|
|
|
|
Only Mozart
 Some
guys have it and some guys don’t.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, now exactly 250 years old, obviously had it. By
age eight he was already writing symphonies you can still hear on the radio.
 And
there is no sign that the Mozart fad will blow over very soon.
A couple of years later he was
writing operas, which culminated, for me, in The Magic Flute
toward the end of his short life. To my mind the saddest fact in musical
history is that he died at 35. Nobody can imagine what his inexhaustible
imagination would have produced if he’d been granted another five
years. If he’d lived to threescore and ten, there would have been no
need for Beethoven, whom I also adore.
Actually, if the two men’s
lives had overlapped more, each might have inspired the other to new heights
in a sort of divine rivalry. I can just imagine Mozart’s reaction to the
Eroica symphony: “Not bad, kid! Not bad at all! But watch this!”
And then he would have written an even better symphony under the influence
of his younger rival, who, not to be outdone, would have come back with his
own miracle, and so on, until all our lives were so full of astonishing sounds
that the enraptured world would never go to war again.
You can argue that
Mozart’s music alone should have had this effect, and I can’t
quarrel with that. Franz Josef Haydn’s long life enveloped his, and
these two geniuses did, in fact, inspire each other. The sweetest anecdote I
know of is that when the excellent composer Cherubini heard that Haydn had
died, he wrote a symphony in his honor; but the report was false, and old
Haydn was so moved that he journeyed to thank Cherubini in person. The two
men embraced. Now and then life does play wonderful jokes on us.
My own formal musical education
ended, to my eternal regret, when I drove my piano teacher insane at the age
when Mozart was probably improvising cute little fugues. My own first opera
remains unfinished; it seems in retrospect a rather conventional sort of
opera, with a lot of Italians stabbing each other, and that’s about as
far as it got when I ran out of ideas. I am still convinced of my untapped
potential, however, and I shouldn’t have let myself get discouraged
when I discovered that my plot had been anticipated by Verdi.
![[Breaker quote for Only Mozart: Many happy returns]](2006breakers/060126.gif) Verdi
is another composer who is hard to top. Though he has
unfortunately contributed to the impression that Italians are always stabbing
each other, he wrote melodies as simple, lovely, and unforgettable as
primary colors. He shared this rare gift with Mozart and few others. Even
those who do it once may never do it again. Mozart seemed to toss them off
at will, as in the all-too-brief wedding march in The Marriage of
Figaro, which, like the composer’s life, should have gone on
forever.
Wagner’s legacy is more
complex and ambiguous. He was undoubtedly a musical genius, but he did
much to strengthen the stereotype of Germans as people who just never
know when to shut up. (The philosopher Hegel must also bear some of the
blame for this.)
Neither Verdi nor Wagner, then,
can be said to have contributed much to the cause of world peace. But if we
ever achieve it, Mozart will certainly deserve some of the credit. Beethoven
did his bit, too, with the Choral Symphony, but nobody wrote for voices the
way Mozart did. I never knew how beautiful a tenor voice — or any
other human sound — could be until I heard Fritz Wunderlich sing
Mozart; it takes a superb soprano to sing the Queen of the Night’s
arias at all, but a surprising number have done so, and Mozart’s
religious music is enough to shake any atheist’s self-confidence: If
there is no God, how can there be harmonies like these? (“Survival of
the fittest” doesn’t seem to explain them.)
None of Mozart’s
contemporaries heard more than a fraction of his work. Thanks to modern
recording, you and I can hear nearly all of it without leaving home. More than
two centuries after his early death, he is still bringing out the best in the
human race.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |