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Too much Mozart makes you sick
By Norman Lebrecht / December 14, 2005
They are steam cleaning the streets of Vienna ahead of next month’s birthday weekend
when pilgrim walks are planned around the composer’s shrines. Salzburg is rolling out
brochures for its 2006 summer festival, which will stage every opera in the Kochel
canon from infantile fragments to The Magic Flute, 22 in all. Pierre Boulez, the pope
of musical modernism, will break 80 years of principled abstinence to conduct a
mostly-Mozart concert, a celebrity virgin on the altar of musical commerce.
Wherever you go in the coming year, you won’t escape Mozart. The 250th anniversary of
his birth on January 27 1756 is being celebrated with joyless efficiency as a tourist
magnet to the land of his birth and a universal sales pitch for his over-worked
output. The complete 626 works are being marketed on record in two special-offer super
coffers. All the world’s orchestras will be playing Mozart, wall to wall, starting
with the Vienna Philharmonic on tour this weekend.
Mozart is the superstore wallpaper of classical music, the composer who pleases most
and offends least. Lively, melodic, dissonance free: what’s not to like? The music is
not just charming, it’s full of good vibes.
The Mozart Effect, an American resource centre which ascribes ’transformational
powers’ to Austria’s little wonderlad, collects empirical evidence to show that
Mozart, but no other music, improves learning, memory, winegrowing and toilet training
and should be drummed into classes of pregnant mothers like breathing exercises.
A ’molecular basis’ identified in Mozart’s sonata for two pianos is supposed to have
stimulated exceptional brain activity in laboratory rats. How can one argue with such
’proof’? Science, after all, confirms what we want to believe - that art is good for
us and that Mozart, in his short-lived naivety, represents a prelapsarian ideal of
organic beauty, unpolluted by industrial filth and loss of faith. Nice, if only it
were true.
The chocolate-box image of Mozart as a little miracle can be promptly banged on the
head. The hard-knocks son of a cynical court musician, Mozart was taught from first
principles to ingratiate himself musically with people of wealth and power. The boy,
on tour from age five, hopped into the laps of queens and played limpid consolations
to ruthless monarchs. Recognising that his music was better than most, he took
pleasure in humiliating court rivals and crudely abused them in letters back home.
A coprophiliac obsession with bodily functions, accurately evinced in Peter Shaffer’s
play and Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus, was a clear sign of arrested emotional
development. His marriage proved unstable and his inability to control the large
amounts he earned from wealthy Viennese patrons was a symptom of the infantile
behaviour that hastened his early death and pauper burial. Musical genius he may have
been, but Mozart was no Einstein. For secrets of the universe, seek elsewhere.
The key test of any composer’s importance is the extent to which he reshaped the art.
Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward. Unlike Bach and
Handel who inherited a dying legacy and vitalised it beyond recognition, unlike Haydn
who invented the sonata form without which music would never have acquired its
classical dimension, Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he
knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a
progenitor of Muzak.
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Some scholars have claimed revolutionary propensities for Mozart, but that is wishful
nonsense. His operas of knowing servants and stupid masters were conceived by Da
Ponte, a renegade priest, from plays by Beaumachais and Ariosto; and, while Mozart
once indulged in backchat to the all-high Emperor Joseph II, he knew all too well
where his breakfast brioche was buttered. He lacked the rage of justice that pushed
Beethoven into isolation, or any urge to change the world. Mozart wrote a little night
music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary as regressive, a composer
content to keep music in a state of servility so long as it kept him well supplied
with frilled cuffs and fancy quills.
Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for celebration and little indeed was done
to mark the centenary of his birth, in 1856, or of his death in 1891. The bandwaggon
of Mozart commemorations was invented by the Nazis in 1941 and fuelled by post-War
rivalries in 1956 when Deutsche Grammophon rose the from ruins to beat the busy
British labels, EMI and Decca, to a first recorded cycle of the Da Ponte operas.
The 1991 bicentennial of Mozart’s death turned Salzburg into a swamp of bad taste and
cupidity. The world premiere of a kitsch opera, Mozart in New York, had me checking my
watch every five unending minutes. The record industry, still vibrant, splattered
Mozart over every vacant hoarding and a new phenomenon, Classic FM, launched in 1992
on the Mozart tide, ensured that we would never be more than a fingerstretch away from
the nearest marzipan chord.
What good all this Mozart does is disputable. For all the pseudoscience of the Mozart
Effect I have yet to see a life elevated by Cosi fan tutte or a criminal reformed by
the plinks of a flute and harp concerto. Where ten days of Bach on BBC Radio 3 will
flush out the world’s ears and open minds to limitless vistas, the coming year of
Mozart feels like a term at Guantanamo Bay without the sunshine. There will be no
refuge from neatly resolved chords, no escaping that ingratiating musical grin.
Don’t look to mass media for context or quality control. Both the BBC and independent
channels have rejected any critical perspective on Mozart in the coming year, settling
for sweet-wrapper documentaries that regurgitate familiar clichés. In this orgy of
simple-mindedness, the concurrent centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich ö a composer of
true courage and historical significance ö is being shunted to the sidelines,
celebrated by the few.
Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance
in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and
structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st
century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony.
Listen to music that matters.
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