Another turn of the cosmic wheel and I’m about to deliver my yearly Mozart lecture to my Music 27 class at UC Berkeley. I look forward to it, but as always with mixed emotions, because it’s like strolling through a radiant garden known to be seeded with unmarked land mines. The problem isn’t Mozart, per se: the problem is Mozarts—yes, in the plural. There is the historical Wolfgang Amadeus, and there is his army of doppelgangers, fellows with the same name who do same thing at the same time in the same place, but who are no more the real Mozart than they are Gandalf the Grey.
And the fictional Mozarts are already there in the room with me as I begin my lecture, because however scanty an individual student’s musical background, there is already some sort of a Mozart implanted in his or her mind, just as there is a Shakespeare and a Jesus and a George Washington. The mythic entity called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has slipped the confines of music appreciation books and dwells as an infinity of beings in an infinite fanfold of alternate universes created by our pervasive and populist culture. Somehow, somewhere, some way, we all pick up a mythic version of Mozart (however ill-formed) on the way from birth to college. That mythic being is subsequently manipulated, expanded, enhanced, warped, and even perverted. With seventy students in my Music 27 class, I will be facing seventy mythic Wolfgangs, and few of them will bear much resemblance to the height-impaired Salzburger whose scant thirty-five years left such an indelible mark on humanity.
What I can guarantee is that a fair number of my mythic Mozarts will be dead ringers for Tom Hulce, that they will exhibit a cheeky impudence that is half James Dean and half Pee Wee Hermann, that they will compose inexplicably perfect music without the slightest difficulty, that they will revel in scatology and obscenity, that they will be misunderstood and underestimated by everyone save a few professionals, and that they will be party dolls to the last.
That particular mythic Mozart sprang into brazen life just twenty-six years ago—but I must remind myself that for my 18-year-old students, the Wolfie Mozart of Milos Forman’s masterful Amadeus is a character out of classic cinema, always there from their point of view, cousin to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara or Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. Such vividly written and acted fictional characters acquire a spurious reality, all the more convincing if one can’t remember a time when they didn’t exist.
The Shaffer/Forman/Hulce Wolfgang has become the 500 pound gorilla of mythic Mozarts, but I will be facing other fictional versions as well, such as those little-old-lady concoctions from childhood piano lessons. The divinely gifted child who pulled off unmatchable feats of musicianship, those well-meaning but corrosive tall tales that grow and grow and grow and grow. Even the myth of the Dresden-doll precious pretty hasn’t quite faded out yet, the fluffy baby angel whose dainty piano pieces require twee fingers and tiptoed pedal.
But whatever the nature of those fictional alter egos, I will be swimming against a Humboldt Current of ingrained notions. I’m not particularly worried about the petty details—those historical tidbits that Amadeus has adjusted or altered to suit the story. For example, when Leopold Mozart visited his son in Vienna in 1785 he was promptly drafted into last-minute preparations for that evening’s concert, not dragged off to a glitzy costume ball as in the movie.
My bugaboos are those big-ticket, across-the-board, overriding substitutions of myth for truth.
Mozart’s effortless composition is a myth. He sketched, revised, and sometimes spent years polishing a composition. Sometimes he abandoned a piece midway through and never got around to finishing it at all. This particular myth got its start very early on, when Constanze destroyed the bulk of her deceased husband’s sketches and workbooks—specifically to reinforce the image of a heaven-kissed W. A. Mozart transcending the usual creative process. But he didn’t write down perfectly finished music all in one go; he applied lots of elbow grease and even more copious editorial nibbling. And he had his creative blocks just like the rest of us.
Mozart the cheeky rebel is a myth. He knew his place in his world, had no objection to it, and he knew how to behave around the nobility and aristocracy. There is nothing in Mozart’s life history that suggests he was ever insolent to his social superiors. To mouth off to royalty or nobility as he does in Amadeus would have been professional suicide, or worse. Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, played to perfection as an amiable doofus by Jeffrey Jones, was in reality an arrogant, ambitious and ruthless despot. His reforms were sweeping, and by the standards of the day he was an Enlightened monarch indeed. But by our standards he resembles Attila the Hun. He employed extensive networks of secret police to roam his realm and enforce his will, and he hadn’t the slightest objection to subjecting dissenters to downright medieval techniques of torture and/or punishment. Oh, he was a big improvement over his predecessors and most of his peers. He even abolished capital punishment, something we haven’t gotten around to doing here in the good old humane US of A. But a defanged constitutional monarch he most definitely was not.
Mozart the misunderstood is another common element of the classic mythos, in existence long before Peter Shaffer’s play or the movie adaptation. One finds it as a recurrent leitmotif in composer hagiographies from Bach to Bartók, but closer inspection reveals that the starving genius in the drafty garrett who is appreciated only after he drops dead is Hollywood, not history. Mozart would have been devastated if most people found his music hard to understand. He depended on their goodwill to make his living, after all. That isn’t to say that they held him in the same esteem as we do—such unconditional worship is rarely bestowed on actual living people, after all. But his audiences grokked him, even if imperfectly.
The Marriage of Figaro as a near-flop comes to us almost exclusively from the movie. It was an enormous hit, so much so that the management of the Burgtheater put up signs begging the audience to refrain from requesting so many encores. Along those same lines, it’s worth noting that Don Giovanni was a mega-hit for Mozart at its Prague premiere; the Viennese were cooler towards it at first, but not as a rejection of Mozart. A nasty recurrent scrum with Turkey was sapping everybody’s energies (and pocketbooks), and no doubt the war-weary citizens of the capital wanted something a bit fluffier than the moral ambiguity of Lorenzo da Ponte’s screwy but fascinating libretto.
Mozart’s father Leopold as a villain is an altogether tougher mythic nut to crack. I’ve found myself slipping into thoughtless Leopold-bashing on occasion. He’s a complex character and a far cry from the servile and one-dimensional stuffed shirt of Amadeus. Consider the awesome responsibility of training such a colossal talent, and what a success Leopold made of it. The man was obviously one of the all-time great teachers. It has been my experience that mediocre teachers faced with a potent talent react either by retreating into blissfully uncritical approval, or by treating their student’s gifts as disruptive threats to orderly progress. But Leopold was made of far finer stuff; he shepherded his son’s gifts, encouraged and fed them, but deftly avoided imposing his own lukewarm musical personality on his vividly imaginative son. Wolfgang’s older sister Nannerl would have presented no challenges to a veteran teacher of Leopold’s caliber; she was a garden-variety talent requiring no more than his routine professionalism. But no teacher can be prepared for a Wolfgang Mozart. Not only was this stupendous talent Leopold’s student, but he was also his son as well—meaning that Leopold was obliged to function as both parent and teacher. Wolfgang had a difficult childhood and adolescence, nor could it have been otherwise. He had heard people refer to him as a “miracle” as far back as he could remember, and nobody could experience such hyperbolic praise on a regular basis without emotional damage. It is very much to Leopold’s credit that Wolfgang wound up neither a Wagner-class egomaniac nor a burned-out whack job. But the strain of raising and training a stupendously gifted child took its toll: Leopold could be overprotective, intrusive, manipulative, and sometimes downright mean. But his love was steadfast and his guidance unfailingly skillful. He succeeded at a near-impossible task, and that confers a modicum of sainthood, albeit with a tarnished halo.
But one element of the mythos bears up to scrutiny, and delightfully so. Wolfgang Mozart did indeed write a six-part canon to the text Lick My Ass. He had a gutter mouth and just loved to talk dirty. They don’t mention it in the movie, but all the Mozarts were keen on humor involving flatulence, excrement, or the nether regions. So next time you conjure up an image of a humorless, holier-than-thou Roy Dotrice as Leopold Mozart—just imagine him telling a fart joke.
But not in front of the Archbishop.