Alex Ross - Listen to This

“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.”

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. It is a place where genres meld; where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where comedy and tragedy, and the sensual and the sacred, are one.

You can find the golden mean running through the Andante of the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, from 1779–80. A beguiling four-bar melody appears twice, in E-flat major in the middle and in C minor at the end. The first time, the major mode is briefly shadowed by a turn into the relative minor. The second time, minor is flecked by major, creating the effect of a light in the night. The two passages are more or less the same, but the space between them could contain a novel.

The musicologist Scott Burnham has observed that Mozart offers the “sound of the loss of innocence, the ever renewable loss of innocence.” There is no more potent subject for an artist, and it explains why Mozart remains so vivid a presence. As ever, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 sends us into a pensive trance, the finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony wakes us up into a uniquely Mozartian kind of intelligent happiness, and the catastrophic climax of Don Giovanni stirs our primal fear of being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The loss of innocence was Mozart’s, too. Like the rest of us, he had to live outside the complex paradise that he created in sound.

Thousands of books have been written about Mozart, and they present a bewildering variety of images. For a long time, well into the twentieth century, many people pictured Mozart as the “eternal child”—an antic boy-man who happened to write sublime music. This was a theme of Alfred Einstein’s 1945 biography, long considered the standard work. Pushkin, in his play Mozart and Salieri, came up with an influential variant: Mozart as “idle hooligan.” This led to the eternal adolescent of the play and movie Amadeus —a potty-mouthed punk who happened to write sublime music. Other commentators have made Mozart out to be a Romantic in the making or a modernist before the fact—an aloof, tortured character, an agent of sexual subversion, or a clandestine social revolutionary.