Eine Kleine Rap-Musik : ON MOZART: A Paean for Wolfgang, <i> By Anthony Burgess (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; 160 pp.)</i>

Anthony Burgess is a funster, an imp of the print. Like Robin Goodfellow, he stands, feet astride, arms akimbo, laughing at us and with us and all around us. We are his opera buffa . Burgess is a renaissance man--a bird much mistrusted in these parlous times--now writing fiction, now nonfiction, now children’s stories, now translating Cyrano and Oedipus, and also tucking us in comfy with “Coaching Days of England.”

And all the while he makes much music (before becoming a writer he was a professional musician). He’s a consummate chin-wagger off the page, too, reveling, even rolling, in words: On British TV he’s always popping up to opine on everything--eyes blazing with merriment, hair pulled artfully across his balding pate like constipated clouds on a pasty-faced globe. Today’s world, thuddingly prosaic, needs characters like Anthony Burgess.

In “A Clockwork Orange” (1962, pre-Beatle), he presaged the mindless violence and the virtual illiteracy of today. His teen-age gang-bangers spoke a lingo of their own. In “Joysprick,” he led us gently through the language of James Joyce, another lingo inventor. Now, in his autumn years, he shows there’s no lack of esprit-sprick in this old Puck.

“On Mozart” is described on the cover as “A Paean for Wolfgang” and, further: “Being a celestial colloquy, an opera libretto, a film script, a schizophrenic dialogue, a bewildered rumination, a Stendhalian transcription, and a heartfelt homage.” Phew! Does this signal a glorious mess ahead? Or is this to be a literary breakthrough? Actually, it’s a damn fine read, fizzing up the brain like a good Champagne. Let me be “Mr. First Nighter” and take you into my front-row seat . . .

Curtain opens with a prologue set in heaven at the Musicians-Only Club. Beethoven and Mendelssohn overhear the Gulf War and complain about God’s coffee. Enter Prokofiev and Sir Arthur Bliss, and the bickering starts: Bliss accuses Beethoven of keeping us all behind the European currents of musical progress; Beethoven retorts that “Music does not progress. Handel knew neither the augmented sixth nor the Neapolitan one, but there is no music greater.” Bliss has a dig at TV: “It is the resurrection for the body. The dead live on it.” Mendelssohn states that music is “the one universal language.” There’s no sign of Mozart.

Suddenly, Wagner strides in, only to be insulted by Mendelssohn as “the man who turned opera into unbearable Teutonic epic.” Then all the celestial composers batter at Wagner, capped by Prokofiev: “You have only one chord. You hammered to death the secondary seventh on the leading note.” (Burgess certainly wears his music theory on his sleeve.)

The tunesmiths troop off to see an opera showing Mozart as a hack obsessed with the scatological. In the bar, between acts, the musical discussion continues. Rossini, after complaining about the Champagne, admits he “never took music too seriously.”

In Act Two, Mozart rhymes billiards with milliards . But poor old Salieri rhymes bubble with trouble (Tin Pan Alleymen even gave that up by 1930). Court musician Gluck has a cardiac arrest and is carted off; Mozart gets the job and immediately complains about the pay.

Back in the bar, Schoenberg and Gershwin schmooze over a bottomless jug of martinis. George says music should merely entertain; Arnold says it should tell the the truth. George says Arnold should have stuck to simple tonic-dominant music--he’d have got movie work in Hollywood. Arnold says his giving every note equal validity was democratic, but George scolds his pal for leading the world into anarchy. The agree to meet for tennis tomorrow.

And so it goes . . .

Eventually, Burgess himself gets into the act by having a go at verbalizing K. 550 (1788) in free-flowing imagery choked with much Joycean word-shuffling (“Loud cry the crowds, cry loud the crowds, the crowds cry loud”). The masks are discarded from now on and it’s mostly Burgess the tract-master for the rest of the book. Actually, it’s been thinly-disguised Burgess for the book so far (and most enjoyably so).

Now “Anthony” and “Burgess” discuss Anthony Burgess’ experiment with K. 550. One says it’s “gibberish,” the other that there’s nothing to say about Mozart except that he’s “divine.” Further: Mozart is perfection because he avoided vulgarity and sentimentality (the two requisites, by the way, for decent 20th-Century pop music). Yes, proclaims our over-heard author, Mozart was a true gentleman--unlike later musicians who let “trombones fart and slide” (so much for ragtime, vaudeville, and jazz!).

In the epilogue, Burgess confesses he’s through with atonality, that the truest music serves the dance. Dance is the highest art form of art because it “celebrates the union of man and woman and that larger union known as the human collective.” Hear, hear!

But, ironically, battered old Wagner emerges as the winner, in terms of money music. Burgess’ damnation unwittingly shows the vulgar Teuton to be the father of syncopated pop music, including rap: Wagner’s debasing of Mozart’s divine, unearthly purity led to “the rhythms of spoken discourse.”

So--who will write the score for “On Mozart”?

Lloyd Weber is excluded, also Sondheim. I submit that a suitable candidate, for this “Clockwork Orange” fellow, would be a gang-banging rapper ripped clean from the gutter.