Forget ‘Amadeus’: Mozart revealed

‘MOZART! WHAT a radiance streams from the name! Bright and pure as the light of the sun, Mozart’s music greets us. We pronounce his name and behold! The youthful artist is before us – the merry, lighthearted smile upon his features, which belongs only to true and naive genius.”These are the opening words of “Mozart: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words,” published in 1905 by Friedrich Kerst.

And it gets worse. Kerst continues: “Mozart was a Child of the Sun. Filled with a humor truly divine, he strolled unconstrainedly through a multitude of cares. Music was his talisman, his magic flute with which he could exorcise all the petty terrors that beset him.”

What appalling balderdash – sentimental and plain wrong. It’s embarrassing merely to copy that out. But given that the Child of the Sun turns 250 today, be prepared for similar twaddle this year.

More nonsense has been written about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than almost any historical figure except Jesus Christ. Plenty made its way into film too, in the outrageously inaccurate “Amadeus” (1984), which fixed Mozart in the popular imagination as an uncouth idiot savant, at once genius and scatological boor – and at the same time unleashed a tidal wave of interest in his music.

Myths abounded about Mozart from the very start. Within a month of his death in December 1791 (at age 35), a Berlin paper published a rumor that he had been poisoned. Another suggestion was that he died from poverty because the jealous court composer Antonio Salieri deprived him of work. Some suggest he died for lack of tact – certainly, he had little gift for saying the right thing to influential people. And it’s true that he made many enemies.

But when he died, it was from rheumatic fever or heart failure, not poison or poverty. He was far from a pauper. Certainly, he had debts, but his fortunes had turned up again after several bad years owing to war with the Ottomans, recession and the death of the music-loving Hapsburg emperor, Joseph II.

The fictitious Mozart was introduced to the world by the first biography, Friedrich Schlichtegroll’s “Nekrolog” of 1793. This collection of anecdotes, bequeathed to posterity the myth of Mozart the eternal child who married unsuitably and against his father’s will, who was unable to manage money and lived in chaos.

He was repeatedly depicted through twin lenses: prodigy and prodigal. The child genius, composing at 5 and touring Europe, performing for royalty; a perpetual adolescent, reckless, incompetent at everything outside music.

All quite wrong, says conductor and musicologist Richard Divall. “He had a profound mind, spoke five or six languages

Every generation has admired Mozart, but some more than others and in different ways. The changing perceptions are themselves almost a small social history. His music has gone from “difficult” to “elegant” to “flowery,” “facile” and “feminine.” He has gone from untutored to consummate craftsman to the greatest genius of all, forming an artistic trinity with Shakespeare and Raphael.

The Romantic era, ushered in by Beethoven, sought to reinvent Mozart as a romantic, emphasizing his fire and imagination. The late 19th century took delight in his classicism – form and symmetry, perfection, order, restraint.

Divall says that it was in the 1850s that Mozart became widely revered, as Haydn went into oblivion. But his status fell in the early 20th century – he was considered too flowery, too Enlightenment. Beethoven was atop the pantheon, followed by Brahms.

His bicentenary in 1956 created a new surge of interest, with many works being recorded for the first time.

Today, many people find his music easy to listen to. But to conclude that Mozart’s music is either facile or simple is itself unforgivably facile. As pianist Artur Schnabel observed, Mozart is too easy for children and too difficult for artists. In Mozart, the sublime is often as linked to pain as beauty. In other words, his music is sometimes agonizingly beautiful; it makes the heart ache.

“It may be that when the angels go about their task of praising God, they play only Bach,” said the theologian Karl Barth. “I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart and that then, too, our dear Lord listens with special pleasure.”