A Fugue
In between theorizing general relativity and developing the cosmological constant, Albert Einstein played chamber music. An accomplished amateur, his appreciation took shape not just in attentive listening but also in a warm tone and well-chosen fingerings. He stopped taking formal lessons as a teenager, but the violin he considered his greatest source of joy accompanied him to Zurich, where he was schooled; to the patent office at Bern, where he developed the special theory of relativity; to the University of Prague, where he took up a professorship; and then across the wide Atlantic to Princeton, where in 1940, having been stateless since World War I, he was naturalized but never trusted. (His FBI file runs over a thousand pages.) For the rest of his life, beginning in 1933, Einstein spent his days at the university’s Institute for Advanced Study investigating problems in quantum mechanics. Evenings he devoted to Mozart, at the white frame house on Mercer Street close to campus. In a 1944 interview with the New York Times, Einstein avowed his reverence for the composer by calling Mozart’s sound “so pure” it provides “a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.”
Einstein is not the only Jewish intellectual featured in this book to insist upon Mozart’s singularity. Saul Bellow (another Nobel Prize winner) paid the prodigy homage twice over—first, when he delivered “Mozart: An Overture” as the keynote speech at the composer’s bicentennial, and again, when he selected this essay as overture to It All Adds Up, his own 1994 nonfiction collection. Mark Rothko understood Mozart less as accompaniment to painting than “the alpha and omega” of his art, son Christopher indicates in Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. The artist would not so much as pick up a brush before first unsleeving a Mozart LP and setting it on the turntable in his studio. Mathematician and self-titled “fractalist” Benoit Mandelbrot names Mozart along with Verdi the composers he most esteems in an Edge interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist—“but not Wagner that much.” And musicologist Alfred Einstein echoes the physicist, who was perhaps his distant cousin, when he pronounces Mozart so preternaturally gifted as to be not “of this world.” Mozart was not—could not be—“truly at home” anywhere, Alfred Einstein goes on to suggest in Mozart: His Character, His Work, a 1945 text that remains on the shortlist of major contributions to Mozart studies. Having fled Munich before the start of the Second World War, it is not surprising that he implicitly aligned his own resettlements with the Salzburg composer’s perpetual travel across states while arguing that Mozart’s rootlessness was inextricable from his greatness.
Like both Einsteins, Mozart was disinherited by the city he left as a young man. Though he was renowned throughout Europe, Salzburg guidebooks published five and six years after his 1791 death contain no mention of this native son: no reference to his early years, biographer Maynard Solomon tells us, no plaque identifying the home or the street of his birth, no encomiums to the performances in cathedrals and salons where Mozart conducted the compositions that still play in our ears, their notes undegradable and brilliant as stars. To be fair, after traipsing from Munich to Mannheim and Paris to Prague as a child in the company of sister Nannerl (violinist) and father, Leopold (first music director), Mozart retained little love and less respect for his birthplace. Its natives were “intolerable” and its court musicians “coarse,” “slovenly,” and “dissolute.”1 “One hears nothing” in Salzburg, Mozart wrote unfeelingly to a friend who remained there (but with what Saul Bellow identifies in his Mozart essay as a “novelist’s gift of characterizing by minute particulars”). For this composer, Salzburg was a musical limbo devoid not just of theater but also of opera—because singers, after all, would “insist on being handsomely paid, and generosity is not one of our faults.” While Mozart chafed at the town’s pettiness, he was no more impressed with Vienna, the city that would become the base for his adult expeditions after he rebelled against his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, and was immediately dismissed. There in Vienna in 1791—thirteen years after the composer’s epistolary swipes at the lesser lights of Salzburg’s concert stages—he dictated eight bars of his Requiem’s “Lacrimosa” and drew his last breath.
What makes Mozart peerless? The elixir of grace notes and rising cadences he offers without letting us forget the pulses that pull us down to Earth? The cosmopolitan charm with which he travels back and forth between languages in his vocal music? The curious lightness in the darker tones of the andantes and adagios that speak suffering without ponderousness? Maybe it is the fine eighteenth-century control, one so effortlessly achieved it seems all measure and no weight, with which Mozart balanced melancholy and exuberance. Or maybe it is just the pragmatic in him that appealed to artists and scientists who fled Germany and France—places he played—during a period of tremendous conflict and uncertainty. Like Jane Austen, an artist of his own generation, Mozart offers effervescence without effusion. Tincturing ecstasy with irony, he glances at delight without ever wallowing in sentiment. (Can we even feel enchantment without simultaneously registering its transience?)
Certainly Mozart exploits an irony as keen as Austen’s in Così Fan Tutte (my own favorite opera). Not even Shakespeare leaps as nimbly over the chasm between ideal and actual as does Mozart, who soothes our roiling feelings by cataloguing all of love’s discord—hypocrisy, betrayal, flattery, vanity, and inconstancy—in a musical language so exquisite no verbal tribute could equal its harmonies. Bellow, who wisely leaves off commending this work almost before he begins, is satisfied to call Così Fan Tutte a “miracle.” The composer “was not obliged to seek the truth in German, French, Italian, or English. His objective was not sincerity; it was bliss.” As if echoing Alfred Einstein, Bellow, the Quebec-born child of Russian immigrants, praises Mozart’s immunity to the parochial. Here, as in Einstein’s 1945 study, Mozart appears to be an Austrian who isn’t one—or rather, the kind of Austrian both the fiction writer and the musicologist wished all that country’s citizens might be.
In attributing such thinking to Bellow and Alfred Einstein, I veer perilously close to ethnocentrism. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that in the middle of the twentieth century the Austrian most on the world’s mind was not this or any other composer but the art student who had dropped canvas and easel in favor of demolition. An expatriate thanks to the Third Reich, Alfred Einstein contemplated Europe’s broken girders and twisted steel from afar. Nationalism was devouring millions in Europe as his Mozart book went to press. “A Wartime Book” designated by Oxford University Press in New York as one “produced in full compliance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials,” the study focuses less upon the practical difficulties Mozart’s itineracy must have created than upon the composer’s gloriously rebellious independence from regional and imperial authorities. How could this Salzburg-born but widely ranging prodigy—a free spirit if ever there was one—not offer Alfred Einstein and his readers lessons in survival amid the smoking ruins of the twentieth century’s hearths?
Rereading this book three-quarters of a century after its publication summons Mozart for me as a slight, pale, pockmarked man scrawling crescendos and diminuendos on rag paper. Beside him, hovering shadowy as the diminutive suns children capture on the ground during eclipses with makeshift cameras, Albert Einstein speaks in his thickly accented English, chalking equations on a blackboard in tidy script. Even as his mathematical expressions revealed the design of the cosmos, the officials in charge of his homeland’s security shrank the territory within which “non-Aryans” were permitted to move. In 1933, not long after Germany outlawed all political blocs but the Nazi Party, Albert Einstein left its ever-narrowing space. I see his wife, Elsa, looking out over the water after boarding the Red Star Line’s Westernland in Southampton alongside her celebrated husband, her free hand clinging to the rails, her round face flushed, her fine hair frizzing below the edges of a black hat perched jauntily to one side. What must these two of have said to each other as the boat left its moorings?
Dislocation is debilitating, but it can also spur innovation. Einstein knew this. So did Mozart, an itinerant who made a virtue out of necessity. “Without travel, one is a miserable creature,” the composer wrote to the father who wished to chain him to Salzburg’s provincial rhythms. In another letter to Leopold, Mozart, who never ceased attempts to be a good son, returned to this conflict. A mediocre person stays undistinguished whether he travels or stays at home, the composer insisted by way of rationale for his resettlements. But the person of superior talents (“which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous,” he cannot help adding with inimitable élan), will become “bad, if he always stays in the same place.”2 Not long after, Mozart decamped to Paris, despite his father’s guilt-inducing objections, taking his ailing mother with him to oblige his other parent. When she died there under winter’s cold skies, Mozart continued working, answering loss with music, translating indefinable wistfulness into a yearning at once cerebral and soulful.
The bright tone of the violin was for a time displaced by the viola’s deeper timbre. A “kind of longing, which is never satisfied”—such was loneliness, he would write ten years later, this time during a separation from his wife.
Einstein’s own perspicacious ear heard longing as well as delight in the cadences of Mozart, fellow traveler. During the war that forced him to turn his back upon his childhood memories, the scientist—world traveler and time voyager, seer into the twisted warp and woof of the universe—sat in a small house at the edge of a field in New Jersey playing Mozart’s violin sonata in E minor. Where else for a Jew born into twentieth-century Europe to draw solace? Not in a distinct geography or a particular historical era but amid key signatures and time signatures of a different order. “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music,” Einstein offered in a 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview. Studying the vastness of space must have palliated the residual nostalgia he felt on this pearl of a planet for the sounds of his youth: the southern inflections of Bavarian speech, the clock on the steeple that chimed the quarter hour in Bern under which he used to grant patents, the yawl of the approaching train horn that bent in pitch as the engine retreated outside his office. But more than such memories, music provided Einstein the right of return. Mozart came home to Salzburg when he crafted The Magic Flute, an opera as modern in its burlesque of German custom and manners as the impudent satire of Weimar Republic cabaret. Two hundred years later, the crystalline inflections of Die Zauberflöte restored to Einstein the language the Second World War left his family no reason to use.
The work of the physicist is to measure the incalculable. There is the beauty of solutions and the beauty that cannot be fathomed. Einstein spent the large measure of his waking hours thinking through forces that remain mostly un-reckoned. Ultimately, it was mystery rather than certainty that arrested him— in music as in math. An art of concordance, music bespeaks the exquisitely tuned relationships that hold the planets in their orbits, the stars in the sky, and us, marvels of molecular engineering, in our own skins. A psalm that reconnects the wandering self to the world in the largest sense, music gestures outward through intangibles of feeling, encouraging our attention to stray beyond the walled lines that divide nation-states toward the shimmering curve of Earth’s atmosphere.
Is there a way in which the laws of music parallel the mathematical principles contemporary cosmologists use to figure the shape of the universe Einstein began to make out? Maybe such a correspondence is only my romantic fancy. Still, I would bargain that more than one scientific thinker is prompted now and again by Mozart, that other wandering star. Even those of us who appear blank in the face of physics know that the circumlocutions of water molecules follow the pull of the moon two hundred thousand miles distant from Earth’s oceans. Is it so strange to imagine that the musical phrases amplified in our cars and rooms and earphones might call us all toward the velvet darkness of much farther shores?
1 All citations from the 1985 The Letters of Mozart and His Family, translated and edited by Emily Anderson, are drawn from Maynard Solomon’s Mozart: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), except where noted otherwise.
2 This correspondence is cited by Peter Gay in Mozart: A Life (New York: Viking, 1999).