From the Guardian archiveWolfgang Amadeus MozartAnd God created Mozart – archive, 1991
5 December 1991 The Enlightenment did more than help create Mozart the boy wonder, it gave us the idea of the artist as demi-God that persists 200 years after his death, Nicholas Till argues
This evening concert halls throughout the world will echo with the sombre accords of Mozart’s Requiem for the dead in commemoration of the composer’s own death 200 years ago today.
The perfect symbolism of the Requiem, left incomplete upon Mozart’s death, has never been surpassed: life and death are subsumed in art. In his dying moments the real Mozart handed succession to his own myth, and it is as a succession of myths that he has henceforth existed. There are no fewer than 70 novels which take Mozart for their subject in the catalogue of the Austrian National Library. Evidence that this year’s orgy of Mozza-mania is nothing new. But evidence too that it is the fictional Mozart who is of greatest importance to us.
Mozart’s contemporaries such as Goethe knew him as a ‘stinking artist’, and his operas reveal him to have been a man with a broad outlook on life and a passionate engagement with the issues of his age. But the myths have been at work to persuade us otherwise. We know Mozart instead as a divinely gifted child, the mouthpiece of God, a man barely touched by the concerns of the world. Re-visiting the library catalogues to tally the Mozart novels against serious scholarly discussion of his operas, a corpus of works as rich and varied as that of Shakespeare, we find that for every one study of Mozart’s operas there exist five books on the poetry of Sylvia Plath, 20 on Jane Austen, and nearer 50 on Wagner.
Anniversaries usually provide opportunities for critical revision of artistic reputations. But if anyone expected a serious re-appraisal of Mozart to fight its way through this year’s symphony of babble and hard sell, they will have been disappointed. The myths remain a more potent source of fascination. More money has undoubtedly been spent on the recent TV tease of the ‘not Mozart’ films than on ‘Mozart’.
Why do the myths of Mozart survive so tenaciously? The explanation is, I think, historical. Mozart was working at just that moment in western history in which art was assuming its modern role as a secular substitute for religion. And music, the least subservient of the arts to the representation of material reality, was increasingly considered during the course of the 18th century to be the most spiritual of the arts the pure art to which, in romantic aesthetics, all others would eventually aspire. And it was Mozart’s music which was the first in western history to be embraced by this new aesthetic of the ideal to be regarded, in ETA Hoffmann’s words, as the ‘mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom’.
Mozart’s dismissal by his employer the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1781, engineered by the composer himself, came to symbolise a crucial moment in the social history of western music: the moment in which the composer affirmed the autonomy of his music, which was no longer written in the service of Church or prince. But having liberated music, Mozart himself, conveniently, did not carry the troublesome stigma of the romantic artists of the following generation who insisted on stamping their own personality upon their work. Beethoven, the first composer to make exalted claims for the spirituality of his music, is at the same time too messily present in his music for it to assume the seraphic purity of the ideal. But Mozart is apparently self effacing, leaving no corporeal trace in his art. Mozart the man can be depicted as the mere earthly repository for his divine genius the giggling buffoon of Amadeus, unaware that the voice of God speaks through him.
Mozart’s music came to be elevated, as Goethe noted, as the supreme icon of ‘unattainable perfection’ in Western culture. ‘There is nothing perfect in this world except Mozart’s music’, wrote that original young fogey Thomas Love Peacock, and the romantics confirmed their hopeless longing for the irrecoverable in an almost unanimous preference for Mozart over Beethoven. Although Beethoven enjoyed a lengthy interregnum during the later 19th and early 20th century, Mozart has been restored to the pinnacle of Parnassus in our own less confident and unheroic age. Mozart’s art, ambiguous and elusive, meets the demands of a post-modern world constructed of ironic signs rather than stolid verities Mozart himself remains a carefully nurtured enigma, endlessly receding behind his myths. And yet, in this world of shifting values and flawed ideals, Mozart’s music has also come to represent the forbidden but still universally longed for grail: the possibility of human perfection.
In this paradox lies, perhaps, the explanation for the continued fascination of Mozart. And ultimately, it is founded upon Mozart’s own raw-nerved awareness of the spirit of the modern age. The years of Mozart’s maturity in Vienna between 1780 and 1791 coincided with a period of social upheaval as violent as any in history as the Emperor Joseph II attempted to effect in Austria in a mere 10 years a process of modernisation which in England and France had taken place over two centuries. During these 10 years the Viennese experienced all of the painful symptoms of the modern condition, so famously described by Marx and Engels a few years later: the sweeping away of ancient opinions and values the profaning of all things sacred the troubling sense that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. It is precisely the condition of society brought into being by the febrile libertarianism of Mozart’s own Don Giovanni.
Mozart’s operas all explore the inevitable conflicts between progress and stability, freedom and order, to which social change gives rise. The very freedom Mozart himself sought brings alienation and doubt to the individual in modern society, and his own life demonstrates the painful process which he himself underwent in his search for identity as a man and artist. From his first mature opera La finta giardiniera, based upon Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, the archetypal story of individualist bourgeois aspiration, via the more balanced, classical reconciliations of the conflicts between freedom and order in The Marriage Of Figaro, to The Magic Flute, representative of the spiritual inwardness and nature mysticism of the early romantics, Mozart’s operas represent nothing less than their own creator’s journey towards self fulfilment, and his (and the Enlightenment’s) quest for the eternal ideals of truth, virtue and beauty.
Like the writings of that other great prophet of the modern age Rousseau, Mozart’s operas are suffused with the Edenic myth of a lost past in which order, wholeness and certainty prevailed. Mozart had a profoundly religious temperament and deep faith. In his later years he embraced an esoteric masonry based upon gnostic Christianity, which he shared with his exact contemporary and spiritual twin William Blake. As we might expect, as well as the myth of the Fall, the Christian promise of redemption and forgiveness runs as a theme throughout Mozart’s operas, offering to heal the fragmented world in which humanity finds itself. We turn to Mozart for spiritual consolation not because he was the voice of God, but because he is supremely human.
If you listen to the Requiem tonight, forget the torrid stories of its creation, and try to ignore the niceties of authentic performance. Hear it instead as the testament of one of the great religious artists of modern culture as Mozart’s acknowledgment of the fearful alienation caused by our sense of sinfulness, and his promise, as consoling as we will ever receive in a Godless age, of the possibility of grace and forgiveness, and of the certainty of final rest.
Nicholas Till is an opera director and author of a forthcoming book on Mozart and the Enlightenment.
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