Mozart's Gift: his music has taught us how to live

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."

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

So, does Mozart still speak to us? The fact that we are celebrating his 250th birthday this month suggests so, and for some fraction of the elite culture, he surely does. Judging by concert halls, it's an old and shrinking fraction, but there are still a fair number of teenagers learning the "Turkish Rondo," so who knows?

Still, I think that what we got in Peter Shaffer's movie Amadeus roughly represents what the culture generally thinks about Mozart. He was a silly man, but a genius, who produced music that is very pleasant to listen to but somewhat lacking in punch. He liked childish things, like that masquerade The Magic Flute, but he was serious about death (who isn't?) so he started on that spooky Requiem, which does get to us, in a churchy kind of way.

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

For a while, it seemed that playing his music to infants was a good way to promote their adult careers; 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. A giant of sorts, yes, up there on the list with Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and--who? Bach? Goethe?--anyway, those guys we sort of learned about freshman year.

So maybe we do not hear him so well any more, or maybe we have just passed him by. 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. Like ours, his tone is a little condescending and seems to find Mozart just a little too pretty-pretty. 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."

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. We are not, typically, Will to Power freaks. Nor are we big on "the courtesy of the heart" or "tender enthusiasms." They lack street, and even quad, cred. If we have a taste for them, we keep quiet about it. 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.

Take that childish entertainment, The Magic Flute. The story is fantastic and oddly put together, with an apparently incomprehensible switch in good and bad guys halfway through. 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. Its Singspiel style offers a stodgy and naive alternation of spoken dialogue with singing, a clumsy German version of the slick and zingy Italian opera buffa.

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." How so?

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 naiveté of the Singspiel style with such knowing grace that one lives constantly both inside and outside the conventions. Naiveté here is false, tongue in cheek, but lovingly false. The tone takes the stiff, earnest, and childlike seriously, but provisionally. 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. Thus, utopia becomes at once a cause to live for and an impossible and wistful, even slightly comical, hope.

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. Another operatic example is the famous quintet in the first act of Cosi 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.

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

Nor are these feelings always as gentle as Nietzsche suggests. Who has ears to hear, knows, for instance, what is going on at the end of the first act of Don Giovanni. There the Don's victims turn into a kind of musical lynch mob. 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.

If we miss this, it is because Mozart indicates even the most grisly feelings and possibilities beautifully. He never makes the expressionist move of identifying the genuine or the intense with the ugly. The presentation of even the feral in beautiful forms, however, does not attenuate those feelings; it intensifies them, by holding them up against the beauty and order of their representation. At the same time, it creates a mediating, and therefore liberating, distance from those feelings, in which one can think as well as feel.

Some of Mozart's most obviously emotional music is composed in minor keys. 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. It can be played, as the Juilliard Quartet does, at a moderate pace, with a kind of courtly, civil, and knowledgeable effect. If there is anything melancholy going on, it is well repressed, on its best behavior, smiling politely to the company. It can also be played, as the Salomon Quartet does, a little slower, a little more inwardly, even a bit spookily; but, as the liner notes tell us, "we are a long way from the 'confessional' outpourings of some of the later romantics."

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

Thus, Terry Teachout in this month's Commentary ("The Major Minor Mozart") speaks of the "stoic quality" of the G minor symphony, K. 550. I think he means that even when the play and motion is taken out of the experience, the feeling never simply takes us over. There is room for reflective control.

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

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. It is not "aesthetic" in the sense of replacing the moral with formal beauty; it is much closer to what we find in Shakespeare's Tempest or Measure for Measure; i.e., models of a kind of control of the passions that gives them their due. Yet it is presented aesthetically, not through argument or exhortation.

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. 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. 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 Monostatos, 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.

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

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

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

Yet, despite all that, Mozart is the most available of composers. The paths to his depths are plainly and attractively marked at the surface. 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 Sarastro's crimes) in thinking that real openness is perennially possible.

Fred Baumann is the Harry M. Clor professor of political science at Kenyon College.

Bach gave us God's Word

Mozart gave us God's Laughter

Beethoven gave us God's Fire

God gave us music so we might
pray without words.

I don't know how anyone who is not a Mason (or at least has a mason explain it to you) can understand the Magic Flute, really.

(Mozart was a freemason and was really supported by his fraternity brothers during his more troubled times.)

My car radio is tuned to K-Mozart.

They are going overboard with this celebration.

Trips to Austria and - on a smaller scale - giving away director's cut DVDs of Amadeus and tickets to Wolfgang Puck's restaurants.

If you like classical music and live in the LA area, K-Mozart is a good station - 105.1 FM.

If you like classical music and live in the LA area, K-Mozart is a good station - 105.1 FM.

Yep. It is. So is KUSC 91.5 FM, which I'm listening to right now. We're fortunate here. We have 2 classical music stations. Many areas have none.

As a choral singer I know how the world views our music as somewhat passionless. But the passion is there for those with ears to hear. It is a matter of restraint and dignity so that a subtle breakout of emotion is moving beyond much of the bellowing of the Opera stage. Mozart had that gift, and we choristers know it instantly when we sing his music. After all, isn't that the hallmark of the classical style? Not eliminating the human emotion, but channelling and controlling it in the civilizing forms of the period. Not so popular in the "feels good do it" society, but in the civilized world, it is everything.

I like Mozart, and think that all classical music can have a civilizing effect, especially compared to rap. (Parents, have you heard your rap-listening kids talk? Suburban, middle class boys and girls are talking like gangstas, talking about "B*tches" and "'Hos" casually, even affectionately.) But to argue that classical music has a moral effect goes too far. Mozart and Beethoven loving German officers, educated men immersed in the world of high culture, sent Jews and others off to their deaths and then listened to the Magic Flute while enjoying a nice chianti.

Thanks Johnnie.

He's still the man.

p.s. May I please have my name added to your "Rush" ping list??

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1563991/posts

Sure, adding you to the Rush List, Link above to today's thread!

"But the passion is there for those with ears to hear.

Yes it is. At times profoundly so.("Requiem" for isntance.)

I believe that music unlocks a door to human potential--potential for good or for evil. It has an almost mystical effect on people. I look to the case of Anton Bruckner as a model--he was just a provincial organist who displayed no talent for composition at all. Then he experiences the music of Wagner, and all of a sudden at age 40 he becomes a musical genius.

For me, it was Mahler that fomented a fundamental shift. The best music inspires such feeling that all before it pales. That music might be different for everyone, but Mahler's works affect me deeply. I like Mozart but feel that many who claim to be fans are so-called "front-runners." And why is it that every movie in which there is a snobby party they have Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?

Dear afraidfortherepublic,

Thanks for the ping!

Classical Music Ping List ping!

If you want on or off this list, let me know via FR e-mail. Thanks!

sitetest

"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 Sarastro's crimes) in thinking that real openness is perennially possible.

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

Look at it this way: Nietzsche had to invent the Uebermensch to get him through his sniveling little life; Mozart's genius (his "native instincts about beauty and honesty" -- whatever) bubbled to the surface at an early age, and it never let him down.

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