Mozart’s Life, Scored in Different Keys

Peter Gay’s “Mozart,” a new installment in the Penguin Lives series of short biographies, incarnates both the virtues and the shortcomings of these generally likable abbreviated books.

Summaries can be useful: They can introduce a reader to an unfamiliar subject or reacquaint him with a familiar one; they can lay out the biographical issues and debates and set down a foundation for further inquiry. What they seem unable to do as often is present a fresh or startling take on their subject.

There are moments when, reading his breezy overview, one wishes that Gay (the author, most notably, of “Freud: A Life for Our Time”) had been able to conjure Mozart out of a key episode or theme in his life--as Phyllis Rose did so memorably in “Parallel Lives,” her portrait of five Victorian literary marriages--but this is to ask “Mozart” to be narrow and selective when the assignment at hand, clearly, is to be expansive and wide. Indeed a slight feeling of assignment hangs over the proceedings here, as though Gay had been asked to give the introductory lecture to a music appreciation class.

Helpfully, professor and audience alike are intelligent and cultivated, and Gay is able to plunge right in by laying out the dilemma facing the biographer of Mozart, which is where to locate the man in the legend. Gay presents the standard Mozart: the willful child prodigy; the infantile young adult obsessed with scatology, anality and sexuality; the virtuoso composer who never revised; the rebellious son of an overbearing father; the broke, neglected genius who was buried in a pauper’s grave. His goal is to nuance rather than to discard this portrait: “By and large these tenacious caricatures are distortions rather than fabrications; most of them . . . contain a kernel of truth.”

He Was Most Alive in Periods of Transition

Gay keeps the kernels and picks and chooses among the husks. His Mozart is most animated and alive, as a rule, at moments of transition: when he tried to wrest himself free from his father, Leopold (whose influence, “beneficial or baneful, or an amalgam not easily disentangled”--a nice phrase--”remains a matter for debate two centuries later”); when he defied the truth that “a child prodigy is, by its nature, a self-destroying artifact” and matured in his composition, opening himself to new influences, among them Italian, German and Masonic music, Haydn and his string quartets, and the then-newfangled piano; and when, in moments of sharp self-knowledge, he knew it was time to remake his life.

The most poignant of Mozart’s self-reinventions include his Leopold-defying marriage to Constanze Weber; his rupture with his patron, the archbishop of Salzburg, and his relocation from his claustrophobic native Salzburg to more worldly Vienna; his understanding of how deeply he was enriched and awakened by travel; and his awareness, as he grew older, of “a certain emptiness--which pains me--a certain longing which is never satisfied, consequently never ceases.”

One of the trickier challenges facing the biographer of Mozart, as of any composer, is exploring the connection between the life themes and the musical ones. Here Gay often relies on vague generalities (“he poured out masterpiece after masterpiece that scaled greater heights and plumbed greater depths”) that do little to capture or illuminate the music, as Gay seems aware: “how puerile these common metaphors are compared to the experience of listening to Mozart!” Possibly the best thing one can say of Gay’s modest, balanced book is that it makes the reader eager to slip CDs into the player and again contemplate the mystery and the magic of this remarkable human talent and life force.

In “Mozart In Revolt,” David Schroeder, a professor of music at Dalhousie University in Canada, offers a fundamentally different, downright anti-biographical take on certain of the most familiar Mozartian themes. Schroeder approaches Mozart through his correspondence, chiefly to and from his father but also to his cousin, Basle, his wife and certain friends, which he places in the 18th century epistolary tradition. By doing so, he endeavors to subvert a host of psychological assumptions about the Oedipally encumbered Mozart, who was most recently (and exhaustively) drawn in Maynard Solomon’s 1995 biography “Mozart: A Life.”

Encumbered with repetitions, single-mindedness and even in places a touch of smug belligerence (“This book . . . will make a biography more difficult to write,” he proclaims early on), Schroeder’s study reads like a bulked-up essay--but it is one that nevertheless has its corrective and tonic insights.

Ideological Debate

With His Father

Schroeder will have no truck with the Freudian, 20th century view of Mozart as a man “in tune with . . . our foibles, ambitions, aspirations, phobias and complexes.” He does not see Mozart and Leopold engaged in a lifelong battle over the son’s independence from the father; instead the debate between them, he argues, is largely ideological. In his letters, Leopold, “a skilled epistoler,” offered his son moral, social and religious instruction. He modeled his communications on those of other skilled letter-writers of the Enlightenment. He never expected them to be private; in fact, Schroeder argues, he anticipated eventual publication, either of the letters themselves or as an element in his son’s eventual biography.

Alas, “what could have been a grand and noble project,” as Schroeder puts it, “was dissolved by its subject.” Once separated from Leopold, Mozart developed “an artful technique of defusing the objectionable side of his father’s influence.” He flattered, assumed masks, told lies (about work; about his romantic life; most famously, perhaps, about his mother’s death, which he delayed reporting to his father), riddled and engaged in wordplay. Mozart the masquerader or Harlequin is not unconnected to his work, the operas in particular; Schroeder shows Mozart the man, or at least the letter-writer, in this fresh and rather sly light.

Only to what end? At the conclusion of his study, Schroeder asserts that “[w]earing masks in letters, it must be concluded, obscures the person more than reveals him.” A whole book devoted to anatomizing Mozart’s obscurity? Game player and masquerader though Mozart may have been, he was, in his letters as elsewhere, a throbbing, anguishing, celebrating, dazzling spirit, a hide-and-seeking spirit maybe, but one who deserves to be sought out and given a somewhat more vibrant and embracing treatment than he receives here.