Mozart

In an essay that goes on to discuss nuances in some of Mozart’s music, Terry Teachout has this succinct description of the composer’s life and work:

One might easily put together an anthology of heartfelt tributes to Mozart’s music, were it not that the result would be so repetitious. Suffice it to quote Aaron Copland, writing in 1956 on the occasion of the Mozart bicentenary:

[W]e can pore over him, dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in the end there remains something that will not be seized. That is why, each time a Mozart work begins . . . we composers listen with a certain awe and wonder, not unmixed with despair. The wonder we share with everyone; the despair comes from the realization that only this one man at this one moment in musical history could have created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.

Some part of Copland’s wonder, of course, must have stemmed from the fact that its object was a child prodigy without formal education who wrote his first symphony at the age of nine and his last one a mere 23 years later, not long before his early death. All prodigies are by definition interesting, but in Mozart’s case the interest is heightened by the fact that he not only died young but left behind an oeuvre so extensive and all-encompassing that it might as well have been the work of a fully mature composer who died at sixty, or even eighty.

In addition, though, there is the still greater puzzle of the apparent incongruity between Mozart’s music and his personality. Forget the foul-mouthed idiot savant of Peter Shaffer’s movie Amadeus (1984); the real Mozart is elusive enough without benefit of caricature. “It is impossible,” wrote the great English musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “to exaggerate the depth and power of Mozart’s thought.” Yet Karoline Pichler, who knew him socially, described a man “in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests.” His surviving letters paint a similarly inexplicable portrait of a likable, lively-minded lightweight.

The gap between man and artist is so vast, in fact, that one half-wonders why some ragtag band of ardent pseudo-scholars has not come along to claim that the music of “the man from Salzburg” was really written by a more cultivated and better situated contemporary.

The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is Friday, January 27.