Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

Dad sent me a noozpaper article the other day from one Christopher Hyde, who covers the musical beat for the Portland (ME) Press Herald. The article, which I can't find online, is entitled "How Mozart Lost His Edge" and follows the pattern of "Of course I love Mozart but......" that I've seen echoed among other critics in this 250th year after Mozart's birth, critics who secretly or semi-secretly believe that Mozart's music is nothing more than pleasant twaddle and that for Truly Authentic Art, one must turn to the gutsy, fearless unacknowledged legislators of the Romantic, Post-Romantic and Modern Eras.

What balls.

The whole thing is too long to reprint, but I will give you a sample of Mr. Hyde's smarmy thinking:

Mozart, in spite of his contemporary reputation as an innovator, is the darling of the Platonists, representing the unchanging music of the spheres. There is nothing in any of his works....to make one uncomfortable, and his value is in moral uplift.......

It is hard to think of the impish Mozart, with his subversive Masonic leanings, as a defender of the status quo - that role is usually reserved for Salieri - but that is what he has become for a modern audience. Rightly or wrongly, most of Mozart now fits Matisse's definition of his art as a warm armchair into which the bourgeois can sink after a hard day at the office.

It would be doing a great composer (if not the greatest) a favor if performances this year could somehow restore the edge that Mozart must have had when he was alive. One might start with the horn concertos, and their outlandish suggestions to the performer.

In other words, retro-fit Mozart as a Bad Boy, make him seem more "edgy" and perhaps he can shake his bourgeois baggage long enough for audiences to pay attention to him again.

I hardly think it is poor old Mozart's fault that to many modern ears his work sounds like elevator music. (And bloody Henri Matisse can go piss up a rope.) In fact, Mozart was an innovator. Among them, he, Joseph Haydn and (early on) Ludwig van Beethoven created, exploited and perfected a very specific form of music, the Classical style, a style that had its heyday between 1775 and 1809. Yes, the style is very much grounded in Platonistic ideas (as if this is a weakness?), but the way in which those ideas are treated by these three composers - not just in terms of grace and elegance but also in terms of intellectual rigor - is what makes their music truly noteworthy. Try listening to the work of some of the other composers in and around Vienna at the time and you will truly see how high these three stand in comparison. (As I have said many times before, Charles Rosen in an absolutely outstanding authority on this period. If you are interested in this sort of thing, I strongly recommend you read his work.) Instead of trying to trick audiences into believing that Mozart was a closet subversive, performers (and newspaper critics) should instead be spending more time explaining the actual music to those audiences in its own terms.

Oh, but of course that would take away from the Social Construct. And God forbid that anyone should judge music on how it sounds, as opposed to its socio-political ramifications. After all, everybody knows now that any artist who does not join the ranks of Shelley's unacknowledged legislators to Stick It To The Man is nothing more than a Court toady, a cringing syncophant whose art has no real value whatsoever. Matisse's bourgeois clock-watcher flopped in his armchair should not be listening for the logical symmetry of a finely-wrought sonata movement, savoring its balance and simple elegance! He shouldn't take pleasure in the supreme manner in which Mozart used music to subtly weave at least three very different emotional strains into the farewell scene in Act I of Cosi fan Tutte! No, indeed, he should be being challenged, prodded, made to feel uncomfortable, jabbed in the solar plexis, told to get out there in the streets and be.......Authentic!

Now before you start filling up the Tasty Bits (TM) Mail Sack with complaints, let me just add that yes, art can have that very function. And some of the best art does have that function. But some does not and is no less worthy because of it. My main point is that this is not what Mozart's music was about. The man was interested in music for its own sake, ars artis gratia. And trying to dress him up as something else in order to get modern audiences to give his music its appropriate due is a disservice to both the music itself and those audiences.

UPDATE: Oh, in case you're wondering, Mozart did join the Masons. But not every lodge was devoted to working out plots for simultaneously blowing up the Imperial Palace and the Cathedral. The brand of "subversiveness" that Mozart was engaged in was the small-l liberal subversiveness of opening up the higher rungs of the social ladder for talented and motivated bourgeioses like himself, not the radical subversiveness of trying to knock the ladder down. On a more pragmatic plane, I think he joined for the same reason that most of us join fraternities, lodges and boards these days - to network.

And in case you're not familiar with the story about the horn concerti refered to by Mr. Hyde, Mozart wrote these concerti for Joseph Leitgeb, a gifted player and close friend. The original scores are full of jokes and comments and, in one case, written in multi-colored ink, apparently with the idea of trying to make Leitgeb crack up while trying to negotiate the pieces' extremely difficult virtuosi passages. Basically, Mozart was joking around. Politicize that.

UPDATE DEUX: Speaking of Music and the Man, Chan fought the Law and the Law won. (Sooper Sekret note to Chan: If you'd have been playing Toscanini's rendition of the last movement of Beethoven's 7th, the pig never would have caught you!)