Mozart Demythologised

Mozart: A Life
by Paul Johnson
Penguin, 2014, 164 pages, $19.99

Paul Johnson’s important new short book on Mozart presents the man and the musician in a fresh new light, in so doing laying to rest a multi­tude of traditional caricatures and canards propagated for so long by some music historians. While acknowledging that the brevity of Mozart’s life is a tragedy for music, Johnson writes:

The notion of the “Mozart tragedy” has to be seen in the context of a huge volume of work, most of the highest quality, with virtually all the masterpieces surviving in Mozart’s own hand. The truth is, he started earlier than anyone else and was still composing on his deathbed: those thirty years were crammed with creation.

From the outset he challenges one traditional image of Mozart—that of the delicate Dresden porcelain figure:

Mozart was small, not much over five foot and, with his pale blonde hair, fine skin, and small, delicate bones, looked fragile. But apart from periodic trouble with his kidney throughout his life, Mozart was healthy and active, some would say hyperactive. He rode a horse regularly, travelled endlessly … and worked relentlessly, often late into the night.

And he takes pains to dispel the myth of Mozart’s poverty:

Mozart was never remotely poor. All the years he lived in Vienna, he had a reasonably comfortable apartment near the centre of the city, which always contained one large room for family concerts. He hired a horse for morning exercise and a coach when necessary. He was quite a dressy fellow. When he died, an inventory carried out revealed that he had five frock coats, three of them cloth, one of nankeen, and one of satin … We also hear of a barber coming to dress his hair once a day, of dinner expeditions to restaurants and taverns, and of suburban roadhouses, of bottles of “fine wine” and “iced punch”.

He earned the wherewithal for all this by what today would be described as time management skills, as attested by his ability to alternate musical composition with wielding a billiard cue:

Mozart had bundles of music paper in his pocket when he entered a public billiards room and composed while waiting his turn. He calculated a long break as twenty or thirty bars. “Right! Three pots in a row! Now what key am I in?” “Oh, come on, Wolfgang, it’s your turn!”

Johnson displays the erudition we expect of him in his lucid exposition of Mozart’s place in the canon, leading us into intriguing byways. It is not common, for example, to associate Mozart with dance in the literal sense. But we learn from him that of the three major figures in Western music, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, only Wolfgang Amadeus was an inveterate and indefatigable dancer throughout his life—indeed virtually to his deathbed. His wife Constanze told the Irish tenor Michael Kelly that Mozart often said he liked dancing so much he would have liked to live as a dancer. Perhaps not surprising, as it was his world:

What is certain is that by Mozart’s day, Vienna had become the dance capital of the world, with the minuet (originally French) becoming the epitome of aristocratic enjoyment, even taking classical form in becoming, especially in Mozart symphonies, a key part of sonata-form works. Mozart saw the dance, in its various expressions, as a model of the social structure, so that in the first act of Don Giovanni he has Donna Anna and Don Ottavio dance a minuet while Don Giovanni and Zerlina do the middle-class contra dance and Masetto and Leporello perform a plebian German dance.

While all the composers wrote dances, from Gluck and Haydn to Schubert and Beethoven, Mozart was far and away the most prolific. As Johnson points out, Vienna was synonymous with dancing long before the Congress of Vienna and the coming of the waltz sanctified the diplomatic encounters on the dance floor.

All told, Mozart wrote 229 full-scored pieces. These include fifty-six German and fifty-eight contra dances. This is more than all his songs, arias, duets, canons and other vocal works composed separately outside his operas—indeed, twice as large. Not only did Mozart like dancing, he also enjoyed composing for the dance so he could get maximum pleasure out of it for himself and his friends.

Johnson’s book is, in addition to its incisive insights into Mozart’s masterpieces, a treasure-trove of illuminating anecdotes and information. As an example, we learn of Mozart taking over the percussion during a performance of The Magic Flute:

This is the only occasion we hear of him trying the glockenspiel. It got laughs from the audience, and he liked that. One of the most endearing things about Mozart is that he saw music and laughter as inseparable. Nobody took music more seriously. Nobody got more jokes out of it. He had a wonderful gift of timing—having fun, then at precisely the right second, switching to deadly seriousness. But it was a serious note that was never solemn.

This book is a must-read for all music-lovers and Paul Johnson aficionados.