Mozart’s secrets

What new information can be gathered from yet another biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that has not been said in the hundreds (some say more than two thousand) of this musician’s life stories? I am not an expert on Mozart, but some facts are relatively known by all those interested in music. Paul Johnson’s Mozart. A Life (Viking, 2013, pp. 164) is not an academic biography (the author does not cite where his quotations from others come from), nor a biography written for composers by a composer (like the Beethoven’s biography discussed in my post below (Beethoven’s tears). The book is a quick read, written by an obvious aficionado. There is an Epilogue/Appendix by Daniel Johnson entitled “Mozart in London” dealing with Mozart’s visit to that town; this appendix is more a panegyric to London than anything else. The book closes with a short section on Further Reading followed by an Index. My comments are based on what I knew about Mozart’s life and those I found in Johnson’s book.

Mozart and languages

It is part of Mozart’s lore that when he and his sister Nannerl were young, they invented a secret language. It would be interesting to find out what the form of this language was and whether they kept the knowledge of it. Johnson mentions that Mozart probably learnt how to read music notes before knowing how to read words. Not only that, but his facility with learning languages is also brought up: “His father taught him Latin without difficulty. But English he picked up for himself, and the following year he mastered a good deal of Italian. Years after, he is recorded as speaking English fluently and with a good accent.” (p. 14; source of information not indicated). The biography does not go deeper into this topic. One can surmise that as regards Latin, it was the language of the Catholic mass, and as regards Italian, it was the language of the opera, so Mozart had to be in contact with these languages weekly, if not daily. It would be an interesting research to delve into the process of learning languages in Mozart’s time, and especially by him.

Gaieties of life or complexity of character?

Johnson frequently underlines the fact that Mozart’s character leaned greatly towards cheerfulness. “The great thing about Mozart, one reason why people liked him so much, was that he added hugely to the gaieties of life. Gay himself by nature, he saw no reason why people should not enjoy a little innocent pleasure, or not-so-innocent pleasure, for that matter.” (p. 61) Dances, jokes, double-entendres, musical jokes, billiards, all contributed to this enjoyment of life.  He loved to dance, and he composed many dance pieces (minuets, gavottes, country dances, waltzes and others), and music for ballet. Family and friends gatherings offered the occasions for not only playing music, trying his new compositions, and discussing them, but also for exchanging new jokes and basically having fun. Mozart’s membership in the Freemasons is well known. It is less discussed (one example may be from the Catholic side https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/mozart-masonry-and-catholicism) how this membership, whose purpose is very far from having fun, added to the complexity of Mozart’s character, since gaiety and Masonry have very different rules and may have clashed in the composer’s mind. Add to this Mozart’s faith and his relationship to the Catholic church. Clearly, he was able to incorporate all this in his music, even though his joy, Catholicism and Freemasonry may have clashed, or maybe just because of this clash he was able to create such musical masterpieces.

Offending the ear

In a letter to his father, Mozart writes about the parts in his The Abduction from the Seraglio. There is an interesting thought which Johnson does not dwell on:

… passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music… (pp. 84-85)

So many questions come to mind stemming from this sentence: What is disgust? How is it expressed in music? What does ‘offending the ear’ mean? Why does Mozart want to please the listener? Is it the composer’s duty to please the listener? Do we have here Mozart’s definition of music as something that does not offend the ear and pleases the listener? Is this definition applicable only to compositions written in the classical style or can/should it be generalized? This Mozart’s opinion perhaps explains why his compositions have been called ‘elegant’ (I don’t remember by whom).

Creating musical problems

Johnson writes, on p. 95, “Because of his early training and exceptional musical intelligence, Mozart found most things easy and loved creating problems for himself and so, invariably, for singers and players. As his letters to his father show again and again, he knew exactly when he made his work hard to play and harder still to get exactly right. It is not true to say that he invented hard passages entirely for their own sake – that would have been perverse and unmusical – but to get an effect, he was ready to make the orchestra “sweat,” as he put it, and the singers to give their utmost.”

Interestingly, Beethoven, too, was prone to compose hard sections and pieces, and he too, was not worried about how the members of the orchestra felt about it (he sent them home to practice!). My interest here stems from the fact that the idea of “difficulty” underpins the manner in which geniuses operate – i.e., they cause their aims to converge at any cost. But there are different levels of difficulty and different types of it. Each pianist has to decide how to approach the difficulties, for ex., found in he sonata K457. From a general perspective, the modern age shuns difficulties, learners are forced to “have fun” learning.

In conclusion, this biography opened up more questions and more topics to delve into, rather than providing answer and solutions to existing queries. It does, moreover, ask us to think slightly differently not about Mozart himself, but about the closest people to him, for ex., we should consider whether his father was really such a monster as he usually is portrayed, or whether Constance was really such a bad housewife as has been written about her. All in all, whether you love Mozart’s music, or not, this biography will not change your mind about this genial composer.

Beethoven’s tears

A good biography allows the readers to discover the person described as well as learn more about themselves and humanity in general. Jan Swafford’s Beethoven. Anguish and Triumph (Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2014, pp. 1077)) is just such biography. Although written from the perspective of a writer who is also a composer, the book places Ludwig van Beethoven in his historical setting, describes his family life, and his composing process, and, above all, sheds some of the mythical encrustations that history has layered on this musical genius. After having read this biography, I have a much more nuanced and corrected view of the composer, and I appreciate his music so much more than before. Rather than attempting to analyze the book chapter by chapter, I chose to concentrate on three ideas that form sort of a background of how I understand Beethoven, humanity, and myself.

Beethoven’s tears

The book reports a visit to Beethoven’s family when he was very young, during which the visitor saw small Ludwig standing on a stool, playing the piano, and crying, with his father looming over the little child. This picture conjured many questions in my mind, least of which about how children have been and are “educated”. It is an idle and useless speculation to ask whether the composer would have been as great as he was without his early forced instruction in piano playing. But it is entirely possible that this experience molded Beethoven’s thought, often expressed in the biography, that “Difficult is good”. In other words, the composer put forward in his mind a challenge to himself: he made difficulty a driving force which helped him to overcome the obstacles that for us would seem insurmountable, such as his constant health crises, financial situation, sentimental problems, family troubles, etc. When a Scottish publisher asks Beethoven to make his original versions of Scottish songs easier for the young ladies to play them, Beethoven is recalcitrant. On other occasions, when orchestra members complained to him that his music is too difficult to play, he only says ‘go home and practice’. His attitude that ‘difficult is good’ is illustrated throughout his life. He does not complain excessively about anything: his health, his financial situation, his sentimental problems, his family troubles, and there were many of each almost constantly. It is more than Freudian “sublimation”, it is an attitude that the test one puts oneself in has a solution which comes from deep inside. It is a truly admirable stance, one that could help humanity to solve the problems we are facing, both at the individual and the general level.

Rossini’s tears

Gioacchino Rossini visited Beethoven in 1822. Swafford writes:

“Rossini was stunned by two things in that visit: the squalor of the rooms and the warmth with which Beethoven greeted this rival who he knew was eclipsing him. There was no conversation; Beethoven could not make out a word Rossini said. But Beethoven congratulated him for The Barber of Seville. … Rossini left in tears. That night he was the prize guest of a party at Prince Metternich’s. He pleaded with the assembled aristocrats, saying something must be done for the “greatest genius of the age.” They brushed him off. Beethoven is crazy, misanthropic, they said. His misery is his own doing.” (p. 751)

This episode plainly illustrates two things: one, that the compassion of an individual is not enough to be of any lasting consequence, and two, that the most contemptible answer to someone else’s difficulties is to blame solely the individual themselves. We don’t know if Rossini (or for that matter anyone else) provided some financial support to the composer. On the other hand, it is as if the aristocrats’ views provide us with connections to Beethoven’s political – quasi democratic/egalitarian – beliefs about the upper classes, their falseness, aloofness, and hypocrisy. Growing up in Bonn during the Enlightenment, reading German poetry, encountering other composers, taught Beethoven about political ideologies, about possible changes in the world, and about the power of some individuals to affect changes. Seeing this episode from a contemporary perspective and comparing it to prevailing attitudes today illustrates the fact that we still have to learn a lot about equality, both at the individual level, and at the general level. It’s enough to see how the majority of the US citizens and their political parties fear, dread, and are terrified by egalitarian thoughts. As I have written elsewhere, universal income could be the answer to most of the social and economic problems, but this solution is not acceptable nowadays.

“To keep the whole in view”

One of the three epigraphs that Swafford offers after the title page of her biography is by Beethoven. She does not indicate where it comes from. It reads

“My custom even when I am composing instrumental music is always to keep the whole in view”.

In composing, therefore, Beethoven had a firm theme which had to fit in the whole composition, and Swafford gives numerous examples how that pans out in his oeuvre. What I found interesting is the word even, because it indicates that Beethoven, when doing/thinking anything, kept “the whole in view”. My interpretation is that he took account of what nowadays can be called the context. It seems that he was not rash in his judgement of people (even though he was wrong about Napoleon); he was widely read and his ideas stemmed not exclusively from the Enlightenment. He held high ideals which he translated into music. It is clear that humanity needs lofty ideals, of which there is dearth at present. But more than that, we need to keep the whole in view, keep asking about the context in which certain events happen, whether they be individual or national or general. But for that we need an education that does not focus on jobs, perpetuating therefore the capitalist hegemony.

In conclusion, this biography provides ample opportunity to learn about Ludwig van Beethoven, about the political, economic, and historical context of his life. But it also offers a lot of possibilities to look at one individual’s life with a compassionate outlook that is not judgmental. Above all, it teaches us more about ourselves and out humanity.