung aus dem Serail”, and in his more often performed operas like “Die Zauberflöte” and “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte”; but it is supremely to be found in “Le Nozze di Figaro”, that most humane of all operas ever written. Who, hearing it, can ever forget the characters, can fail to think of them as people intimately known and touchingly portrayed? Returning to the score, as most listeners often do, is like meeting old friends — especially Count Almaviva and the Countess, Figaro and Susanna, and young Cherubino: but the minor characters, too; all of them as real as next-door neighbours. That Mozart could accomplish this is proof of a human empathy on a par with his huge musical gifts. That he accomplished it, most readily, in opera is proof of how he matured: for the little boy who astonished the world as a precocious instrumentalist had already composed two operas at the age of twelve, but both of them were quite conventional, dramatically; as a grown man, however, he clearly knew how to get inside the skin of men and women, young and old, and give them individual voices.
He was not the last of his kind. The Romantic Revolution may have lured composers into the decadent trap of Self-Expression. Some of them, though, continued to create extroverted operas in the Figaro tradition: Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, all three of them masters of characterization and all three, significantly, born and raised in the culture of Italy which, of all the cultures in Europe, is the most humane.
But Mozart is the master of them all.
