instrument, or on a computer remains. The critic David Hajdu, in an essay on the phenomenon of home remixing (creating new versions of songs on home computers), notes a curious throwback. “Members of the musical public are again assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales,” he writes. In other words, we are almost back to where we started.
When I sift through my musical memory, I find that real and virtual events are inextricably jumbled. The strongest echoes are of live performances that shook me to the core: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of the incomparable choral conductor Robert Shaw, with more than four hundred singers roaring forth in the first- and second-tier boxes; the post-punk bands Fugazi and the Ex in a sweat-drenched church basement in Washington, D.C., firing up a mass of youthful bodies; Gidon Kremer and five other musicians in an Austrian village church at midnight, presenting an extraordinarily eerie chamber arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. Then again, certain recordings carry an acute emotional charge: I think of the Bernstein Eroica that I pretended to conduct as a child, the LPs of Mahler’s Sixth that I blasted in high school late at night, the Pere Ubu CD that forced me to abandon my cavalier dismissal of rock music. But I can’t replicate the psychic impact of those first encounters. They were unrepeatable events on a private stage. As the composer and theorist Benjamin Boretz has written, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.”
Nothing in my listening life can compare to the experience of Hans Fantel, an author and critic who for many years covered audio matters for The New York Times. In 1989 he wrote about what it was like for him to listen to a CD reissue of a classic disc: a live recording, made on January 16, 1938, of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, under the direction of Bruno Walter. Fantel spent his childhood in Vienna, and he attended that performance with his father.
“We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich,” Fantel wrote. “The music, captured that day by the bulky old microphones I remember strung across the stage, was the last to be heard from many of the musicians in the orchestra. They and their country vanished.” Fantel put on the record and relived the occasion. “I could now recognize and appreciate the singular aura of that performance: I could sense its uncanny intensity—a strange inner turmoil quite different from the many other recordings and performances of Mahler’s Ninth I had heard since.”
Some of the turmoil was Fantel’s own. “This disc held fast an event I had shared with my father: seventy-one minutes out of the sixteen years we had together. Soon after, as an ‘enemy of Reich and Führer,’ my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss. That’s what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity … Something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.”
4 THE STORM OF STYLE MOZART’S GOLDEN MEAN
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense blue-gray eyes. When he was in a convivial mood, his gaze was said to be warm, even seductive. But he often gave the impression of being not entirely present, as if his mind were caught up in some invisible event. Portraits suggest a man aware of his separation from the world. In one, he wears a hard, distant look; in another, his face glows with sadness. In several pictures, his left eye droops a little, perhaps from fatigue. “As touchy as gunpowder,” one friend called him. Nonetheless, he was generally well liked.
He was born in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1756, and he died in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1791. He was a thoroughly urban creature, one who never had much to say about the charms of nature. A product of the artisan classes—his ancestors were bookbinders, weavers, and masons—he adopted aristocratic fashions, going around Vienna in a gold-trimmed hat and a red coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. He was physically restless, quick-witted, sociable, flirtatious, and obscene; one of the more provocative items in his catalogue is a canon for six voices titled Leck mich im Arsch (K. 231/382c). He frittered away money, not least on apartments that he could ill afford. He had considerable success, although he knew that he deserved more. If audiences were occasionally perplexed by his creations, listeners in high places recognized his worth. Emperor Joseph II was a fan of Mozart’s work, and, in 1787, to prevent “so rare a genius” from going abroad, he gave the composer a well-paying position that required little more than the writing of dances. In a letter to his father, Leopold, Mozart had warned that “the Viennese gentry, and in particular the Emperor, must not imagine that I am on this earth solely for the sake of Vienna.”
As a child, Mozart was advertised in London as “the most extraordinary Prodigy, and most amazing Genius, that has appeared in any Age.” Leopold dubbed him “the miracle whom God allowed to be born in Salzburg.” Prince Kaunitz, Joseph II’s chief minister, said, “Such people only come into the world once in a hundred years.” Praise at this level, however justified, takes its toll on a man’s humility. Mozart, by his own admission, could be “as proud as a peacock,” and the Archbishop of Salzburg, whose service he quit in 1781, was not the only person who considered him “dreadfully conceited.” Conceit edges easily into paranoia, and Mozart was not immune. “I think that something is going on behind the scenes, and that doubtless here too I have enemies,” he wrote from Paris, in 1778. “Where, indeed, have I not had them?” As he traces conspiracies, mocks the French, and extols the Germans, he sounds curiously like Richard Wagner.
Later, in Vienna, Mozart clung to the idea that Antonio Salieri, the Imperial Kapellmeister, was plotting against him. Whether or not such intrigues existed—John Rice’s biography of the supposedly dastardly Salieri portrays him as a likable character, and an intermittently imaginative composer—Mozart himself was not above politicking: when he applied for the job of second Kapellmeister, he pointedly observed that “Salieri, that very gifted Kapellmeister, has never devoted himself to church music.”
Playfulness was Mozart’s saving grace. His counterpart in modern times is perhaps George Gershwin, who was charming and self-infatuated in equal measure. Latter-day attempts to find a dark, despondent layer in Mozart’s psychology have been unconvincing. In his correspondence, he once or twice displays depressive symptoms—alluding to his “black thoughts,” describing sensations of coldness and emptiness—but context is all-important: in the first instance, he is begging for money, and in the second he is telling his wife, the demanding Constanze, how much he misses her. Nor should too much be made of a letter in which Mozart tells his dying father that death is the “true goal of our existence,” the “best and truest friend of mankind.” These sentiments were commonplace in a world where lives ended early and without warning. Of the seven children born to Leopold and Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang was one of two who survived infancy; only two of his own six children lived to adulthood. Against this backdrop, Mozart seems, if anything, indefatigably optimistic.
Leopold Mozart said of his son, “Two opposing elements rule his nature, I mean, there is either too much or too little, never the golden mean.” Often, an artist sets forth in his work what he cannot achieve in life, and Mozart’s music is the empire of the golden mean. Nicholas Kenyon, in The Pegasus Pocket Guide to Mozart, writes, “Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions coexist within the space of a short phrase.” Mozart inhabits a middle world where beauty surges in and ebbs away, where everything is contingent and nothing pure, where, as Henry James’s Madame Merle says, an envelope of circumstances encloses every human life.
