Keys fail to unlock Mozart

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 18

Keys fail to unlock Mozart

Mozart. By Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Translated from German by Marion Faber. Dent, 1983, 408 pp. Illustrations. $29.95. (Reviewed by J. A. Ritchie) Amadeus has a lot to answer for. Its unidealised view of Mozart, more warts than anything else, has eased the way for bolder biographers to consider the man, whom tradition has treated as a God-like figure, more as an average chap on the personal front, albeit a genius in music. Most of us were content to let the fanning, sycophantic notions of the young Mozart remain, on the grounds that they did no harm to the music and even possibly promoted it. But within the family, so to speak, we knew Wolfgang Mozart as a crude little man, not all that clean (even for those days), a man with a propensity for dirty stories laced with the German equivalent of four-letter words, more at home in the billiards saloon, something of a gambler and certainly the possessor of a strong sexual appetite. Nevertheless, we thought these things to be substantially irrelevant alongside the product of an original and fecund mind. Interesting, yes; but not so important in the total scheme of things. This volume disagrees with such a

view. Wolfgang Hildesheimer is variously described as a German novelist, playwright, graphic artist, and psychologist. The one thing he is not is a musician. He makes this perfectly clear. His knowledge of the libretti, the domestic background, and the means by which Mozart’s later operas came to be conceived, prepared, and first performed, is intimate and comprehensive. But practically every thesis he propounds (and there are plenty) is undercut by the demonstrable fact that music is not the author’s stock-in-trade. This does not prevent Hildesheimer from parading a certain aura of knowledgeability. He has a passion for keys — of the tonal variety, so that every key of every aria he mentions in the operas appears to be included as a matter of course. And always one gathers the impression that by establishing the fact that he knows which key a piece is in, he has cemented, in our minds, his wisdom. Susanna, for example, according to Hildesheimer “replies to the shadowy A minor of the Count with her clear C major.” In the course of a long study it becomes obvious that the author, as the blurb says, “refuses to repeat what others have said.” In this spirit he denigrates men like Ernst Bloch,

Goethe, Bruno Walter, Leo Schrade, and one of the highly acknowledged Mozart scholars, Alfred Einstein. Hildesheimer is “anti” them all, quoting them speciously to put them down and using the royal “we” to encourage the reader to join in the opinionated philanderings. He asks that this unfashionable usage be considered “the common standpoint of the author and a reader who can identify with his theses, opinions and conclusions.” It is asking too much. Further, the layout of the book is distressing. Apart from twenty pages of illustrations, six pages of notes, a chronology, and two indexes totalling 33 pages, the remainder is one long chapter of 366 pages with no headings. It comprises a relatively unstructured and amorphous essay, the best content of which deals with Mozart’s operas as Eart of the German tradition. But it is ard going for the reader unrelieved apart from an occasional felicity of translation such as Mozart’s note to Anton Stoll: Stoll, my dear, You’ve been swilling some beer! The minor, I hear, Is what tickles your ear! (Marion Faber deserves congratulations for her translation. Its accuracy cannot be vouched for, but it is smooth and readable.)