Alex Ross - Listen to This

Present-day scholars are picking away at the myths and fantasies that have encrusted the composer. They describe him not as a naïve prodigy or a suffering outcast but as a hardworking, ambitious, successful musician—“Mozart as a Working Stiff,” to borrow the title of an essay by Neal Zaslaw. One notable upshot has been the rehabilitation of Leopold Mozart, who long loomed over his son’s life story as an oppressive, even abusive, figure. Maynard Solomon, in his 1995 biography, presented damning evidence against Leopold, writing of the father’s “erotically tinged drive to dominate” his son. Leopold is said to have exploited Wolfgang in his early years, squirreling away profits from their European tours. When the gifted child became a problematic teen, Leopold exhibited an unhealthy possessiveness, opposing his son’s marriage plans and berating him for what he considered spendthrift behavior. His letters contain passages of world-class manipulation. “Your whole intent is to ruin me so you can build your castles in the air,” Leopold wrote in 1778, not long after his wife died while accompanying her son to Paris. “I hope that, after your mother had to die in Paris already, you will not also burden your conscience by expediting the death of your father.”

Leopold was a bit of a monster, but the job of raising the Miracle of Salzburg would have sapped anyone’s patience. Ruth Halliwell made the case for Leopold in her illuminating 1998 book, The Mozart Family. The father didn’t so much exploit the son as make him possible. Those long European tours gave Mozart an incomparable education; he went to London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Munich, met the monarchs and princes of the day, and talked to most of the leading composers. Knowing that his son’s musical gifts far exceeded his own, Leopold offered advice on the practical aspects of art and life, in which he was rather better versed. Who can deny the truth of Leopold’s maxim “Where money is plentiful, everything is dear, and where living is cheap, money will be scarce”? Or: “The best way to make people feel ashamed of themselves is to be extremely friendly and polite to those who are your enemies”? Mozart’s path would have been easier if he had absorbed a few of the bland but useful adages that his father passed along.

The letters between father and son become much livelier when music is the subject. On musical matters, the Mozarts are essentially of one mind; Leopold never seems to be reining in his son’s imagination. In late 1780 and early 1781, Mozart was in Munich, preparing his first major opera, Idomeneo, while Leopold was in Salzburg, supervising the librettist. The young composer was unleashing every expressive device available to him: as David Cairns writes, in his 2006 book Mozart and His Operas, Idomeneo touches on “love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment, stoicism, heroic resolution; the ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the horrors of dementia, the agonizing dilemma of a ruler trapped in the consequences of his actions; mass hysteria, panic in the face of an unknown scourge, turning to awe before the yet more terrible fact; the strange peace that can follow intense grief; the infinite tenderness of a father’s last farewell to his son.” Leopold was mostly a bystander to Mozart’s feat, but he did make one crucial contribution: for a pivotal scene in Act III, when the voice of Neptune’s oracle rises from the depths, he requested “moving, terrifying, and altogether unusual” music, and went on to suggest a series of sudden crescendos and decrescendos in the brass and winds, bracketing the vocal phrases. Exactly this effect appears in the finished score.

Perhaps Leopold’s greatest gift to his son was the instruction to compose with both musical insiders and the general public in mind. In a letter from 1782, Mozart takes that favorite phrase of his father’s—“the golden mean”—and weaves around it a pragmatic philosophy that is just as relevant now as it was in the eighteenth century:

These concertos [Nos. 11, 12, and 13] are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why … The golden mean of truth in all things is no longer either known or appreciated. In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no sensible man can understand it.

One wonders what Mozart would have made of today’s musical scene, where the gap between inanity and unintelligibility is spectacularly wide.

Scholars have also demolished the old picture of Mozart as an idiot savant who transcribed the music playing in his brain. Instead, he seems to have refined his ideas to an almost manic degree. Examination of Mozart’s surviving sketches and drafts—Constanze threw many manuscripts away—reveals that the composer sometimes began a piece, set it aside, and resumed it months or years later; rewrote troubling sections several times in a row; started movements from scratch when a first attempt failed to satisfy; and waited to finish an aria until a singer had tried out the opening. Ulrich Konrad calls these stockpiles of material “departure points”—“a delineation of intellectual places to which Mozart could return as necessary.” In other words, the music in Mozart’s mind may have been like a huge map of half-explored territories; in a way, he was writing all his works all the time. The new image of him as a kind of improvising perfectionist is even more daunting than the previous one of God’s stenographer. Ambitious parents who play the Baby Mozart video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.

In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—180 CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set was later reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. One day I transferred it to my iPod and discovered that Mozart requires, at the minimum listenable bitrate, 9.77 gigabytes.

On a computer, you can use search functions to create cross-sections of Mozart—a dreamworld of adagios, a neo-Baroque swirl of fantasias and fugues, a nonet of quintets (all major works). To listen to his twenty-seven settings of the Kyrie is to appreciate his inexhaustible invention: they range from the ravishingly sweet to the forbiddingly severe, each a convincing simulacrum of the power of the Lord. But the obvious challenge was to go through the whole megillah—to begin with the Andante in C Major (K. 1a), which Mozart wrote when he was five, and proceed to the bitter end, the Requiem (K. 626), which he left unfinished at his death, at thirty-five. It took me three months. I can’t claim to have given every bar close attention—a patch of recitative in the early opera La finta semplice (The Pretend Simpleton) was disrupted by a protracted public-address announcement at Detroit Metro Airport, and most of the Contredanse No. 4 in F (K. 101) was drowned out by the crack drum corps Drumedies performing in the Times Square subway station—but I did get a bird’s-eye view of Mozart’s achievement, and was more in awe than ever.

From the start, the music is astonishingly well made. (A caveat from the scholarly demythologizers: most of the earliest works were “corrected” by Leopold.) Young Mozart shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of the day: Baroque sacred music, opera buffa and opera seria, Gluckian reform opera, Haydn’s classicism, the Mannheim symphonic school, Sturm und Drang agitation, and so on. Quite a bit of the music is reassuringly routine; Hermann Abert writes, in his massive 1921 biography of the composer, that Mozart “evolved along sound lines, without any supernatural leaps and bounds.” But very early there are flashes of individuality. Some of the first come in the London Sketchbook, which dates from Mozart’s London sojourn of 1764 and 1765 (and which Leopold did not touch). A piece in G minor (K. 15p) features a stormily descending chromatic bass line—a Bachian gesture with a trace of boyish impudence. A piece in E-flat major (K. 15kk) has gently murmuring chords and mournful slips into the minor, forecasting time-suspending andantes and adagios to come.