WARHORSES.(The Marriage of Figaro)(Sempre Libera)(The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I)(Sound Recording Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 27-SEP-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The breathtaking profanity of Mozart's letters--"Whoever doesn't believe me may lick me, world without end," and so on--has led one British researcher to conclude recently that the composer had Tourette's syndrome. What's interesting about this theory, which has become the goofball classical-music news item of the season, is that anyone would actually need a far-fetched medical explanation for the fact that a young male with healthy appetites swore a lot and liked to talk about sex. Mozart, like Shakespeare, moved with equal ease through the most refined and most raucous circles of his world. Only if classical music is confined to the fleshless end of the spectrum does Mozart's exaltation of the body become a psychological anomaly crying out for interpretation.

Rene Jacobs's recording of "The Marriage of Figaro" (Harmonia Mundi), the most startling and perhaps the best classical recording released so far this year, reconciles man and music, sacred and profane. The first bars of the overture serve notice that the "divine Mozart" is coming lustily to earth. Sforzandos land like sucker punches, legatos become greasy slurs. The four-minute overture is an event in itself: you sense the creation of a new political and cultural stage on which...

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