Mozart's Gift

...An example I am particularly fond of is from the String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, whose last movement consists primarily of a haunting, sketchily dance-like theme...

...Thus, utopia becomes at once a cause to live for and an impossible and wistful, even slightly comical, hope...

...In the end, the romantic hero and the homo economicus turn out to be not basically different, but two sides of the same forged coin...

...The tone takes the stiff, earnest, and childlike seriously, but provisionally...

...The fact that we are celebrating his 250th birthday this month suggests so, and for some fraction of the elite culture, he surely does...

...So maybe we do not hear him so well any more, or maybe we have just passed him by...

...It is not "aesthetic" in the sense of replacing the moral with formal beauty...

...So, does Mozart still speak to us...

...For that reason—that we tend to operate, as though instinctively, on romantic and post-romantic antitheses about passion and reason—it is, in fact, harder to hear Mozart well today than it used to be...

...Add a bit more—perhaps "who is this woman who does not kiss me...

...No comment is needed...

...Its Singspiel style offers a stodgy and naive alternation of spoken dialogue with singing, a clumsy German version of the slick and zingy Italian op^^a buffa...

...They lack street, and even quad, cred...

...It can be played, as the Juilliard Quartet does, at a moderate pace, with a kind of courtly, civil, and knowledgeable effect...

...The presentation of even the feral in beautiful forms, however, does not attenuate those feelings...

...In that, he was, again, probably closer to the truth than was Nietzsche...

...That is why, in their own ways, all three of those arias are come-dic, even the Count's, which is also partly genuinely scary...

...Who has ears to hear, knows, for instance, what is going on at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni...

...We get it...

...Yet, despite all that, Mozart is the most available of composers...

...He is the magus Sarastro, and he is what Tamino, the young hero-in-training (and, in her way, Pamina, the heroine), is supposed to become...

...Judging by concert halls, it's an old and shrinking fraction, but there are still a fair numFred Baumann is the Harry M. Clor professor of political science at Kenyon College...

...And indeed, Nietzsche's view of Mozart, though far more elegantly and insightfully expressed than my caricature of our own, isn't that far from it...

...Mozart’s Gift His music has taught us how to live BY FRED BAUMANN In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejoices that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, "the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste . . . still speaks to us" and warns that "alas, some day all this will be gone...

...He was a silly man, but a genius, who produced music that is very pleasant to listen to but somewhat lacking in punch...

...Even where the emotion is at its most intense, the effect is never merely personal, however bleak or despairing...

...He never makes the expressionist move of identifying the genuine or the intense with the ugly...

...from Mozart's child-prodigy phase, maybe his hatred for the archbishop of Salzburg, something about childish pranks, billiards, gambling, his wife Constanze's possible infidelity—and it fills out our picture...

...While emphasizing that Mozart represented a taste too high for the future Nietzsche feared, he also lets us know it is too soft for the future he longed for...

...This is not mere ironic deflation of romantic pretensions...

...The ability to be both inside and out, to feel and reflect on the feeling, to have strong passions and to be in formal control of them, is a large part of the delight we take in passages like this, or the first movement of the G minor string quintet, K. 516...

...i.e., models of a kind of control of the passions that gives them their due...

...There is room for reflective control...

...We feel all of it...

...Yet Mozart's biographer Alfred Einstein says that "it is one of those pieces that can enchant a child at the same time that it . . . transports the wisest...

...And Mozart was probably right, as he indicates in the crucial scene in The Magic Flute (where Tamino ends up trusting his naive instincts about beauty and honesty even over a true, but partial, account of Saras-tro's crimes) in thinking that real openness is perennially possible...

...Still, I think that what we got in Peter Shaffer's movie Amadeus roughly represents what the culture generally thinks about Mozart...

...We are not, typically, Will to Power freaks...

...Either way, he thought Mozart would become incom-prehensible—though probably not to the new philosophers or Overmen themselves...

...The paths to his depths are plainly and attractively marked at the surface...

...It can also be played, as the Salomon Quartet does, a little slower, a little more inwardly, even a bit spookily...

...For a while, it seemed that playing his music to infants was a good way to promote their adult careers...

...it intensifies them, by holding them up against the beauty and order of their representation...

...Unlike the Queen of the Night, who gives way to her passion for justice to the extent of becoming monstrously unjust, and unlike the slave Mono-statos, who chooses sides according to his odds of being able to force sex with Pamina, Tamino learns to be able to feel it all and still control it, to play the flute, in the image of the allegory, and not have it play him...

...At the same time, it creates a mediating, and therefore liberating, distance from those feelings, in which one can think as well as feel...

...And of course what is happening at the musical, stylistic level is replicated at the level of the allegory, where naive expressions of utopian faith in Enlightenment ("Now the earth becomes a heavenly realm and mortals equal to the gods") are announced straight to the audience in glorious assertive music, but by very serious little boys...

...There is a similar moment at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro, where the countess pardons the count, in which much-betrayed, but still-loving, mercy balances perfectly with resignation and bitter necessity...

...That is, listening to Mozart calls to mind (and in some ways turns you into) a certain kind of person, a more complicated sort than we mostly go in for today...

...There are magical transformations of hags into nubile girls, visits from a forest menagerie of music-loving wild animals, and occasional appearances by 12-year-old divine messengers...

...Some of Mozart's most obviously emotional music is composed in minor keys...

...Another operatic example is the famous quintet in the first act of Cost Fan Tutte where, to the most soaring and blissful music, two couples of lovers mourn the departure of the men for war, while an elderly cynic (who, for a bet with the two men, is merely setting up a test of the women's fidelity) mutters that he'll die if he can't start laughing...

...it is much closer to what we find in Shakespeare's Tempest or Measure for Measure...

...Whichever end of the permissible range you emphasize, the very fact that the melancholy or even eerie feelings the music conveys are set off by the courtly, and that the inner is in tension with the outer, strengthens the effect...

...but except for a niche audience, most of us do not actually choose to listen to it all that much, at least when Bruce Springsteen is available...

...I think he means that even when the play and motion is taken out of the experience, the feeling never simply takes us over...

...Nietzsche refers to Mozart as "rococo," to "his 'good company,' his tender enthusiasms, his childlike delight in curlicues and Chinese touches, his courtesy of the heart, his longing for the graceful, those in love, those dancing, those easily moved to tears, his faith in the south...

...Bach...

...Just as we know the protestations of eternal love to be foolish, we feel their present truth and feel pity for the vulnerability they reveal...

...Insofar as his music transcends our categories, we either consign him to the realm of the pretty-pretty or turn him, as some 20th-century criticism did, into a grotesque quasi-existential Angst-ling...

...Like ours, his tone is a little condescending and seems to find Mozart just a little too pretty-pretty...

...If we have a taste for them, we keep quiet about it...

...Individually attractive, a passionate clump whose music becomes raucous and hysterical, rising to a climax that would annihilate, castrate, eat the Don and Leporello if, at that moment, the two bass baritones did not shout it down and assert themselves, reestablishing the balance of the conflict...

...It is a figure that we don't meet much otherwise...

...Take that childish entertainment, The Magic Flute...

...Thus, Terry Teachout in this month's Comment^-ry ("The Major Minor Mozart") speaks of the "stoic quality" of the G minor symphony, K. 550...

...Naivete here is false, tongue in cheek, but lovingly false...

...The Mozartean hero, whom we approach, admire, and even learn to resemble, if only slightly, puts them to shame...

...In The Magic Flute, an opera whose Masonic libretto the Freemason Mozart took very seriously (as did Goethe, who wrote a sequel), Mozart made thematic the creation of such a person...

...And of course, Nietzsche was right that the language of aristocratic, pre-Romantic taste is no longer available to us...

...If we miss this, it is because Mozart indicates even the most grisly feelings and possibilities beautifully...

...He liked childish things, like that masquerade The Magic Flute, but he was serious about death (who isn't...

...There the Don's victims turn into a kind of musical lynch mob...

...Bartolo, and Figaro—but who also, in the end, maintains as sovereign the viewpoint of rationality and order...

...In invoking, and to some degree creating, such a person, Mozart implicitly makes a kind of moral case, a case for how we should live...

...If there is anything melancholy going on, it is well repressed, on its best behavior, smiling politely to the company...

...Goethe?— Mozart's Gift Mozart's birthplace, Salzburg anyway, those guys we sort of learned about freshman year...

...On sale for generations now have been simpler models of heroism, at their best the superficially cynical but deeply moral idealist (say, Humphrey Bogart) but, more typically, various chest-pounding moralists and romantics...

...The story is fantastic and oddly put together, with an apparently incomprehensible switch in good and bad guys halfway through...

...A giant of sorts, yes, up there on the list with Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and—who...

...Not a redemptive Wagnerian hero or cynical slacker, not a high-minded virtuoso of compassion and/or righteous indignation, not a "realist" or an "idealist," but someone who both acknowledges, lives in, accepts the viewpoint of, and participates in, all human feelings— even the ugly ones, as we see in the marvelous revenge arias given to the Count, Dr...

...Nor are we big on "the courtesy of the heart" or "tender enthusiasms...

...True, underneath the stage tricks there is a profound allegory of the education of the soul, but Mozart also uses the clumsiness and apparent graceless naivete of the Singspiel style with such knowing grace that one lives constantly both inside and outside the conventions...

...ber of teenagers learning the "Turkish Rondo," so who knows...

...How so...

...Nietzsche was unsure whether the future held the triumph of the despicable, bourgeois "last man" who is no longer even ashamed of himself or, as he hoped, of the newly heroic and disciplined races that the "new philosophers" would mold...

...but, as the liner notes tell us, "we are a long way from the 'confessional' outpourings of some of the later romantics...

...Nor are these feelings always as gentle as Nietzsche suggests...

...so he started on that spooky Requiem, which does get to us, in a churchy kind of way...

...Holding together with apparently effortless ease the most intensely characterized opposites is, to me, the essential quality of Mozart's music and the state of mind it engenders...

...Also, we may share with Nietzsche and his age a certain tone deafness that comes with modernity and its big masses, wars, breakthroughs, orchestras, and amps...

...Yet it is presented aesthetically, not through argument or exhortation...