On R3 this morning I heard the interviewee, on the programme ‘Private Passions’ (this is a classical music programme), say that he thought Mozart should be made a saint because he had made more people in the world happy than any saint has.
Well, I certainly do not think that saints are in the business of happiness, but I won’t go into what I do think they are about here – except to comment that it is amazing what competitive holiness will drive a person to….well, OK, I do think it is a bit more complicated than that!
Anyway, it is the claims for Mozart that interested me this morning.
Mozart, we are told, was a genius. The evidence is, of course, his music, and particularly that he composed full scale major works, such as symphonies when he was still a child. I think the first symphony was at the age of about 7. One can come at this from the opposite direction and say that if a child could compose a symphony, then composing symphonies is child’s play.
The question then would be why do other children so rarely write symphonies?
I once heard a teacher from the Royal College of Music asked if he could identify which of the students going through music training were going to be the stars of the concert halls of the future, which were going to be ‘great’ musicians. The reply was that, yes, he could tell, and it was easy: the ‘great’ musicians of the future were the ones that spent most time in the practice rooms. The teacher and presenter did not then draw the simple conclusion – that it is all a matter of practice – they could not let go of the idea of genius and so they muttered on about maybe the genius is evident in the motivation i.e. you would have to be a genius to be that well motivated.
So, at any rate, we can suppose that Mozart wrote his first symphony at the age of 7 because he never had his bottom off the piano stool from about the age of 2 or 3, not to mention the fact that he had the help and encouragement of a full-time personal tutor in his father.
Then there is the motivation that keeps a child on a piano stool hour after hour, day after day. Rather than well motivated, this can be called obsessive, and then it takes on a different cast altogether. Then one gets to the position of saying that Mozart wrote a symphony at the age of 7 because he was a dysfunctional obsessive child. So it is not just that writing a symphony is child’s play, but that only a sick child would be obsessive enough to acquire the requisite skills at so young an age. (One sees the same sort of obsessive behaviour in autistic children, among others.)
What about the claims for Mozart’s music? If I have decided that Mozart was no genius, but a sick child, where does that leave the music that people so much enjoy? Can a sick child nevertheless produce great music? In a word, NO.
There is a scene in the Peter Schaffer play, AMADEUS, a fantasy about the relationship between Mozart and the court composer, Salieri. (Just for the record, I read a copy of a letter Mozart wrote to a friend or relative, in which he rants on, in true paranoid fashion, fit to compete with J.J Rousseau, about that Salieri who is out to get him, who is plotting his downfall, and turning everyone against him etc etc.) Anyway, in this scene Mozart is trying to convince the Emperor that this new opera he wants to write will be wonderful. The members of the court think the subject rather crude. Mozart says, “I am just a vulgar man, majesty, but my music is not.” It seems to me that this is a ‘pigs might fly’ situation. I mean, a pig is a pig and will never fly. A vulgar man is a vulgar man and his music will never fly. Or to be vulgar myself, a pig will never s–t gold!
According to my understanding, the music IS the man. Everything a person does, everything they create, even the clothes they wear, all tell of who the person is. This is unavoidable.
Recently I got into a discussion with an artist who was trying to create paintings from which the artist was, as it were, absent. To do this e.g. he made his brush strokes all as even as possible, as though they might have been produced by a machine. Also, everything was the result of intellectual calculation. I argued that he was trying to achieve the impossible. He came back with ‘concept art’, a form of art in which the artist merely has the ideas, but then gets craftsmen to do the painting and constructing. But there really is no escape. He is an artist, and that alone says things about him. If he chooses to do concept art, then that too talks of who he is. The concepts and ideas behind the works are his, and they talk of him.
If I apply this thinking to the music of Mozart, then it becomes sick. I do not deny that people are getting pleasure from it, but they are getting pleasure from something that is bad, in the sense of sick, even rotten. There is nothing new in that, of course. People get pleasure from all sorts of things that are bad for them.
The real trouble arises when one allows the sick and dysfunctional to control our culture. The works of Mozart are held up before aspiring musicians and composers as the best examples to be studied and analysed and used to give them their musical education. So the sickness of Mozart is passed on down through the generations.