"The language of a composer", Cardus wrote, "his harmonies, rhythms, melodies, colors and texture, cannot be separated except by pedantic analysis from the mind and sensibility of the artist who happens to be expressing himself through them".
But that is precisely the trouble; for as far as I can see, Mozart’s can. Mozart makes me begin to see ghosts, or at the very least ouija-boards. If you read Beethoven’s letters, you feel that you are at the heart of a tempest, a whirlwind, a furnace; and so you should, because you are. If you read Wagner’s, you feel that you have been run over by a tank, and that, too, is an appropriate response.
But if you read Mozart’s—and he was a hugely prolific letter-writer—you have no clue at all to the power that drove him and the music it squeezed out of him in such profusion that death alone could stop it; they reveal nothing—nothing that explains it. Of course it is absurd(though the mistake is frequently made)to seek external causes for particular works of music; but with Mozart it is also absurd, or at any rate useless, to seek for internal ones either. Mozart was an instrument. But who was playing it
That is what I mean by the Mozart Problem and the anxiety it causes me. In all art, in anything, there is nothing like the perfection of Mozart, nothing to compare with the range of feeling he explores, nothing to equal the contrast between the simplicity of the materials and the complexity and effect of his use of them. The piano concertos themselves exhibit these truths at their most intense; he was a greater master of this form than of the symphony itself, and to hear every one of them, in the astounding abundance of genius they provide, played as I have so recently heard them played, is to be brought face to face with a mystery which, if we could solve it, would solve the mystery of life itself.
We can see Mozart, from infant prodigy to unmarked grave. We know what he did, what he wrote, what he felt, whom he loved, where he went, what he died of. We pile up such knowledge as a child does bricks; and then we hear the little tripping rondo tune of the last concerto—and the bricks collapse; all our knowledge is useless to explain a single bar of it. It is almost enough to make me believe in — but I have run out of space, and don’t have to say it. Put K. 595 on the gramophone and say it for me. |