Mozart Essay, Research Paper
“For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music.” With this appraisal the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1980, begins its magisterial article on Beethoven. More than a decade later one might not apply this statement to the Teutonic Goliath but to the David of Mozart. Not only is this year (1991) the bicentennial of Mozart’s death, it also comes at a time when his pristine classical image has become the preferred taste over Beethoven’s more extroverted expression.
Turn your channel to PBS, where Hugh Downs or Peter Ustinov is narrating a Mozart special. Turn to one of the commercial channels, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 and “Little” G Minor Symphony K. 183/173dB are selling MacIntosh computers, Don Giovanni gives class to Cheer laundry detergent, The Marriage of Figaro hawks the Sirocco automobile, the Requiem’s Lacrymosa seemingly sanctifies Lee Jeans, and another piano concerto (K. 482) perks Maxwell House coffee. The recovery of a Mozart symphony, even if juvenilia, receives front-page coverage from The New York Times. Dealers and collectors will go to any extreme for a piece of the action; Mozart autographs sell at the same prices as fine paintings, and dealers in one case dismembered the “Andretter” Serenade K. 185, retailing it piecemeal for greater profit. The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni now rival the box-office receipts of La Boheme and Madame Butterfly.
This popularization of Mozart did not come from the opera houses or concert halls — its most direct beneficiaries — but from the stage and screen. More than any other factor, the Mozart mania of the 1980s was initiated by Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. It and the subsequent film directed by Milos Forman did more for Mozart’s case than anything else in the two hundred years since the composer’s death. Amadeus ran in London, Washington, and New York and was translated into German and Hungarian, among other languages, as it entered the repertoire of the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Nemzeti Szinhaz in Budapest. Shaffer continually revised the stage version with, in his words, “a nearly obsessive pursuit of clarity, structural order, and drama. . . . One of the faults which I [Shaffer] believe existed in the London version was simply that Salieri has too little to do with Mozart’s ruin.” For the film version, Shaffer and Forman again revised the script, not only for the new medium but also for a larger and less-sophisticated audience. Both men agreed that we were not making an objective “Life of Wolfgang Mozart.” This cannot be stressed too strongly. Obviously, Amadeus on the stage was never intended to be a documentary biography of the composer and the film is even less of one. . . . But we are also blatantly claiming the grand license of the storyteller to embellish his tale with fictional ornament, and — above all — to supply it with a climax whose sole justification need be that it enthralls his audience and emblazons his theme.
Even more so than on the stage, the film translated what could be accepted as compelling drama into what for many viewers became the time, place, and characters of history. The caveats published with the stage play were never imprinted on celluloid; fiction was never segregated from truth.
Amadeus centers on the deep envy of the imperial court composer Antonio Salieri of Mozart’s godlike gifts as a composer. Despite Mozart’s uncouthness and immaturity, he produced one work after another that seemed divinely sponsored as they transcended his own personality. He was beloved of God — truly befitting the name “Amadeus.” Both the play and the film concern themselves with the most significant decade in the composer’s life, beginning with his dismissal from the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg in 1781 until his death ten years later. During this time Mozart resided in Vienna and became a composer free from the daily obligations of court appointments, but encumbered by the quest for financial stability. In this decade Mozart composed a large number of works astonishing for their quality. Amadeus sets much of its action at the Viennese court in order to focus on Salieri’s rivalry with Mozart. Though some of its situations might be plausible, much of it is an almost surrealistic distortion of court life and the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Today, more than seven years after the film’s release, musicologists are still asked about Wolfgang, Constanze, and Leopold Mozart, the Emperor Joseph II, and Antonio Salieri. Were they really like that? In this “the Mozart year” of 1991, it is time to review this portrayal of a cultural icon in order to begin setting the record straight.
“Fictional ornament” understates the gulf between what was the invention of the authors and historical truth. No doubt both Shaffer and Forman knew the facts of Mozart’s biography and were even familiar with some of the historical controversies. Their metamorphosis of Mozart’s life was analogous to Da Ponte’s transformation of Beaumarchais’s play The Marriage of Figaro into an operatic libretto: the length was made to fit the time frame of the medium, the number of characters was reduced, and the situations streamlined and combined.
Yet, the settings and motivations of the characters might still be recreations of eighteenth-century life. If Shaffer and Forman had accomplished or even intended this goal, much of the power of their film would have been diminished for today’s audience. Motivations, goals, and feelings, or at least the way they were expressed and retained by men and women of Mozart’s day, would have been decidedly different from ours. For example, Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart had six children brought to full term, and only two survived into adulthood, a ratio common for the time. If their reaction to the death of each child were on the same scale as the reaction to a child’s death in the 1990s, they would have been in an almost perpetual state of mourning during the decade of their marriage.
Obsessively jealous personality
Though titled Amadeus, it is the character of Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) who remains at the center of Shaffer’s work. Salieri held high posts in the Viennese imperial musical establishment from 1774 until 1824. In his last years he suffered from senility. Among the rumors circulating in Vienna around 1824 was one saying that Salieri had said he poisoned Mozart. The tale reached Beethoven and many others. In 1825 Salieri’s two attendants attested that they had never heard such words from their charge, and a friend of Mozart’s physician reported that Wolfgang had died of a fever that was epidemic at that time in Vienna. From an unproved premise Shaffer developed this, the central character in Amadeus, as one obsessed by and murderously jealous of Mozart’s genius.
Constanze, Mozart’s widow, fanned the rumor’s flame by endorsing it; she also believed that Salieri had plotted against her husband. But it is more likely, if any hot hostility even existed, that Salieri was protecting his own turf within the imperial establishment. If a court cabal had been so powerful and Salieri so maniacal about preventing Mozart’s success, neither The Abduction from the Seraglio, nor The Marriage of Figaro and Cos? fan tutte would have been composed for or performed in the court theaters. In addition, Salieri would certainly not have shared a double operatic bill at the Sch?nbrunn palace with Mozart in February 1786 if such bad blood existed between them. Furthermore, Mozart did receive a court appointment as Kammermusicus in December 1787 and at the time of his death was to be appointed Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Salieri even attended a performance of The Magic Flute on October 13, 1791, reportedly visited Mozart the day before he died, and, according to one account was a mourner at the funeral on December 6.
If Salieri had been an obsessively jealous personality, as shown in Amadeus, there would have been many opportunities to observe it. As court composer and later imperial Kapellmeister he taught many gifted students. Beethoven studied with him the setting of Italian texts, and Salieri early on recognized Schubert’s special gifts: “That one knows everything; he composes operas, songs, quartets, symphonies and whatever you will.” In June 1816 the revered Kapellmeister celebrated fifty years in the service of the emperor, which prompted Schubert to enter a private and honest tribute in his diary:
It must be fine and inspiring for a musician to have all his pupils gathered about him, to see how each strives to give of his best in honor of the master’s jubilee, to hear in all their compositions the simple expressions of Nature, free from all that eccentricity which tends to govern most composers nowadays, and for which we are indebted — almost wholly — to one of our greatest German musicians [Beethoven]. That eccentricity confuses and confounds, without distinguishing between them, tragic and comic, sacred and profane, pleasant and unpleasant, heroic strains and mere noise; it engenders in people not love but madness; it rouses them to scornful laughter instead of lifting up their thoughts to God. To have banned these extravagances from the circle of his pupils, and to have kept them, instead, at the pure source of Nature must be the greatest satisfaction to a musician who, following in Gluck’s steps, seeks his inspiration in Nature alone, despite the unnatural influences of the present day.
Anselm Huttenbrenner reported that Salieri always spoke of Mozart “with exceptional respect,” and the two composers were on friendly enough terms so that Salieri would loan Mozart scores from the court library. Apart from Constanze’s remark, there exists no independent evidence to conclude that Salieri and Mozart were on bad terms. On the contrary, their relationship may have been a healthy professional one.
According to the film, the basis of Salieri’s jealousy was his desire, while still a boy in Italy, to become “a great composer like Mozart.” That Salieri in old age doubts his confessor’s aphorism that “all men are equal in God’s eyes,” by comparing himself again to Mozart is a stroke of dramatic brilliance. But the idea, postulated around 1760 by an Italian youth, of a “great composer” is a concept nearly a half-century ahead of its time and almost entirely a nineteenth-century Teutonic idea. In Amadeus, all that remains of the historical Salieri are his posts as court composer and imperial Kapellmeister and his appetite for Viennese bonbons.
Though Salieri never achieved historical greatness, he was rightfully a highly respected and successful composer whose ability to provide operas for the court and to administer its musical establishment cannot be questioned. In contrast, Salieri’s music performed in Amadeus is simpleminded and unworthy of his true abilities. There is no question that Mozart’s improvisational and performance skills were exceptional; Salieri’s remain unknown. However, by showing Salieri as a barely competent musician, the disparity of musical talent is deepened, thereby furthering Shaffer’s dramatic plan. Salieri’s music may never have achieved immortality, but it was always correct, skillful, and appropriate.
Characters on the periphery
Salieri’s employer, the Emperor Joseph II, also receives condescending treatment at odds with what we know of him. Shaffer and Forman portray the emperor as naive and as a poorly trained musician; his struggle through Salieri’s easy little march drives this point home. If anything, Joseph II was a musical sophisticate and practitioner of a rather high order. The emperor attended to and participated in the management of his theaters and made time nearly every evening for chamber music in which he often took an active part either on the cello or at the keyboard. During his younger years, he was a student of Wenzel Raimund Birck (1718-63), and in 1762 he played the organ for a litany by Johann Adolf Hasse that was composed expressly to be performed by the imperial family. Joseph’s reaction to Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio was “too many notes.” Today, we regard this opinion as inappropriate, but it was widely shared during the eighteenth century by both connoisseurs and amateurs. Mozart’s six string quartets dedicated to Haydn were regarded by many as unfathomable and unplayable, for there were “too many wrong notes.” Some dissatisfied customers returned the parts to Mozart’s publisher Artaria.
Shaffer’s archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymous Colloredo, is Joseph II’s political and philosophical antipode; in Amadeus Joseph wanted to infuriate the archbishop. In fact, the election of Colloredo after the death of Sigismund Christoph Schrattenbach was a marked change toward Josephian ideals in Salzburg. Schrattenbach’s reputation as benevolent and Colloredo’s as imperious and difficult have stemmed mainly from the Mozart family correspondence. Judging the archbishop or anyone else on the basis of the Mozart family’s opinions is to judge them from a heavily biased source, whose central interest was to have both secure employment and the freedom to travel. Colloredo demonstrated enlightenment views and actions during his term of office, and Schrattenbach showed benevolence toward the Mozarts. He has been described by Volkmar Braunbehrens as a “crotchety, capricious bigot who professed great piety and would have been better as a children’s priest than as bishop.”
Mozart’s mother had died in Paris in 1778, and his wife’s father died in Vienna in 1779. Shaffer and Forman cleverly focus the personalities of the surviving parents with parallels from Don Giovanni and Die Zauberfl?te: Leopold Mozart becomes the Commendatore, accompanied by that figure’s dark harmonies, and Maria Cacilie Weber becomes the Queen of the Night. Mozart described Frau Weber to his father as a very difficult person, so the analogy to the Queen of the Night becomes a highly suggestive characterization. Thus, Amadeus presents Constanze’s mother, as far as we know, in generally accurate terms, even though in the film she remains on the periphery.
An ambivalent relationship
In contrast, Leopold Mozart completes — with Salieri, Wolfgang, and Constanze — the quartet of Shaffer’s main characters. His relationship to the Commendatore is one based on the surface meaning of the title and bears little other resemblance to the character in Don Giovanni, who dies preserving his daughter’s honor. Leopold is also protective, but in the sense of a meddler and harsh judge of his son. Shaffer’s introduction of Leopold as an unexpected visitor to Vienna is not the actual setting in which he first met Constanze; the couple had, in fact, traveled to Salzburg in late 1783 for a family reunion that many have supposed to have not been the most pleasant of visits. In fact, Amadeus collocates the spirit of the 1783 stay in Salzburg with Leopold’s 1785 visit to Vienna and with the circumstances of Mozart’s economic problems of the later 1780s. Leopold’s entry into the Viennese apartment, his observation of wine glasses and dishes from the previous night, his discovery of Constanze still in bed, and his accusatory questions — don’t you have a maid, how is your financial situation, they say you have debts, do you have students, and, to Constanze, are you expecting — signal more today’s folkways of upright living than those of a successful eighteenth-century free-lance musician in Vienna. If the questions are not quite right, the message they send to twentieth-century men and women about Leopold is clear enough. No doubt a letter Leopold sent to the Baroness von Waldstadten in Vienna was a central source for the Amadeus character: “When I was a young fellow I used to think that philosophers were people who said little, seldom laughed and turned a sulky face upon the world in general. But my own experiences have completely persuaded me that without knowing it I must be a philosopher.”
In contrast, when Leopold actually did visit his son from February 11 to April 25, 1785, Wolfgang was in the midst of high popularity and was financially successful. During the period of Leopold’s visit, Mozart gave six subscription concerts (February 11, 18, 25, March 4, 11, and 18); Joseph Haydn visited on February 12 for a reading of the first three of the six quartets that Wolfgang dedicated to him and told Leopold that his son was the greatest composer he knew in person or by reputation. On February 13, Mozart played his Piano Concerto K. 456 at the Burgtheater; February 15 again another Concerto K. 466 at the same house; February 21 performed for Count Zichy; March 10 gave another concert at the Burgtheater; March 13 and 15 the Musicians Society (Tonk?nstler Societ?t) performed Mozart’s oratorio Davide Penitente at the Burgtheater; March 20 Mozart was probably booked for Anna Storace’s concert; April 2 performed all six of the “Haydn” Quartets at the residence of Baron Wetzlar von Plankenstern; and April 24 the Freemason Cantata K. 471 was heard at the lodge “Zur Eintracht.” All this was heady stuff for his father. Not even the tours the family made during the 1760s and 1770s could compare with such activity, and the money Mozart earned in this time was several times Leopold’s yearly salary. His father’s reaction was, for this old trouper, uncharacteristic: “We never get to bed before one o’clock and I never get up before nine. We lunch at two or half past. The weather is horrible. Every day there are concerts; and the whole time is given up to teaching, music, composing and so forth. I feel rather out of it all. If only the concerts were over! It is impossible for me to describe the rush and bustle. Since my arrival your brother’s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theatre or to some other house. He has had a large fortepiano pedal made, which stands under the instrument and is about two feet longer and extremely heavy. It is taken to the Mehlgrube every Friday and has also been taken to Count Zichy’s and to Prince Kaunitz’s.”