Not quite forging the links
Fiona Maddocks
MOZART AND VIENNA by H. C. Robbins Landon Thames & Hudson, f16.95, pp. 208 Some books are bad because they are badly written. Some are bad because, to put it no more strongly, they turn out to be other than they seem, if covers or titles are supposed to give some general inkling of content. This book is in the latter category. The name has been chosen with care: Mozart and Vienna. The 'and' is crucial. This is not 'Mozart's Vienna', or even `Mozart in Vienna'. Indeed Volkmar Braunbehrens's excellent Mozart in Vienna, recently translated from the German and published here last year, secured that title first and provided us with most of what we might wish to know on the topic. Not that it would have applied here, any- way. For that invaluable little conjunction `and' has enabled the fertile Professor H.C. Robbins Landon (this is his fourth book on Mozart within three years, following numerous Haydn volumes and an enthusi- asm, as seen on television, for Venetian music) to connect two subjects close to his heart without quite uniting them. Thus, cakes and ale, beer and skittles, Mozart and Vienna.
But given a book purporting to be about, say, cakes and ale, you might reasonably expect the writer to demonstrate how these sharply contrasting substances are yet in- extricably linked. Were you to find yourself fobbed off, instead, with a few skimpy chapters on cakes, which then made no fur- ther appearance until the closing pages of the book, otherwise devoted entirely to ale, your frustration would be justified. Such a book, anyway, should be called Ale and Cakes. Or Ale (and Cakes).
So, with Professor Robbins Landon's book: Vienna and Mozart would have been more accurate, if still not satisfactory. For this is largely an abridged translation of Johann Pezzl's Sketch of Vienna, a lively collection of apergus on late 18th-century Vienna during the time Mozart was there, though not mentioning his name once, with a few pages about Mozart either side — a detachable dust-jacket, as it .were, round the main thing.
True, a discreet sub-heading on the cover does warn you what to expect (Including selections from Johann Pezzl's Sketch of Vienna 1786-90), but much in the spirit of a film of Hamlet adding 'and thanks also to William Shakespeare' as one of the smaller end credits. Nor does it pre- pare you for the spare efficiency of the pro- fessor's own contribution — apart, that is, from the perfectly decent Pezzl translation.
The first four brief chapters, preceding the Pezzl, cover familiar ground about Mozart's journeys to Vienna as a child prodigy with extracts from some of the bet- ter known letters by his father, Leopold. A fifth chapter, 'Mozart and Vienna in the 1780s' gives hope, at last, that a vigorous `sketch' — to use the favoured word — is to follow, of what Robbins Landon tantalis- ingly calls Mozart's 'whirlwind of musical activity' at that time. But no. Cakes done, the professor moves on to ale. This chap- ter, it turns out, is a mere one-page intro- duction to Herr Pezzl and his recollections.
And highly illuminating they are. Covering everything from climate to chambermaids, banknotes to 'spinsters of a certain age', Pezzl wittily conveys Vienna at the time of Joseph II, a city uneasily embracing the Enlightenment, fashionable, noisy, dusty, a place of parties, balls and coffee-houses. He furnishes us with facts, and is always precise: 'The average number of people run over [and killed by carriages] is three and a half. His own views are read- ily apparent: he supports the Enlightenment and Joseph II's reforms; abhors the fashion for the hooped skirt (Twit the slimmest girl is transformed by it into a herring barrel'); tolerates gam- bling; bemoans the reduction in number of marriages, which he attributes partly to the fact that women deter men by being too greedy. We learn about food, wine, the police, orders of chivalry and Anglomania, a constitutional weakness he did not suffer:
The results of this anglomania are to be seen in. . . a slovenly, heavy gait. ..punch, jockeys, whisky, racing etc. For ladies it means a lik- ing for horse-riding, tea, hats... and a gener- al preference for any male, young or old, handsome or hideous, who lives anywhere between the Isle of Wight and the Orkneys.
So Pezzl skips — for this is lively stuff towards his conclusion, a comparison of Vienna old and new, which shows the city more expensive and emancipated than it was, yet devious, miserly and untrustworthy with it. Robbins Landon's abridgement may have saved us from occasional repeti- tion or tedious detail. But what a lost opportunity. Why not produce a full edi- tion of Pezzl, complete with decent foot- notes instead of this mish-mash, where the omissions are illogical (how disappointing to lose entries on Foreigners, Conversation, Inns or the Book Trade) and the explanatory notes erratic.
In Pezzl's section on domestic staff, Robbins Landon points out that Haydn qualified as a 'house-officer' in the Esterhazy household. Yet he fails to explain people and places integral to Mozart himself: the description of St Stephen's Cathedral, where his marriage and burial took place, is omitted; little is said about the vast Trattner House on the Graben, owned by the publisher and entrepreneur Thomas Trattner, where Mozart stayed in 1784; attention could have been drawn to Pezzl's ladies' maids and chambermaids, for which Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro and Despina in Cosi Fan Tutte might almost have been role models. Doubtless Pezzl's description of burial habits in Josephine Vienna have been examined in attempts to unravel the confusion over Mozart's dismal death and meagre last rites; but for the general reader — at whom this book is surely aimed, as abridgements usually are — rehearsing the issues would have done no harm.
Robbins Landon's conclusion promises us 'Mozart's stay in Vienna, 1781-91, and its ramifications' — in just nine pages. Braunbehrens, or the professor's own 1791: Mozart's Last Year would satisfy the reader better. One way and another, the Mozart bicentenary has served Professor Robbins Landon and his publisher well.
Fiona Maddocks is the Music Editor of the Independent.
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