|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Miracle of Mozart
| Article
# : |
19028 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,461 Words |
| Author
: |
Robert R. Reilly
Robert R. Reilly's second part of his article on English music
appears in the August 1990 issue of The World & I. |
What we think of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart tells us more about ourselves that it does about Mozart. While this reflection is brought on by more recent events, it no doubt has always been true since the end of the eighteenth century. Each generation since Mozart has sized itself up with respect to him. He is, as music professor Richard Taruskin has pointed out, "the very earliest composer by whom works in practically every genre he cultivated have been maintained in an unbroken public performing tradition to our time." Certainly his genius has always been recognized, but with varying degrees of popularity, and from different perspectives.
In his own day, Mozart was considered harmonically complicated and daring, but hardly revolutionary in the later Beethoven cast. The Emperor Joseph's famous critical comment was: "too many notes, my dear Mozart." Franz Joseph Haydn informed Mozart's father, Leopold, that his son was the greatest living composer. After Mozart's death, Haydn forbade anyone to mention Mozart's name in his presence because he would burst out weeping.
Mozart was deeply admired by Beethoven, but it was the influence of Beethoven's works that spawned the heroic Romanticism that by the late nineteenth century had lost all sense of scale and control, and that later came crashing down in a deflated heap of despair in the early twentieth century. Music of such exquisite balance and scale as Mozart's inevitably faded into the background.
During this period, however, Mozart was revered by the select. "There is only one Mozart," Giacchino Rossini wrote. Ferruccio Busoni said that Mozart was "the most perfect example of musical talent that we have even had." Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky, whose great music skirted bloated bathos more closely than that of any other major composer, was, typically, emotionally unrestrained and overwrought in his tribute of Mozart: "I love Mozart as the musical Christ. I do not think this comparison is blasphemous. Mozart was as pure as an angel, and his music is full of divine beauty...the culminating point of all beauty in the sphere of music." Gustav Mahler, the master of the mega-orchestra and composer of the Symphony of a thousand, died with only one word on his lips: "Mozart." Mozart also found cult among the literary. George Bernard Shaw said Mozart's was "the only music written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God."
The Porcelain Figurine
This attitude, however, reflected a
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
