Mozart on the Couch

...At any rate the ambiguities of the authorship are intimidating, but Miss Brophy usually has the pluck to ride right over them or the ingenuity to tunnel under them into the general unconscious of the 18th century, where she manages to find some very diverting little motives indeed...

...The violence, dislocation and disconnections of American life in the present are very hard to live in, or up to, especially as we get scant relief by withdrawing to our tradition, which is largely more of the same...

...Not the least of them was one for adapting a libretto for the gifts of a particular composer, so perhaps Miss Brophy is right enough in treating Mozart as the controlling spirit after all, even if the control was not exhaustive, since da Ponte thought Mozart overdid the tragic side of Don Giovanni, for example, and since irreducibly a lot of the wording and characterization which carry the "psychology" are by da Ponte...

...I find one cannot turn that epithet against her own writing, since it is not prose, if you take prose for an art, but mere expository language, at its worst a sort of lecture—prosy indeed—at its average a sort of desultory conversation, and at its best a sort of racing and lyric notation...

...It is not the most awful but the most charming thing about Miss Brophy that her psychologizing is made of nothing but Freudian truisms, and that—as the 18th century saved its kind of truisms by delicacy of rendering or by pyrotechnics—so she does hers...

...By another Rococo skill, that of treating tangentials and incidentals with such vivacity one cares nothing for the central theme, she gets safely around her announced subject, Mozart the dramatist...

...But she has one, potentially a very large one, not only in England, where her insularity does not matter, but in America as well...

...When I am told that Homer is "pellucid," that Virgil wrote a "more self-conscious national epic," that Lucian was the Voltaire of Greece, I weep for Oxford, where the blurb says she got her Classical training...

...author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" Miss Brophy's quite various mind is possessed of several manners, not all of them fortunate...

...Miss Brophy is often quite aware of the difficulty and in passing she can deal very acutely with the properly musical dramatics by Mozart, but she does want the whole show, especially the psychological content of it, to be all his, and so makes as little as possible of the very great talents and contributions of da Ponte...

...This informality is perhaps deliberate, since she finds the quasi-musical formalisms of Mozart's letters "infantile,' and since she is a perfectly unsuspecting believer in Freudian dogma, under which I daresay any form would be a horrid symptom of anality...

...Taken as a tranquilizer, her book contains only a few mild irritants...

...Her psychoanalysis of Mozart and the 18th century at large is oddly saved by this...

...Then, in connection with a problem of dramatic structure in The Magic Flute she will go asleuthing into the Masonic lore of the period, which leads on and on into the Eleusinian mysteries and God knows what all, of very intermittent interest...

...As I ultimately and no doubt unsportingly tire of this manner among her manners, I am not her ideal audience...

...In a way she is the perfect housekeeper of the 18th century...

...And where did she acquire such disjunct logic as this: ". . the absolutism of Louis XIV and the enlightened despotism of Frederick...

...The most awful thing about the 18th century is that it had no distaste for truisms,' says Miss Brophy, and it should have enriched its intellectualities with "psychology...

...Her little chapter on the similarities of Don Giovanni to Hamlet because of their nearly identical Oedipal substructure is a marvelous feu d'esprit, a triumph of ideological decoration in the Rococo manner, so good I put aside all suspicion she believes in the seriousness of every word she says on the subject...

...Hers is a very English 18th century, and it turns out that a village gossip by the name of Jane Austen (sic) was a cardinal figure of the Enlightenment, and a composer of vers de société, by the inordinate name of Alexander Pope, wrote the tragic epic of the time, an Iliad of the sex-war, The Rape of the Lock...

...In brief, Miss Brophy is in a lag to the point she supposes Mozart has to be promoted, just when we are trying to feel right about having heard him enough...

...She does not know enough music...

...The subject, taken straight, is largely unmanageable, since we know next to nothing of how close the collaboration was between Mozart and his main librettist, da Ponte...

...Somewhere she missed philosophy...

...But as with the penis, another favorite subject with Miss Brophy, so with music, one may say her interest is intense, her acquaintance more than casual (she is a wife and mother and attends Glyndebourne), but her knowledge somehow not primary...

...Miss Brophy is surely right in saying that Mozart did more than merely set da Ponte's text to music, but then we cannot say what sort of hand Mozart took in the actual dramaturgy of, say, The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni...

...Two chapters are entitled "Die Zauberflöte Solved," though what is solved in that endlessly problematical opera is one of its at most tertiary problems...

...And the novelty is at first delicious, even being told that the sister of the recently discovered novelist Fielding (author of Tom Jones) was so benighted she confused Lucian with Lucan and Plato with Pluto seems a nice enough way to pass one's time, but eventually this kind of triviality gets too thick...

...But reading her is both relaxing and rejuvenating, since one goes back some 20 years, and anybody can revel in it...

...By now the Freudian schemata, once so electrifying and so cogent, have become rather dinky truisms and can no longer be trusted for sweep or scope, except on the couch, if there...

...Moreover, a great deal of the dramaturgy was already set by Beaumarchais and the many authors of Don Juan plays before da Ponte did his versions...

...If one wants to withdraw from the present, one can do it with a better conscience if the way back is assured, and Miss Brophy does seem to provide that assurance...

...Or simply she goes too fast...

...No doubt there is in all this some vulgar display of learning, some claim to consideration on the ground of dedicated research, but on the whole she handles her facts with affection, a sharp sense of their flavor, and she can often arrange a footnote as prettily as no doubt she does a posy...

...Reviewed by DONALD SUTHERLAND Professor of Classical Literature, University of Colorado...

...The least so is that of the flat-heeled literary broad, or slightly uncommon scold, of which we surely have our surfeit on both sides of the water...

...In this unlovely register she tells the 20th century off as execrable, its art as forgetful of what art is, Romanticism as "misty," the Terror as irrational, certain scholars as inadequately read up in their sources, and Shelley's prose as "vile...

...Indeed she has everything: not merely a sense of stabilized historical fact from Homer on, not merely a domesticity about everything, including, of all things, sex, not merely an intellectual ease and gaiety over our most oppressive philosophical and political issues, but she has a reassuring air of being also of the 20th century...

...Miss Brophy, for our purposes, is England at its best, far more soothing than Camelot or a Shakespeare festival...

...Anybody can do Freudian casuistries now, and mostly one can read them only with resignation, but Miss Brophy, by the grace of her sympathies with the Rococo and her British resource of whimsicality, can often make them delightful...

...While, in many of her moods, say the expository, the petulant, the polemical, her invertebrate syntax and slackness of rhetoric are an acute affliction to a formalist reader, in other moods, of affection or enthusiasm, her basic fluidity can rise to a mercuriality, and we suddenly get very splendid descriptions of Rococo decoration, or motivation, or lighting, or brushwork, which go in a spotty and iridescent dazzle of vocabularistics, perfectly in keeping with the material, often equal to Sacheverell Sitwell, and sometimes to Shelley...

...People who do know music have done much worse on the Mozart operas as drama—as in saying the downward moral trend of Don Giovanni is indicated by the downward trend of his notes in his major arias—so, if she has not settled the subject, she may have contributed as much as anybody else has toward a final description of what the operas are...

...Miss Brophy is young, in her 30s, and so not yet recovered from a rather extensive education...

...But she is of the 20th century as of 20 or 30 years ago—when Freud was unquestionable, when the arts could be declared exempt from morality and politics in all good faith, when good sense and "realism" were imagined to be adequate, when Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence were modem writers...

...We thus have a dreadful amount of scholarly apparatus—indices, bibliographies, useless quotations in foreign languages, and footnotes abounding...

...So, unless we confine ourselves to the dramatic qualities of the music and the fuller dramatic sense it gives to the text, it is idle to treat Mozart as a dramatist...

...Within her manner she can scarcely take time to look beyond the schoolbook commonplaces on Homer and Virgil, to consider the differences between Lucian and Voltaire or between Homer and Pope when minor points of similarity can give off a sort of glitter, or to ponder a premise or a problem when a bluff assertion is livelier and gives a more personal tone...

...As if the ideas supporting Louis XIV, the whole awful cage of them, were not ideas because they were not distinctly 18th century ideas or such as Miss Brophy fancies...

...But be prepared...

...To a foreigner, who figures the English 18th century as composed mainly of Laurence Sterne and some pretty cool silverware, this is news...

...The Rococo does take a small part for the whole...

...The latter is at least based on an idea...

...It is Europe, as Henry James said, which is the great American sedative, and now I think it is increasingly England, as the other European nations go more and more their own way...