On Music

...She cites his letter from Paris to his father, apprising Leopold of Frau Mozart's death there without mentioning where he had buried her...

...At the Sunday afternoon concerts at the Baron's Vienna house "nothing is played," Mozart wrote in 1782 to his father in Salzburg, "but Handel and Bach...

...His fantasy of racial purification finally led, through Hitler, to the expulsion of Freud and his fellow-Jews from their homeland...

...Bertram fairly drools over the King's final burst of "genius" in spending Bavaria's dwindling treasury on the immense Meissen chandelier (its model destroyed lest anyone copy it), the solid gold dumbwaiter at Herren-chiemsee, and the embroidery for the bed in which Ludwig only spent 25 nights and on which 30 women spent seven years stitching swans and flowers...

...I not only had the encouragement of constant approval but as conductor of the orchestra I could make experiments, observe what produced an effect and what weakened it, and was thus in a position to improve, alter and make additions or omissions, and be as bold as I pleased...

...But while Wagner succeeded in mesmerizing his host with the overpowering eroticism of Tristan, he failed dismally to make "Parsifal" (as he called Ludwig) play the part of that vestal who would redeem a racially debased realm...

...Fifty years later Wagner's aged widow would there receive Adolf Hitler as the embodiment of her husband's dreams...

...What a pity that Freud, whose home and clinic a few blocks down the same street has been turned into a museum, had no interest at all in music and "psychoanalyzed" Leonardo rather than Beethoven...

...True, after 1790 he chafed at the deadening routine at Esterhaza, yet during the first decade or two of this "slavery" he could honestly say as no artist of his stature has ever said: "My Prince was always satisfied with my works...

...Then I remembered the two days it took Beethoven to cover the distance —that rain-drenched ride in a milk wagon that brought on his fatal illness...

...To a true Freemason, could the body's resting place possibly matter...

...he mentions no works of painting in his letters from Rome, Florence Seldon Rodman's play about Richard Wagner, Hustler of the Gods, will be produced next June in El Paso, Texas...

...With the exception of Johann Sebastian Bach, Haydn seems to have been the single great composer whose life was normal (i.e., well adjusted to the society he lived in) and happy...

...He was apparently the only music lover among the irascible composer's landlords, for there are reputed to be 66 other lodgings in Vienna that Beethoven was expelled from, either for excessive noise (the deafer he got the harder he pounded the piano) or for dumping basins of water over his head onto the floor...

...Unfortunately for Mozart, he had none of Haydn's ability for accommodating himself to the world or for making it accept his music, but his creations bear no bitterness...

...Those two would write the biography that would establish the Mozart legend, bringing in the big money that had eluded the composer all his life...

...Swieten in 1774 had been "commanded" to listen to the music of the Leipzig master by Frederick the Great—though the Prussian monarch had lost his interest in music in the quarter century since Bach's death...

...He composed in the rocking stage-coaches during those interminable trips around Europe without apparently even looking out the windows...

...Unlike Haydn and Beethoven, though, Mozart was not moved by nature...

...Nonetheless, if the tawdry and inhuman in Wagner's grandiose music dramas is made comprehensible by visiting Ludwig's Bavaria, the music that transcends the man also may be more easily appreciated...

...That night he played "as a final blessing" a half dozen of Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, and he later dedicated his First Symphony to the overbearing son of Maria Theresa's physician...

...I am collecting at the moment the fugues...

...It was the gruff Baron who brought the music of the almost forgotten Johann Sebastian Bach to Mozart's attention, profoundly altering his style when it might have merely paralleled Haydn's...

...Parsifal, "that great legacy to the German nation," he hails as the height of "essentially Teutonic music," and those who resisted Wagner's attempt to foist his lethal prejudices on Germany are disposed of with a phrase right out of Goebbels: "superculti-vated intellectuals...

...The return trip to the capital at night, for a look at the Schwarzpanier-haus (Black Spaniard House) where Beethoven died, seemed almost interminable...

...Other sights failed to arouse him either...

...Ilsa Barea, in her book Vienna, goes to great lengths to absolve her beloved city of callously letting Mozart die a pauper, his body dumped in an unmarked grave...

...Beethoven, unlike Haydn, who passed through France in 1792 when the French Revolution was at its peak without a sideways glance, was a true child of the Revolution—in principle that he once caused a farmer's horse to shy, almost overturning the cart...

...The fourth floor apartment on the Molker Bastei in Vienna, where Beethoven lodged off and on from 1804-10, had belonged to Baron Pas-qualati...

...In that respect, Ludwig had the same contempt for militarism as did Mozart, who had written of the goose-stepping Prussians, "At night I hear perpetual shouts of 'Who goes there?' and I invariably reply 'Guess!'" Although he was forced to throw the insatiably greedy Wagner out of Bavaria, the generous Ludwig went on to finance Bayreuth and build Neueschwanstein, the ultimate architectural symbol of the composer's megalomania...

...Four years earlier the idealistic young King, beguiled by Lohengrin, had summoned Wagner, who had just completed Tristan in nearby Switzerland, to be his guest in Munich...

...89 (1787) recapitulate the melodic pattern of the exposition...

...and Venice...

...It is amazing and somehow reassuring that a man so administratively efficient, temperate, benign, and commonsensical could be the opposite of a traditionalist, revolutionizing his art without having to depend on exaggeration, bombast or violence for his effects...

...Wagner revolutionized music by abandoning the classical style that had served Haydn, Mozart and even Beethoven so well in sublimating the miseries and failures of their lives in Austria...

...When the older, more famous man told the younger one in 1790 that he was going to London, the much-traveled Mozart exclaimed, "But Papa...

...There, only Werner Bertram's adulatory biography of Ludwig is sold to visitors...

...The pedantic, not to say dictatorial Baron, who wrote 12 symphonies ("stiff as himself Haydn once called them), would stand up and glare at everyone during his Sunday concerts...

...Her argument hinges on Mozart being a Freemason...

...The buoyant, optimistic music is no proof—did Mozart's reflect frustration and despair...

...Bertram passes lightly over the mad King's order to put out the eyes of those who finally arrived at Neue-schwanstein to treat him for "paranoia...

...Nevertheless, the fact is that Haydn was much too busy running the huge Esterhaza music establishment (his musicians gave him the nickname "Papa" because he interceded with the boss so successfully in their behalf) to have time left over for anything other than creating music...

...I thought of Haydn as much as of Mozart as I walked through Mozart's Birth House in Salzburg...

...Haydn replied cogently: "My language is understood all over the world...

...Van Swieten had set Mozart to arranging parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier for quartet playing...

...Before his incarceration for insanity in 1886, and the suicide that followed, Ludwig even came to accept Parsifal as the ultimate opera, and to present the composer with the ironically-titled villa Wahnfried (peace from delusions...

...Ludwig wanted no part of Wagner's anti-Semitism, nor of that dream of a Pan-German Empire that would force the composer's authoritarian politics upon an unwilling world...

...You have no education for travel and no language except Italian...

...The Schwarzpanierhaus must have been bombed flat during World War II, because it has been entirely replaced with a replica, and the commemorative bronze plaque bears the curious legend that Beethoven "died here in an edifying [erbaulich] manner...

...or Richard Wagner...

...For Wagner, a lifelong anti-Semite, feared the possibility that his real father, Lud-wig Geyer, was Jewish...

...The portraits of him in Salzburg (all, incidentally, amateurishly drawn) show him gazing, enraptured, into space with eyes slightly protruding...

...The young Beethoven, told to bring his night-cap with him, fell in with the Baron's ways perhaps because he too hated frivolous audiences...

...I was cut off from the world, there was no one to confuse or torment me and I was forced to become original...

...Not a homosexual himself (except latently, perhaps), Wagner sensed the King's infatuation, referring to their first meeting as "a love scene we both seemed reluctant to the end," and thereupon proceeded to mercilessly rip-off the monarch...

...Near Fiissen in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps we visited Neueschwan-stein, that glorious parody of a medieval castle that Ludwig II of Bavaria began to erect in 1868 to commemorate his somewhat tarnished Wagnerian dreams...

...She also quotes Baron van Swieten's advice to Constanze during Mozart's last hours: Money spent on a funeral might make the debt-collectors harden their positions...

...But it is in the chapters devoted to Wagner's ideological foresight that this Nazi apologist really reveals his colors...

...The last opera, Die Zauberflote, filled with coded references to the proscribed cult, was enjoying some success in Vienna when Mozart died, and this, Barea implies, must have meant much more to Mozart than the preservation of a body he and his fellow Masons regarded as unimportant...

...How much more worldly are the faces in the portraits of his wife, Constanze, and the Danish diplomat-musicologist she was soon to marry...

...Of course, there is no way of knowing how much Haydn may have suffered within himself from a bad marriage and from the three years at the end when he was too weak to compose...

...Neither at the Esterhaza Castle in Eisenstadt nor in the Vienna house that Franz Joseph Haydn moved to when an unmusical heir to the vast Hungarian fortune cut back on everything but a military band, for example, are there any clues to how the modulations in the development section of the Symphony No...

...If there is any sign that the Germans have drawn the necessary distinctions between Wagner's musical genius and his genocidal politics, one would have to go further afield than Neueschwan-stein...

...There is not a trace of self-pity or paranoia in his letters, or in the writings of those who recorded every spoken word of the world's most famous living composer...

...Still, if the folkish humor and unflagging innovative spirit of Haydn are revealed only in the music itself, the architecture of the Esterhaza, Schwarzenberg and other palaces where he lived or had his works performed says everything about the order and security every listener feels...

...He offered the composer the resources of his kingdom, and Wagner, perennially in flight from his creditors, accepted the miracle...