European Reading Challenge #10

Note: Alan Watts sometimes spoke of materialists and abstractionists. Materialists are devoted to loafing and savoring the physical and the present while the abstractionists do their damnedest to make us materialist scamps “fit” or “correct” or “productive” or “future-oriented.” Mozart was a materialist: Listen to the waves. Beethoven was an abstractionist: Enjoy listening to the waves!

Mozart: A Life – Peter Gay

Wolfgang’s father Leopold was musically talented but Leopold ascribed to God his daughter’s prodigious musical proficiency and his son’s musical genius. Piety did not stop Leopold from taking the divinely inspired children on grueling road trips to perform at European courts. Uncomfortable carriages. Bad food. Epidemics. Nor could late nights and perpetual instability have been healthy for the two kids. It was on one of these long exhausting tours that our Mozart contracted rheumatic fever. He was to suffer periodic relapses of fever, swelling, rash, and fatigue in youth and adulthood. It’s not a stretch to claim rheumatic fever contributed to his early death, of exhaustion and over-work, at 35 years of age, in 1791.

Gay points out that young Mozart soaked up all the different genres of music he was exposed to: J.C. Bach for cantatas, Handel for fugues, Hayden for symphonies, and Gluck for operas. Mozart started composing when he was only a child of seven years old. Mozart found his own voice when he was about 16 years old, in the finale of KV 134 Symphony No. 21 in A major. His favorite genre was opera and many say he was the greatest opera composer of all time.

Not a musicologist, historian Gay discusses the music in lay terms for the general reader. Gay also mentions Mozart‘s practical jokes and sense of comedy. And quotes scatological passages from letters that may be hilarious or bewildering, depending on the reader’s predispositions. Not a womanizer, Mozart was fond of strong women – wife Constanze was decidedly not a ditz though she was a soprano* - and featured strong women characters in his operas.

The short biography is for readers that want the highlights of the life and times of the subject. Without being callous about it, Gay offers contra-Romantic views of Mozart’s last year and his demise. For instance, though many people sigh at the forlorn image of a simple cart taking the remains of the neglected abused artist to a common grave with no stone or flowers, there was no way Mozart’s estate, facing huge debt, could pay for a private funeral. 

Its only drawback is that while it lists many books for further reading, it does not list recordings that experts would recommend to the lay listener. I know it is beyond the scope of the life, but interesting would have been a chapter on the history of the Mozart legend and how after WWII the Mozart we know today was constructed by the recording industry and notables such as Malcolm Bilson, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Charles Mackerras, Alfred Brendel, Wolfgang Meyer, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

* “Why is there a soprano outside of your door? She can't find the key and doesn't know when to come in” is just one egregious example of the appalling stereotypes that dog sopranos to this day.