AN APOLITICAL AMADEUS

...Like Mozart, who also had to pay court to the Great, he lived in constant financial uncertainty...

...It is, indeed, the likes of Mozart and Figaro, whom Almaviva calls "nobodies," who will call the tune in the sunlight of a new day: Should my dear master want some diversion, I'll play the music on my guitar...

...What a pity, then, that Shaffer's splendid effort at a true and realistic portrayal of Mozart should avoid politics, which, it can be argued, was an important and controversial part of Mozart's complex personality...

...341...

...For Mozart and his librettist da Ponte, Figaro stands for the men of the middle class, those forced to use their wits, the clever, hard-working, forever planning and scheming men of talent and ability...

...So, then, on to Figaro...

...Many of these aristocrats (we call them "enlightened") shared Mozart's critique of superstition and intolerance...

...The old order ascribed place, power, and prestige simply according to birth and not in terms of talent and achievement...

...Indeed, it is God's granting of unsurpassed musical genius to such a personality that so bewilders and enrages the pious and civilized Salieri...

...Mozart's career, blocked by court intrigue, demonstrated the power of•the politics of the aristocracy...

...Before turning to Figaro, however, some final comments on Mozart and Freemasonry are in order...

...Nobility, fortune, rank, position—you're so proud of these things...

...In Mozart's lifetime the radical impulse centered on the bourgeoisie's revolutionary assault on the vestiges of feudalism and hierarchical and hereditary principles...

...He starved and lived in squalor, while a mediocrity like Salieri enjoyed sweets in a splendid salon...

...How better to dethrone and subvert the dominant class and its values than by repudiating and violating the patterns of civility it sets...

...From the philosophes and their pornography to Godwin, Shelley, and Byron with their unconventional views on marriage, to the anarchists and Bohemian rebels of the 19th century and the yippies of our own day, unconventional behavior, even vulgarity, is often used as a strategy of defiance symbolizing disrespect...

...Even Mozart's scatology, his preoccupation in his letters and in his behavior with anality—flaunting his bottom, passing gas, telling off-color jokes—all is consistent with this reading of social radicalism...

...Mozart's connections and his sympathies placed him in the most progressive currents of late-18thcentury Europe...

...In the lodge members governed themselves and assumed office through elections, with positions of importance usually rotated among the brothers...

...He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at ease in a palace...

...He has written his music but, in a sense, has not composed them...

...Where he and they parted company, however, was in the class component of his radicalism...

...should he, for instance, wish to go dancing, He'll face the music, I'll lead the band...

...outside, Mozart had to pay court to his superior...

...His membership in the Freemasons influenced his attitudes and work in more ways than simply his mystical love of all mankind, so dear to biographers and musicologists, or his overuse of the Masonic number three...

...His first drafts are perfect...

...Joseph II's death (in 1790) forced him to move to London, from where repeated setbacks sent him to America in 1805...

...Mozart's vulgarity and bizarre behavior are amply documented in his letters and in the anecdotal record of his contemporaries...

...Here da Ponte became professor of Italian literature at Columbia College and would give Mozart's and his Don Giovanni its first American production...

...Not surprisingly, Mozart can be read as an apologist for the bourgeoisie in this its most radical moment...

...Convinced of their own talent and merit, the hard-working middle class (many of their leaders in the Masonic order) assaulted the ranks of privilege with notions of equal opportunity and of careers open to the talented...

...Norman 0. Brown has suggested, for example, that for Luther and Swift the figurative hurling of excrement at those in high stations ridicules and humiliates...

...But, if Mozart is a mere vessel whose opinions and sympathies are of no interest, then why Shaffer's preoccupation with his vulgarity and simplicity...

...This possible explanation of Shaffer's oversight still begs the basic point...

...IT COULD BE that Shaffer is aware of but uninterested in Mozart as a political being precisely because he sees Mozart's internal person as irrelevant...

...But enough of brilliant and bizarre Mozart...

...with the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors...

...He endeavours next to bring these talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment...

...In Mozart's own Vienna the sympathetic Joseph II tolerated the order, and Mozait shared the brotherhood in his own lodge with a Mecklenburg and an Esterhazy...

...MOZART'S FIGARO could well be Mozart himself proclaiming all that he had done, all his achievements, his talent, his ability, and then lamenting that he had to pay court to worthless and idle aristocrats for their financial support...

...Outside the lodge hereditary noblemen governed in perpetuity and reserved positions and privileges for themselves...

...You went to the trouble of being born, and no more...

...FIGARO WAS THE INVENTION OF BEAUMARCHAIS, a minor aristocrat and, among other things, arranger of secret French gun deals for the American Revolution...

...Sexism and racism lurk not far beneath its surface, alas, but for its historical moment, The Magic Flute is a monument to the progressive cause of undermining the intellectual foundation of the anden regime...

...He was a man of genius and yet his work had to be submitted for approval to incompetents like Count Rosenberg...

...Mozart's unconventional behavior can, at least in part, be read in these social terms...

...Settling in Vienna, he acquired Joseph II as a patron and was appointed Theater Poet...

...What infuriated Louis XVI about Beaumarchais's Figaro and Joseph II about Mozart's was Figaro's very personification of revolutionary ideals...

...His contempt for the Great jeopardized their patronage less when expressed in vulgar giggles and excremental humor...

...But always Mozart had still to pay court to these very same Great men at, we must assume, an incredible price...

...But are they simply an idiosyncratic response to a particularly unusual and disturbed childhood or can there be a reading of his character that places it in a larger social and political context...

...This apolitical portrait not only does disservice to the historical Mozart, but it may also have important implications for how one understands his lack of civility...

...Subtly outwitting, innocent seeming, cleverly hitting, planning and scheming, I'll get the best of the hypocrite yet, I'll beat him yet...

...After setting himself up next as a businessman in Sunbury, Pa., and then in Philadelphia, he came back to New York in 1819...

...To depoliticize Mozart is to miss much of the social significance of his life...

...So it was in our age for the German follower of Rudi Dutschke who, when on trial and asked by the court if he wished to speak, took down his pants as an act of defiance and wiped his bottom with the indictment papers...

...In their Magic Flute Mozart and his librettist Schikaneder (a Viennese lodge brother) speak to the very heart of the Enlightenment agenda with their priests presiding over the Temples of Wisdom, Reason, and Nature...

...Mozart could well be one of many for whom cultivated vulgarity and social boorishness is an expression of contempt for a social fabric they wish 340 to replace...

...Le Mariage de Figaro was completed in 1778 but not played publicly in Paris until 1784, because of royal censorship...

...He was, indeed, a complex and unusual personality, but only part of that complexity is captured by Shaffer's reading of his life...

...He is God's instrument...

...The spiritual, the high and lofty is debased by the gross, the low...

...Such anguish is enough perhaps to turn the talented arrive to drink, a fate Mozart shared with that heroic despiser of the aristocracy in his day, Tom Paine...

...Such leveling sentiments would topple the divine order in which God had set hereditary noblemen to govern over such men as Figaro...

...Shaffer has totally depoliticized Mozart, going so far as to have Mozart deny any political content in The Marriage of Figaro...

...Mozart, according to Shaffer (and thus to Salieri), is a mere vessel...

...For most audiences, Shaffer's eccentric and buffoonish Amadeus (if they accept its validity) must confirm the conventional wisdom that emotional immaturity and maladjustment are the inevitable price prodigies pay...

...Outside they were patron and client, nobleman and commoner...

...he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises...

...Many Freemasons, to be sure, were themselves part of the aristocracy...

...Tom Paine in the 1790s symbolized these emerging radical bourgeois ideals by his insistence on writing "nobility" as "no-ability...

...In the lodge there were no barriers between Mozart and Mecklenburg...

...Born an Italian Jew, young da Ponte studied for the priesthood and in his early twenties taught, wrote poetry, and lived a life of disrepute sufficient to have himself expelled from Venice...

...That life and its aberrant behavior could well be understood, like Figaro's, as "The revolution already in action...

...The social ideal of the revolutionary bourgeoisie has seldom been better captured than in the mocking ridicule Beaumarchais has Figaro shout at Almaviva in Act Five: Just because you're a great lord, you think you're a genius...

...It was the very presence of hereditary aristocrats 339 like Mecklenburg and Esterhazy in their lodges that made the Masonic experience so crucial in shaping the social radicalism of the primarily middleclass membership of the Freemasons...

...There he tried unsuccessfully to be a grocer in New York City, and Elizabethtown, Pa...

...Perhaps we should not accept, with critic Richard Ellman, the "banality of anality" in Mozart's day...

...A cultural milestone in this crusade was Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro, which Napoleon would later call "The Revolution already in action," and which, in no accidental way, Mozart would immortalize...

...He shared with his Masonic brothers a disdain for superstition and mystery in church and state that made the Freemasons one of the most radical of the Enlightenment groups seeking to subvert traditional Catholic and aristocratic Europe...

...The answer is, of course, that Shaffer needs to dwell on at least that aspect of Mozart's character and inner being if there is to be any pathos in Salieri's bewilderment...

...It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings...

...The codes governing social interaction were utterly at odds inside and outside the lodge and in this gap lay some of the roots of radical politics...

...Mozart's librettist was, in fact, the personification of the new restless, rootless, and protean men of wit and talent found in the late 18th century, when the rigidities of the ancien regime were giving way to mobility and opportunity...

...WHAT THEN OF MOZART'S PERSONALITY...

...In the lodge Mozart and Mecklenburg were equals, brothers...

...In this relentless and ambitious striving, this constant remaking of self, da Ponte, like Tom Paine, symbolizes the new age...

...No wonder, then, that historians point to the proliferation in the 18th century of Masonic lodges and clubs in general as playing an important role in the spread of egalitarian ideas and in helping to bring an end to what John Brewer calls political "clientage and patrician patronage...

...What have you done to deserve so many rewards...

...Their opera is a series of variations on the triumph of light over darkness, of sun over moon, of day over night, of reason, tolerance, and love over passion, hate, and revenge...

...Adam Smith, perhaps the most astute observer of the bourgeois character, has beautifully captured the anguished ambivalence of this new breed of men of talent and ambition when they confronted their social betters: The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him admires the condition of the rich...

...For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind...

...for Mozart seems to have been equally sympathetic to the middle-class crusade to overthrow the chivalric and aristocratic sociopolitical order, as well...