14

JAN SMACZNY

Mozart and the twentieth century

At the end of his novel Lucia in London, E. F. Benson’s heroine, the energetic socialite Emmeline Lucas – Lucia to her friends – suggests to her piano-duet partner, Georgie Pilson, that they have half an hour’s practice of ‘celestial Mozartino’.¹ In Lucia’s cosmology of composers Bach is ‘glorious’, Scarlatti ‘dainty’ and Beethoven ‘noble’,² but only Mozart achieves divine, if diminutive, status. Lucia’s Mozart is the infant prodigy beloved of the nineteenth century, when, at various stages, England’s cultured classes were hot on the trail of successors to the Salzburg genius.³ Perhaps this is not surprising, since the biographies to which Benson would have had access made much of the infant: for example, Lady Wallace’s 1877 translation of Ludwig Nohl’s The Life of Mozart, which has the child Mozart in Austrian court dress as a frontispiece,⁴ or Pauline Townsend’s translation of Otto Jahn’s monumental Life of Mozart published by Novello in 1891, which uses an engraving of Mozart derived from the Verona portrait of 1770.⁵

Nearly twenty years after Benson published Lucia in London, van Loon invited Mozart, along with St Francis of Assisi and Hans Andersen, to dinner in his volume of fantasy encounters, Van Loon’s Lives.⁶ His account of Mozart is a flight of fancy based on conventional popular images; Constanze, for example, is described as ‘flighty’ and ‘rather worthless’.⁷ There is an emphasis on the purity of the composer’s inspiration and the ability of his music to connect the listener with childhood: ‘a source of everlasting inspiration and joy for those who have not yet forgotten the laughter and the simple pleasures of their childhood days’.⁸

The Gemütlichkeit of Van Loon’s treatment of Mozart is as telling as Benson’s neutralization of the composer as a rounded figure: touched by the divine spark, a childhood of transcendental achievement can develop into an extended adolescence, but not much beyond. In these classics of popular literature, Mozart simply refuses to grow up. For Adorno, such images locked the composer into an overly comfortable, sanitized image of the age in which he lived: ‘A series of falsifications contrives to tailor Mozart to contemporary taste. To begin with he is assigned to the Rococo age whose limits he had just burst asunder.’⁹ Adorno might well have been appalled, but almost certainly not surprised, at the phenomenal transformation of the Mozart image in the late twentieth century.

A key corollary to the notion of the divinely touched infant Mozart is the conceit of untutored genius, a trait enunciated by the composer Bohuslav Martinů, who stated fearlessly that Mozart ‘never studied, he knew’,¹⁰ invoking an image of effortless ability that could only appeal to the ‘me’-centred culture of the 1990s. Interestingly, this view occurs fairly consistently throughout the century. A comparative extension of the myth of genius was applied by John Amis to Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett: of the pair, Britten was Mozart who ‘knew where he was going every bar of the piece in advance’, whereas Tippett was cast in the role of Beethoven, who ‘had the plan but wrestled with material’.¹¹ Whether or not the comparison holds water (according to Humphrey Carpenter, Tippett was dismissive),¹² it perpetuated an image of transcendental facility, reproducing it for the major musical figures of another age. Even so acute and fastidious a critic as Hans Keller tended to subscribe to the myth when, not entirely willingly, he was seduced into a comparative judgement of Mozart and Britten:

as one who is soaked in the music of both Mozart and Britten I may be allowed to claim that for the first time Mozart, the universal musician who masters everything with a somnabulistic surefootedness and grace, has found a companion.¹³

This god-like, transcendental Mozart, remote from the perceived heaviness of nineteenth-century Romanticism, was an icon powerfully reinforced for the 1960s generation in the 1961 translation of Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (1927). This tale of an awkward, middle-aged ingénu’s sentimental education is billed in its present English-language incarnation in Penguin fiction as: ‘The hip bible of 1960s counterculture . . . [capturing] the mood of a disaffected generation and a century increasingly unsure of itself.’¹⁴ The idea of divine youth cut short becomes powerfully totemic in a dialogue between Steppenwolf and the aged Goethe:

He did not make pretensions in his own life to the enduring and the orderly and to exalted dignity as you did. He did not think himself so important! He sang his divine melodies and died. He died young, poor and misunderstood.¹⁵

This image of youthful joy as opposed to torpid tradition resonates later in the twentieth century as well, not least in Peter Shaffer’s play and Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus. Mozart’s remoteness from Hesse’s view of nineteenth-century tendentiousness is celebrated in a hilariously purgatorial scene in which Brahms and Wagner are to be observed traversing a ‘desert plain’ dragging behind their hoards of ‘men in black’, the ‘players of all those notes and parts of his [Brahms’s and Wagner’s] scores which according to divine judgement were superfluous. “Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted”, Mozart said with a nod.’¹⁶

Hesse’s image of Mozart from early in the century may have informed the dialogue that has underpinned the development of his image in the later twentieth century, but the broader picture is not one of stasis. A partial corrective of the seemingly ever-present trope of the infant-adolescent Mozart is found in Sacheverell Sitwell’s biography of 1932.¹⁷ Sitwell was among the first to use the portrait of Mozart by his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, as the frontispiece for a study of the composer. Considering Lange’s portrait to be the ‘only true’ likeness of the composer, Sitwell enthused: ‘There is nothing, in all the iconography of great men, to compare with it.’¹⁸ His reasoning introduces what might be described as a more human, psychological and at the same time more Romantic image of Mozart:

The long shaped head, with space in it for every technical resource . . . the poetical forehead, like the forehead of Keats . . . but there is something of the child still in him. You have only to see the lower part of his face to know of his inexperience in money matters and his weakness in affairs of the world.¹⁹

Alfred Einstein’s far more influential monograph, Mozart: His Character, His Work, a standard text for over thirty years, extends, most engagingly, the tendency towards an extensive psychological profile in which the subject, for example, ‘could be very rough in dealing with women who had designs upon him’.²⁰ For Einstein, the adult Mozart is a protean figure who has encompassed all human experience:

Mozart died in his thirty-sixth year; yet he went through all the stages of human life, simply passing through them faster than ordinary mortals. At thirty he was both childlike and wise; he combined the highest creative power with the highest understanding of his art; he observed the affairs of life and he saw behind them; and he experienced before his end that feeling of imminent completion that consists in the loss of all love for life.²¹

In this summative analysis one again sees Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus lurking in the wings.

Mozart and musicology in the twentieth century

The apparently settled picture of Mozart in the popular imagination in the early twentieth century does not reflect the situation in musicology. Mozart as an object of study has grown at the same pace as the discipline itself. Gernot Gruber, in his invaluable study Mozart and Posterity, outlines the now seemingly curious battles for and against a re-evaluation of Mozart fought in Germany early in the century.²² The battle lines were drawn around an agenda to demonstrate that Wagnerian progressiveness – led by Paul Zschorlich in his 1906 volume The Mozart Hypocrisy²³ – was, for a forward-looking intelligentsia, preferable to the classicism represented by Mozart.²⁴ The arguments rattled on with Mozart coming to be regarded in Gruber’s view as ‘an antidote to the heavy, sultry creations of Wagner’,²⁵ a judgement that parallels Hesse’s in the 1920s. To an extent musicological attitudes to Mozart’s music have developed along similar lines to popular images of the composer. As Boulez perceptively pointed out:

what I mean is the change in the general attitude to a composer according to which aspect of his music appeals most to the taste of the period. In this way we have heard Bach’s music highly ‘dramatized’ and then reduced to the dry and rather trivial, while Mozart’s, once presented as charming, is now tragic.²⁶

The foundations of a more objective twentieth-century musicological approach to Mozart were, of course, laid in the nineteenth century, notably in Köchel’s Chronological-Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart of 1862,²⁷ much revised in von Waldersee’s new edition of 1905. Later editions and reprints of the Köchel catalogue had a very real impact in refocussing Mozart scholarship at regular intervals during the twentieth century.²⁸ With the steady tread of discoveries relating to chronology, however, there is a pressing need to produce a more thoroughgoing revision of Köchel.²⁹ Of crucial significance for a more accurate biography of the composer was Ludwig Schiedermair’s edition of The Letters of W. A. Mozart and His Family of 1914.³⁰ In the Anglophone world, Emily Anderson’s translation and edition of the letters published in 1938 provided a sound base for Mozart scholarship and Eric Blom’s collection of selected letters taken from this edition did much to inform popular images of the composer.³¹

Additional twentieth-century monuments to Mozart scholarship emerged in the post-war era, especially in the run-up to the bicentennial year of 1956. Three numbers of a Mozart-Jahrbuch had been published between 1923 and 1929, and three of a Neues Mozart-Jahrbuch between 1941 and 1943. A continuous run of the Jahrbuch, however, was established in 1950 and later joined by two other serial publications, the Mitteilungen der Internationalen Stiftung Mozarteum in 1952 and Acta Mozartiana, the proceedings of the German Mozart Society, in 1954. But the greatest resource for both scholars and performers was the founding of a New Mozart Edition³² in 1955 to replace the nineteenth-century W. A. Mozarts Werke. A pendant to the complete correspondence was Deutsch’s documentary biography of 1961 (MDL, MDB) followed in short order by a new edition of the complete correspondence (MBA).

Hermann Abert’s early 1920s reworking of Otto Jahn’s standard biography of Mozart greatly enriched the contextual appreciation of the composer and to an extent set the agenda for Mozart studies much later in the century.³³ As details of biography fill out and analytical considerations of Mozart’s music multiply, one of the most notable features of studies relating to the composer is the need to locate him in his world. A relatively early start was Marcel Brion’s Daily Life in the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert.³⁴ Recent years have seen the appearance of volumes that have hugely enlarged our understanding of Mozart’s context, working, social and familial.

Another feature of musicological profiling of Mozart in the later twentieth century has been a tendency to look inward; Freud, for example, proved a useful starting point for the examination of Mozart’s operas in Brigid Brophy’s Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age (London, 1964). Nearly all post-Einstein biographies are inclined to take questions of personal complexity seriously and to shy away from overly simplistic readings of character. Crucial in this development was Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s biography, which did much to create the apparently rounded Mozart favoured by the later twentieth century. Growing out of a bicentenary lecture of 1956, Hildesheimer’s study strips away cherished myths in assembling a novel psychological portrait of the composer. In taking issue with the conspiracy to neutralize Mozart’s existing psychological profile, most tellingly in his critique of Bruno Walter’s image of the composer as a ‘happy simple-hearted young man’, he opened up the potential for richer readings of the composer’s character.³⁵ Of equal importance is Hildesheimer’s questioning of how we apply terms to the composer, notably his consideration of Mozart and humour.³⁶

Saint-Foix, who with Théodore de Wyzewa and Adolphe Boschot had set up a Société Mozart in Paris in 1901, took analytical study of Mozart to a new level. His exhaustive five-volume assessment of Mozart’s music was set against what was then understood of its eighteenth-century contexts. The first two volumes, written with Wyzewa and published in Paris in 1912, consider the music up to 1777;³⁷ the remaining volumes, covering the rest of Mozart’s life and work, were published in Paris in 1936–46.³⁸ Systematic within its own terms, Saint-Foix’s view was in essence evolutionary and in many ways set the agenda for much later analytical work on the composer. Although by no means as comprehensive, Dent’s musically and psychologically persuasive study of the operas, Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study (London, 1913), proved a standard work through much of the twentieth-century. Analytical commentary on Mozart through the middle years of the century was dominated by approaches to conventionally perceived form. Without doubt, Mozart’s pre-eminence in operatic and concerto genres was recognized in books such as Dent’s on the former and Arthur Hutchings’s on the latter,³⁹ but context and angle were limited largely to musical considerations. Perhaps the most influential discussion of Mozart’s musical language in the last thirty years of the twentieth century was Charles Rosen’s in The Classical Style, with its fundamental premise that ‘a work of music sets its own terms’.⁴⁰ Offering not ‘a survey of the music of the classical period, but a description of its language’,⁴¹ Rosen’s perceptive understanding of tonality and, perhaps above all, phrase structure articulated for a generation what appeared to be the fundamental values of Mozart’s music.

A purely musical view of Mozart was, however, hardly tenable in the more exploratory climate of the late twentieth century. Where psychology had been applied to Mozart’s life, the application of philosophical and other related disciplines would follow for the music. As a focus for deconstruction, Mozart’s operas have become a major area of interest in terms of both analysis and psychological profiling. Fruitfully, analysis has also embraced cultural context by drawing in aspects of rhetoric as a means of assessing modes of address in Mozart’s music.⁴² As a large number of autographs, many of which disappeared during the Second World War, returned to currency in Poland, other aspects of the musicological study of Mozart gained momentum (sketch and paper studies, for example), stretching the credibility of Keller’s notion of ‘somnambulistic surefootedness’. In particular, Tyson’s forensic studies of autograph scores and Wolfgang Plath’s pioneering work on sources have done much to illuminate questions of chronology.

In the later twentieth century the study of performance practice developed hand in hand with the rise of performance on early instruments. Ingenious studies of metronome markings for Mozart symphonies from Hummel and Czerny, by Münster and Malloch respectively,⁴³ offer glimpses of contemporary performance speeds, although, as both writers point out, such speeds are not readily taken up by today’s conductors. Broader considerations of performance practice, such as Frederick Neumann’s Ornamentation and Improvisation in Mozart (Princeton, 1986), have been joined by studies informed by both performance and scholarship, notably in the edited volume Perspectives on Mozart Performance,⁴⁴ where the violinists Eduard Melkus and Jaap Schröder, for example, offer thoughts on cadenzas and violin performance style respectively. The point of interface between musicology and performance has increasingly fertilized both areas. Neal Zaslaw’s now standard study of Mozart’s symphonies was begun while the author was working as a musicological adviser to the Academy of Ancient Music during their complete recorded cycle of the symphonies,⁴⁵ and the author freely acknowledges an ‘inestimable debt’ to this orchestra.⁴⁶ Such fruitful synergies indicate what might be described as a more holistic approach to Mozart musicology in the later twentieth century.

The Mozart-musicology industry advances: studies of his life, individual works (in particular the operas), context, performance, reception and psychology are unrolled with bewildering frequency, confirming the view of the academic publishing world that Mozart is the most bankable of Classical composers and that anything with his magical moniker will sell to some constituency. But there is a paradox here, since musicology’s Mozart mostly flourishes independently of his popular image: as musicology, broadly speaking, demythologizes Mozart, his popular image flourishes more and more in a mythological realm.

Mozart and the performer

The modern manner of presenting Mozart in cleaned-up texts, informed by late eighteenth-century performance practice and with orchestras similar in size and composition to those of Mozart’s day, can be attributed to a complex of reasons, but may be traced back to the efforts of performers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Gruber identifies Hermann Levi and Ernst Possart’s attempt to present Don Giovanni in ‘all its original purity and authenticity’⁴⁷ in their Munich production of 1896 as a key moment in a process that might be termed ‘recovering Mozart’.⁴⁸ In fact, there had been a move towards restoration earlier in the nineteenth century in Prague, the city that had commissioned and premiered the opera in 1787. In the newly opened Provisional Theatre, the musical director, Jan Maýr, restored the opera’s recitatives (it had been performed as a Singspiel in Prague for decades) and its second-act sextet finale in 1864 and 1865 respectively.⁴⁹

Other important figures in the development of Mozart performance were Strauss and Mahler. Strauss enthusiastically propagated the methods pioneered by Possart and Levi, and Mahler followed suit on his arrival as conductor of the Vienna Hofoper in 1897. Of major significance was Mahler’s Mozart cycle (1905–6), whose Figaro was taken to the Salzburg Festival of 1906. Gruber’s balanced critique of Mahler’s practices suggests an interventionist approach where dynamics, transposition and instrumentation were concerned, and a free repetition of parts of the overture or the importation of instrumental items to cover scene changes. Mahler’s modernism was vested in a consistent approach to speed, a concentration on ensemble, and an avoidance of both the excessive rubato beloved of earlier decades and ornamentation.⁵⁰ Along with this apparently greater respect for the text was the use of lighter orchestral forces and a keyboard continuo.

Strauss took a major lead in promoting Mozart’s operas, which extended to making an edition of Idomeneo (first performed 16 April 1931). Although much criticized – Dent called it ‘a shocking hash’⁵¹ – the edition, from a later perspective overly interventionist, was an honest attempt to habilitate a neglected work. One of Strauss’s main contributions to Mozart performance was through his involvement with the Salzburg Festival. There had been sporadic festivals in Salzburg in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,⁵² but the birth of the modern festival was in 1920. Michael Steinberg traces the origins of the modern festival to discussions between Hermann Bahr and Max Reinhardt in 1903.⁵³ Both Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal did much to determine the character of the festival in the later stages of planning. Having joined the festival’s artistic advisory board in August 1918, Strauss also participated in recruiting financially active ‘friends’ for the festival on a conducting tour in the United States.⁵⁴ Orchestral performances of Mozart began in August conducted by Bernhard Paumgartner of the Mozarteum and performances of Mozart’s operas started the following year.⁵⁵ These stagings brought some of the finest conductors of the first half of the twentieth century to the festival, including Krauss, Schalk, Walter, Busch and Weingartner.

Fritz Busch was to a large extent responsible for transplanting aspects of the modern Austro-German approach to Mozart to the Glyndebourne festivals, events that were crucial in fixing performance style later in the century. Before the founding of the Glyndebourne festivals in May 1934, performances of Mozart’s operas in Britain in the twentieth century were sporadic if occasionally distinctive, notably Beecham’s Die Zauberflöte at the Aldwych Theatre in 1917, and Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte at the Old Vic under the regime of Lilian Baylis in successive years from 1920, all of which did much to establish a metropolitan audience for the repertory.⁵⁶ Set up by John Christie and his wife, the singer Audrey Mildmay, performances at Glyndebourne began with Figaro under Busch, and in subsequent years the festivals were devoted ‘almost exclusively to Mozart’.⁵⁷ Significantly, on Christie’s instructions, all operas were given in their original languages, a practice then rarely followed in Europe. The formative status achieved by Busch’s pre-war Glyndebourne performances is reflected in an appreciation by Andrew Porter in a round-up of complete Mozart opera recordings in 1955: ‘the sum achieved by the singers and players is something greater than the total of their individual performances’.⁵⁸

The clear implication of Porter’s statement is that ensemble performance is the major strength of Busch’s interpretations. Listening to Busch’s 1936 recording of Don Giovanni,⁵⁹ the line of descent to the lean, dramatically apt performances of today is clear: tempi are for the most part on the fast side and consistent; the orchestral accompaniment is firm; and the singing, solo and ensemble, is perceptibly theatrical. Cleaner editions and the revival of earlier performing styles made a huge difference to performances of Mozart towards the end of the twentieth century, but in spirit there seems to have been little change from the means and eloquence cultivated so successfully by Busch in early Glyndebourne performances.

If the modern tendency in Mozart opera performance began with a search for authenticity, purging Mozart of the perceived excesses of Romanticism, the quest was impelled powerfully by the greater objectivity sought by a number of influential figures. Bartók’s contact with Mozart was largely as a performer and editor.⁶⁰ He and his wife included the Concerto for Two Pianos, K. 365, in their repertory, and Bartók played the D major Sonata for Two Keyboards, K. 448, with Dohnányi in 1936.⁶¹ Bartók’s approach to Mozart as both performer and teacher prefigures the reformist zeal of the later twentieth century. Szigeti, who played at least two of Mozart’s violin sonatas with Bartók, characterized his performance with the composer as ‘that kind of unique experience when one starts anew with a clean slate’.⁶² As with the music of Bach, in Mozart ‘Bartók approved of no emotionalism or sentimentality, but wanted hard fortes, and uniform pianos’.⁶³ This fundamentalist view is confirmed by Bartók’s pupil, Julia Szekely:

Through Bartók we could come to know a new Mozart – the real one: hard, almost rapping fortes; pianos which were not delicate but spoke with a uniform voice; hard-set, closed formal articulations. Never was there any affectation or theatrical mannerism, still less any display of virtuosity.⁶⁴

Stravinsky, too, was certainly important in fixing images of objective approaches to interpretation, indeed non-interpretation, in some ways an extension of his view that ‘music, by its very nature, is essentially powerless to express anything at all’.⁶⁵ Thus, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out: ‘Impersonalism is as old as Stravinsky, who railed against “interpretation”, and wanted his performers to be . . . obedient “executants” of his will.’⁶⁶ The technical underpinning of Stravinsky’s attitude was a belief that tempo is the main problem in modern performance. His disquisition on the problem of tempo in ‘About Music Today’ concludes with the question: ‘Isn’t this why Mozart concertos are still played as though they were Tchaikovsky concertos?’⁶⁷ Stravinsky’s potent advocacy of interpreters who do not go beyond the letter of the score had become, by the 1970s, common currency for interpreters of early music, including, needless to say, that of Mozart.⁶⁸ Reading without mediation beyond the application of what was known of eighteenth-century performance style was regarded as a way of presenting an untrammelled picture of the composer’s music. If the articles that comprise Taruskin’s Text and Act have gone a long way to exposing the flaws in the arguments for an ‘authentic’ or even ‘historically correct’ view of Mozart, the rendition of his music on old instruments and with playing techniques based on a study of contemporary documents now informs the performance of Mozart from opera house to symphony orchestra, from chamber group to solo keyboard player. Collections such as the Academy of Ancient Music’s complete Mozart symphonies and John Eliot Gardiner and Malcolm Bilson’s recording of the piano concertos (begun in 1983) have created a new tradition of early-instrument performance. But with this comes the realization, as Peter Williams states, that

Performance Practice is so difficult a branch of study as to be an almost impossibly elusive ideal. It cannot be merely a practical way of ‘combining performance and scholarship’, for these two are fundamentally different activities, each able to inform the other only up to a certain point.⁶⁹

Now, greater liberality in interpretive choice, even in early-instrument performances, seems likely to inform performance.

The composer’s Mozart

While the relationship of musicologists and performers to Mozart in the twentieth century was, on the whole, a developmental dialogue, composers of most hues, conservative, modern and post-modern, viewed him, largely consistently, as a source of inspiration and wonderment. There was, of course, a group of composers among whom Mozart was venerated without his music being obviously influential. Messiaen, for example, while admiring Mozart for his rhythm, could sidestep his influence completely.⁷⁰ Another was Sibelius. According to Santeri Levas, Sibelius ‘admired Beethoven but loved Mozart’; it seems that he ‘regarded the latter [Mozart] as the greatest master of orchestration, and several times told me how the G minor Symphony had run through his life like a red thread’.⁷¹ Other composers were prepared to accept Mozart as a model at formative and later stages: Elgar’s youthful enthusiasm for Mozart prompted him to model a symphony on the G minor, K. 550, and in the Strand Magazine in May 1904 he commented, unequivocally, that ‘Mozart is the musician from whom everyone should learn form’.⁷² This view is echoed, although without the didactic imperative, by Busoni, who heard in the composer ‘the joy of life and the beauty of form’.⁷³

Understandably, given the reaction in many quarters to his own music, Schoenberg made much of Mozart as a progressive artist, misunderstood in his own day.⁷⁴ Schoenberg was also happy to admit that he had learned fundamental aspects of composition from Mozart, such as ‘inequality of phrase-length; co-ordination of heterogeneous characters to form a thematic unity; deviation from even-number construction in the theme and its component parts’,⁷⁵ all of which find a clear echo in Rosen’s reading of Mozart in The Classical Style. More specifically, Schoenberg owes a debt to the finale of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, K. 551, in the merging of sonata style and fugue in the last movement of the Suite for Piano, Three Wind and Three String Instruments, Op. 29.⁷⁶

For two composers in particular, Strauss and Stravinsky, a relationship with Mozart’s music was a key aspect of creativity. From his youth, Strauss considered Mozart incomparable, the transcendent Classical figure and a clear model. As Bryan Gilliam notes in his introduction to a series of letters from Strauss to Ludwig Thuille, written when both were in their impressionable teens: ‘Strauss’s love of Mozart forms an important thread connecting boyhood, adulthood, and old age.’⁷⁷ In more than one letter to Thuille, the fourteen-year-old Strauss referred to their idol as ‘the divine Mozart’.⁷⁸ Strauss then went on to gloss his enthusiasm in immoderate terms: ‘All the compositions by this “hero” are so clear and transparent and so rich in melodies and so lovely that with every composition by Mozart I revere him more, and even adore him.’⁷⁹ There was little sign of any retreat from this position as Strauss’s knowledge and admiration of other composers, in particular Wagner, grew in later life. As an adult, Strauss became a renowned interpreter of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, which he would ‘reflect about as the perfect work of art’.⁸⁰

Mozart’s style was a constant point of reference for Strauss. In middleperiod works, as Leon Botstein explains, ‘The Mozartian and the Wagnerian . . . in clearly recognizable ways coexisted side by side’,⁸¹ a particularly remarkable cohabitation given the views of the musicological ideologists of Germany in the early twentieth century. Mozart does, indeed, have a material influence on late instrumental works in particular, such as the Symphonie für Bläser in E flat major, the Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra and the Duett-Concertino. In opera, the connections between the two composers are, if anything, more pronounced. Beyond the Mozartian pastiche in Zerbinetta’s rondo in Ariadne auf Naxos and the importation of opera buffa style in Arabella, there is inspiration of a more seminal kind from Die Zauberflöte on both Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal in Die Frau ohne Schatten.⁸²

As perspectives shift on the role of composers in the early twentieth century, old definitions break down. As Botstein has pointed out, the convenient view of Strauss as a modernist turned conservative between Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier requires reconsideration in the light of later works that practise the modes and economies of neo-classicism.⁸³ Given the potential for rereading Strauss as a neo-classicist, the comparisons with Stravinsky, the arch neo-classicist, no longer seem absurd, and in this rereading Mozart’s music occupies almost the role of midwife.

Although prepared to admit that Mozart, with Bach, was among the ‘more “perfect” composers’,⁸⁴ Stravinsky’s view of Mozart was by no means unequivocally uncritical. Having played through a number of Mozart Masses bought second-hand in Los Angeles in 1942 or 1943, he suffered indigestion as a result of ‘these rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin’;⁸⁵ the result was a resolution to write his own austerely hieratic setting. Moreover, according to Antheil, in 1922 Stravinsky would have ‘cut all the development sections out of Mozart’s symphonies. They would be fine then!’⁸⁶ Mozart was nevertheless central to his most completely neo-classical work, The Rake’s Progress, as Stravinsky himself admitted, stating unambiguously that four of Mozart’s operas, presumably Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte, were ‘the source of inspiration for my future opera’.⁸⁷ The key work, however, seems to have been Così (a further connection with Strauss since this was his favourite Mozart opera), a performance of which both Stravinsky and his librettist W. H. Auden heard in 1947.⁸⁸ Both recitative and ensemble music owe much to the ‘Italian-Mozartian’ style,⁸⁹ and although the work as a whole draws on a range of sources beyond Mozart, not least ballad opera, there is clearly enough of his influence to support Stephen Walsh’s observation that The Rake’s Progress is a ‘neo-Mozartian’ opera.⁹⁰

Mozart’s role in the post-modern compositional world is perhaps less overarching, but if his presence has not been reinforced in quite the same way as with neo-classicism, he remains a potent force, whether in realizations of Cage’s HPSCHD (1967–9) or Michael Nyman’s scores for Peter Greenaway’s films (notably The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982, A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985, and Drowning by Numbers, 1988). Beyond influence, for composers as much as everyone else, Mozart is not just an exemplar, but perhaps the most potent symbol of excellence in music.

The global Mozart

Visitors to Prague’s old town square these days are greeted by a forest of placards on poles advertising a bewildering host of attractions. Alongside advertisements for the Museum of Torture Instruments, an exhibition of ‘the world’s largest spiders and scorpions’ and, perhaps more appropriately, a waxwork display, is a papier-mâché head and torso on a pole in crude imitation of Mozart. This grotesque icon variously draws attention to performances of Don Giovanni by marionettes, other of Mozart’s operas by real people in eighteenth-century costume, or one of the near-daily renditions of the Requiem. This last work has spawned a veritable industry in the Czech capital, not just for performers but for attendant hawkers who, dressed in costumes modelled on those of Miloš Forman’s film of Shaffer’s Amadeus, thrust bills into the hands of passers-by. Musically, Prague has in its post-revolutionary era constructed itself as a Mozart town. In the early 1990s, the proximity of the Velvet Revolution of the last months of 1989 and the bicentenary of the composer’s death produced a kind of Mozartian ‘big bang’. With entrepreneurial enthusiasm the Czechs built on their association with the composer, not just his five visits to Prague and the premiere of Don Giovanni in the Estates Theatre, but also the fact that parts of the film Amadeus had been shot in the city. Today, over ten years after the bicentenary, there is little sign of Prague’s Mozart-mania abating. The commercialization of the Mozart image is seen at its most tawdry, with postcards, mugs, T-shirts, playing cards and every manner of paraphernalia celebrating the way Mozart’s image bestrides the city for tourists.⁹¹

This situation could not exist were it not for Mozart’s global image as probably the most visible of all Classical composers. Perhaps the first stirring of what has become a most successful exploitation of the Mozart image was the arrival of the Echte Salzburger Mozartkugel. First manufactured by Paul Fürst in Salzburg in 1890, the classic manifestation of the now nearuniversally available sweet is a marzipan ball enveloped first in hazelnut nougat cream and finally dark chocolate.⁹² Since a reciprocal trade agreement between Germany and Austria in 1981,⁹³ the Mozartkugel has erupted onto the shelves of delicatessens and duty-free shops the world over, reminding those with a sweet tooth that the Salzburg genius could provide physical as well as spiritual nourishment. Even the glitzy packaging suggests that Mozart is in some way the stamp of quality on a favoured product; thus, both the sweet’s and the composer’s image is mutually guaranteed. Neither sweet nor the composer’s image, however, have escaped satirical scrutiny as the artist Wolfgang Ehehalt’s Findings II: Wolfgang Amadeus, Nannerl und die kleinen Dickmacher (Wolfgang Amadeus, Nannerl and the Little Fatteners) of 1989 shows. This hilarious montage features, among other things, busts of Mozart, fragments of manuscript and an open Sardine tin filled with Mozart sweets.⁹⁴

Another vital staging post in the development of the Mozart image was the popular biography. Where Einstein allowed Benson’s ‘celestial Mozartino’ to grow into a thoughtful young adult, Marcia Davenport turned him into a full-blown picaresque hero.⁹⁵ If not exactly a ‘bodice ripper’, Davenport’s biography paints a portrait of the composer almost worthy of Hollywood, reinforced by the conventional tropes of genius. Of Don Giovanni, she writes:

Of course, his whole score stood . . . the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished, and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.⁹⁶

There is, of course, the human dimension in Davenport’s tale with Mozart being very much ‘one of the lads’. Writing about one of Mozart’s stays in Prague, Davenport goes for colour:

When the Duscheks did not have a big party on, Wolfgang and Franz, with whatever other men were about, would put on their hats and sway off to town, to spend the evening in a royal bout of music, wit and noise, in some tavern where they were treated like kings.⁹⁷

At moments such as these Davenport’s Mozart could almost be the blueprint for the Shaffer–Forman roistering ‘Wolfie’. An important reinforcement to Mozart’s ‘laddish’ image was the twentieth century’s awareness and acceptance of his scatological tendencies. Where the nineteenth and early twentieth century might have preferred to ignore this aspect of a man who was, after all, the product of an age in which scatology was relatively commonplace in everyday discourse, the later twentieth century would be inclined to see it as something of an enhancement of his humanity and an aid to universalizing the composer’s image – Mozart as a twenty- or thirty-something rebel.⁹⁸

In offering the late twentieth century an image of the composer in its own likeness, Forman’s film Amadeus was of central significance. Shaffer’s play, premiered in London in 1979, is a sensitive study of the mystery of genius. Forman’s film undoubtedly sensationalized many aspects of the original for a mass audience. Apart from headlining Mozart’s scatological tendencies allied to the complex wit of genius in a romp with Constanze in the early scenes, the film externalizes inference and in many ways takes on the character of a rather glamorous soap opera. Mozart’s unquestionable and unmatchable genius is seen cohabiting with the human and hilarious. Of Mozart’s character as it emerged from play and film, Simon Callow, who played Mozart in the play and Schikaneder in the film, stated that Mozart ‘was someone whose character was inadequate to his genius’.⁹⁹ This perceptive statement was, in essence, exactly what commended the film’s Mozart to a young, mass audience: genius was unearned and could exist alongside all of the characteristics of youth, notably rebelliousness against parents and against authority. Bedecked with eight Oscars, the film Amadeus, of 1984, attracted global attention, and it seems that in celluloid guise Mozart quite eclipsed (as far as the public were concerned) ‘noble Bach’ and ‘dainty Scarlatti’, not to mention Handel, in their commemorative year, 1985.¹⁰⁰ The signal inflation of the Mozart image to megastar status meant that he had become not only the most visible composer but also the most visible of youthful geniuses. Thus the writer of Channel 4’s ground-breaking series Queer as Folk could put into the mouth of fifteen-year-old Nathan, a capable artist in revolt from his parents having just ‘come out’, the following lines: ‘I can do what I like, I’m Mozart, I’m fucking Mozart.’¹⁰¹

Although Gernot Gruber does not use the word ‘global’ in Mozart and Posterity, he outlines a situation at the end of the twentieth century that could clearly be characterized by this term: ‘Mozart is known throughout the world and appreciated as never before: to avoid him would give all those concerned with cultural matters a bad conscience.’¹⁰² And not just those ‘concerned with cultural matters’. Even before Amadeus, the process of what might best be described as the globalization of Mozart was under way. From the Swingles’ Grammy award winner of 1965 featuring compositions by Mozart to electric alarm clocks waking people up with a digital version of the opening of the G minor Symphony, his music is part of our environment. As Taruskin put it in a talk at the Lincoln Center during a conference entitled ‘Performing Mozart’s Music’ in 1991, ‘ “Mozart”, as we all know perfectly well, is not just Mozart’, adding as gloss on the contemporary situation in the bicentennial year: ‘If Mozart were just Mozart, would we have spent a whole year having fits over him?’¹⁰³

The torrential tide of performances, images and information relating to Mozart has turned the composer into an issue. By the end of the twentieth century Mozart was still, in Benson’s construction, ‘celestial’, but the iconic trope was not so much that of the exquisite infant as that of the postadolescent pop star, an ‘A-list’ celebrity who, if he were alive, would be on the guest list at any smart society bash. The Mozart of the musicological fraternity may be the most industrialized, contextualized and psychoanalysed of composers, but he has been comprehensively eclipsed by the popular Mozart. Conventional scholarship will certainly continue: Köchel and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe will be revised, the latter perhaps replaced by a new NMA; and discoveries will continue to be made about Mozart and his context. Whether any of this will significantly alter the protean, irresistible image of Mozart, the scatological, laddish embodiment of untutored genius remains to be seen. If, as John Daverio suggests in chapter 13 of this volume, the study of Mozart reception in the nineteenth century is tantamount to a search for lost images, then the question for us after a century in which images of the composer were so completely ‘in our face’ is how to read them. The music of Mozart, so extensively – not to say lovingly – measured, assessed and reassessed by musicologists and performers, collided in the 1980s and 1990s with his popular image. The resulting pile-up is what the twenty-first century will have to sort out.