GENIUS OR GENUS?

posted by James Reel

    This is the big Mozart Day, the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, which we are officially marking during my six-hour shift here at KUAT-FM with exactly one work lasting six minutes and 50 seconds. Don’t tell the music director, but I have taken the liberty of jettisoning from the schedule two or three not-especially-distinctive yet overplayed pieces by other composers that you’ll never miss (trust me) and replacing them with more substantial Mozart works (so far, the bassoon concerto and one of the late piano sonatas). I didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten.
    This is a fine day to become reaquainted with Mozart’s music, which, ubiquitous as it is, too often gets relegated to the background. In many cases that’s OK; Mozart wrote pages and pages of serendades specifically designed to grace the room unobtrusively during dinners and parties. But his mature works almost (almost) always bear close listening. My friend Lisa Stark, who procures underwriting for KUAT, told me several years ago when she was taking piano lessons that she’d found Mozart to be a little dull until she had to play some of his keyboard music; she discovered that, despite all the repeats and structural conventions, Mozart rarely did exactly the same thing twice; he left many little traps for the inattentive amateur (or even professional) pianist.
    I’m perfectly happy to listen to lots of Mozart’s music today, but I’ve had zero interest in reading all the Mozart “appreciations” that have been published during the past few weeks. I got sick of the whole Mozart-appreciation industry during the death anniversary back in 1991, and the sight of an article either extolling the virtues of or debunking Mozart still makes me a bit queasy.
    I’m especially annoyed by the veneration of Mozart as some sort of heaven-sent genius, music’s equivalent of the Jesus depicted in sentimental Christian portraiture, Jesus the Goy with his remarkably clean hair and placid disposition, a grown-up but still innocent version of the baby Jesus we get at Christmastime, that infant who never, ever would poop in his swaddling clothes. Well, as anyone who has read an unbowdlerized edition of Mozart’s letters or seen Amadeus knows, Mozart was obsessed with poop jokes. This aspect of his character has been over-emphasized in our post-Amadeus world; I seriously doubt that he made fart noises with his mouth in polite company. However he may have behaved around his family and friends doesn’t mean he was a virtual Tourette case in the presence of the archbishop of Salzburg.
    What the idolators and debunkers alike fail to understand is how normal Mozart really was. Provincial Austrian humor was crude; Mozart was raised in it, and even his father, who took great pains to present himself and his family in a dignified manner, appreciated some of his countrymen’s coarser proverbs and practices, as you can hear in the suites he wrote that were inspired by peasant weddings and children’s toys.
    And Mozart as genius? I don’t quite buy it. First, remember that his father was the foremost violin pedagog north of Italy in the mid-18th century; his famous and influential treatise on violin playing was published the year of Mozart’s birth, and he provided his son (and daughter) with a first-rate music education from the very beginning. So, the first thing Mozart developed was a great facility for the keyboard (and secondarily the violin) through practice, practice, practice. Then there’s all that hoopla over Mozart starting to write his own music just before he turned five. Well, again, father Leopold was a solid composer himself, and he gave his son a tremendous amount of help, “editing” the music as Wolfgang scribbled it out. And frankly, Mozart’s childhood works are quite conventional, imitating the music of his father and J.C. Bach and the Italian models at hand. It’s not original, it’s not genius, it’s the result of early training and hard work and help from daddy.
    What boy Mozart did develop a huge talent for was improvising at the keyboard. This was a basic skill expected at the time, just as young jazz pianists today aren’t going to get anywhere if they can’t improvise—that’s the basis of the art form. Mozart gained a great facility for ornamenting and varying melodies. And this is the key to his later individuality as a composer.
    People swoon over Mozart’s ability to write music “in his head” and then jot it down with few second thoughts. Just a few days ago, University of Arizona piano prof Paula Fan was talking to me about how clean Mozart’s manuscripts are, compared to the messy blotches that Beethoven generated. But composing in one’s head is what many of us who write words for a living do all the time; we roll thoughts around, try out turns of phrase while walking the dog or taking a shower, and often we can type out the results with minimal fuss. This is what Mozart did with music, and he was able to do it because he was working within predictible, formulaic structures. He knew, for example, how a sonata-form movement was supposed to go; you have a sequence of themes, a sequence of harmonic modulations that follow a standard pattern, and all you have to do is choose a key to start in and plug in the tunes.
    At least, that’s all you have to do if you’re one of the many hack composers active during Mozart’s time. Mozart was able to transcend the formulas because since childhood he’d been improvising melodic ornaments at the keyboard. He knew exactly how to concoct elegant little surprises in a melodic turn of phrase, and how to get from one key to another through several fascinating harmonic byways. Mozart wrote some of the most deeply moving (and unpredictable!) piano-concerto movements in the history of music, and he did it because he’d been immersed in music for 25 years, paid attention to what he heard, learned from his and others’ mistakes, and developed a keen ear for effect and an ability to bring his own personality—or at least a personality he wished to present—into what otherwise could be paint-by-numbers composition.
    Ultimately, whether Mozart was a genius or just a hard worker with lots of experience and individuality makes no difference. All that counts is the music itself.