The triumph of genius.(Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)(Biography)

In 1892, the year following the centenary of Mozart's death, George Bernard Shaw, critic as well as playwright, felt it necessary to scold his readers for hardly yet having gotten out of the habit of regarding Mozart's compositions as "tuneful little trifles fit only for persons of simple tastes." In this the 250th anniversary year of Mozart's birth, what with all those CD compilations of tunes meant to work the "Mozart Effect" on unsuspecting children and of melting adagios meant to accompany their parents in wine-drinking and more, the situation may not be much improved. On the other hand, a public imbued with Peter Shaffer's intriguing, albeit distorted, Amadeus may have a different picture of the man. Who can forget that moment when the aged Salieri--broken and consumed by envy--recalls first hearing the adagio from Mozart's "Gran Partita" for winds and double bass (K361), (1) the oboe entering from on high as if from another world, its line then picked up with heartrending seamlessness by the clarinet? It was as though, exclaims Salieri, he was hearing the voice of God.

Such moments of pure enthrallment occur in Mozart as perhaps in no other composer--not all of them his most profound musical utterances, but moments of such surpassing loveliness as indeed to evoke another world. "As from afar," rhapsodized the young Franz Schubert, himself no stranger to loveliness, "the magic notes of Mozart's music still greatly haunt me.... They show us in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which we hope with confidence." One may think of the slow movements of the Third Violin Concerto, composed relatively early, or of the great Clarinet Concerto, composed only two months before Mozart's death. Or, to take his more explicitly religious music, the familiar "Laudate dominum" from his Solemn Vespers (K339) or the rapturous Ave rerum corpus (K618). No composer on earth has inspired more talk about heaven than Mozart. One of his celebrated 20th-century biographers, Alfred Einstein, managed to call him a mere "visitor on earth," and even Shaw, not a reverent man, opined that the two priestly arias of Sarastro in The Magic Flute were the only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God.

Whatever the divinizing excesses of such language, Mozart has probably received more attention from theologians than any other composer save Bach. Most famously, there is Karl Barth, who began each day by listening to Mozart and found in him as he found in no other a transporting freedom and play within order, an affirmation "of a world which in sunlight and storm, by day and by night, is a good and ordered world." Barth is quite sure that in heaven, the angels, when left to their own devices, play Mozart, the good Lord listening in with special pleasure.

There is also Barth's pupil Hans Kung, whose little book on Mozart argues affectionately against his old Protestant teacher on behalf of a more Catholic view of the composer. (2) Mozart himself once remarked that "enlightened Protestants" could probably never really understand what the Agnus Dei meant to him, and what Kung finds in Mozart's music are what he calls "traces of transcendence"--traces that in religious music can lend intrinsic liturgical significance to the music itself, without benefit of words, and indeed can make music, whether explicitly religious or not and whether explicitly religious or not and whether vocal or purely instrumental, a source of revelation alongside the Word:

 
  I think that music which speaks the truth is not just limited, say, to 
  vocal music or explicitly religious music; it also includes purely 
  instrumental music--and especially the intimacy of many second 
  movements. An abstract masterpiece can speak the truth in the pure 
  language of sound.... And though music cannot become a religion of 
  art, the art of music is the most spiritual of all symbols for that 
  "mystical sanctuary of our religion," the divine itself. In other 
  words, for me Mozart's music has relevance for religion not only where 
  religious and church themes or forms emerge, but precisely through the 
  compositional technique of the non-vocal, purely instrumental music, 
  through the way in which this music interprets the world, a way which 
  transcends extra-musical conceptuality.... With keen ears [one] may 
  perceive in the pure, utterly internalized sound, for example, of the 
  adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, which embraces us without using any 
  words, something wholly other.... So here are ciphers, traces of 
  transcendence. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, the seventh and last child of Leopold Mozart and Anna Maria Pertl, and was baptized the following day as Johannes Chrysostomus (after the saint) Wolfgangus Theophilus (Mozart himself preferred the French Amade). He was not the greatest musical prodigy who ever lived. Felix Mendelssohn was, achieving…