The composer and his phoenix
Nicholas Kenyon
MOZART AND HIS OPERAS by David Cairns Penguin/Allen Lane, £22, pp. 290,
ISBN 0713994916
✆ £17.60 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 THE MAN WHO WROTE MOZART: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF LORENZO DA PONTE by Anthony Holden Weidenfeld, £18.99, pp. 278, ISBN 02978500806 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household.
David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations are real ... his vision embraces the pain and cruelty as well as the compassion — the darkness and the light; but it is the light that prevails’. Even if you feel that the truth about Mozart’s emotional ambiguity at moments like the end of Figaro is that it leaves that balance of light and dark totally open, Cairns’s is a wonderfully sympathetic, convincingly expressed view. We will be very lucky if the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth produces a more perceptive and moving book than this new study of Mozart’s mature operas.
Born of a lifetime’s experience of these pieces, tracing the steps which brought him to value them so highly, Cairns’s book is, essentially, an extended meditation on what makes Mozart so marvellous. Not for him the cynicism of a Norman Lebrecht (who recently wrote ludicrously that Mozart ‘merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience’) or even the more judicious scepticism of Peter Phillips in these pages last week. By the end of his prologue Cairns has already written several profound sentences about Mozart’s genius, evoking ‘all that the music’s impeccable control concealed — the intensities, the layers of irony, the longing, the undercurrents of sadness, the co-existence of the celestial and the earthy, the sheer intelligence...’ Cairns feels the ‘presence of Mozart so strongly that I am surprised not to see him there’ and communicates that closeness with vivid understanding.
You will need a reasonable knowledge of Mozart’s operas to find your way around Cairns’s often discursive descriptions — don’t look here for a Kobbé-like summary of the action — but his remarks are always precise and to the point. On Cos! fan tutte: ‘In this opera Arcadian beauty and the clinical investigation of human frailty co-exist.’ On Don Giovanni: ‘No other opera equals its sense of headlong momentum, of moving in a single continuous impulse...’ On The Magic Flute: ‘We do not have to read all the signs in order to receive the meaning ... By the end we have no sense that the many different sounds we have heard belong to anything but one work, one comprehensive vision.’ Cairns’s musical analysis of The Magic Flute, showing the unity Mozart draws from a diversity of thematic material and the subtlety with which the composer uses different combinations of his orchestral instruments in almost every number, is absolutely outstanding.
Among several valuable Shakespearean analogies, Cairns makes an odd parallel between omitting the last moralising scene of Don Giovanni (which may have been cut in Mozart’s Vienna revival of the opera) and the first supernatural scene of Hamlet. But surely the real parallel with stopping the opera at the climactic death of the Don would be ending Hamlet at ‘the rest is silence’. There, Shakespeare coldly returns us to the everyday concerns the great tragedy has made us forget, and Mozart too always returns to the normal, the mundane, as in the almost brutal wrap-up of Cos! fan tutte.
Cairns, always a generous critic, almost never criticises Mozart. Where he might do so, in considering the earlier, less mature operas, he prefers to omit them altogether. This is a pity, as is his reluctance to look deeply at the theatre of the time, or at the operas of Mozart’s contemporaries on the grounds that he left them ‘almost immeasurably far behind’. This is an old view of greatness, shared by Charles Rosen in his The Classical Style. Mozart’s operas did not spring to life fully formed; they were influenced by the practice of the time, the singers of the moment, the politics of culture, and to analyse these debts as recent scholarship has attempted surely reveals them as more, not less, miraculous. Cairns recalls a time when Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito were not accepted into the Mozartian canon: recordings by Cairns’s long-time colleague Colin Davis helped to achieve that; in time the same may happen with La finta giardiniera (which Covent Garden mounts for the first time later this year) and Lucio Silla (a magnificent score which no professional British company has yet staged).
Opera was the art-form which obsessed Mozart and to which he most aspired. The detailed accounts in his letters of the writing of Idomeneo and The Abduction from the Seraglio show how wrong Wagner was to imagine that Mozart ever wrote ‘thoughtlessly’: the back-and-forth with inadequate librettists and demanding singers is gruelling. Mozart was always looking for good librettists, whom he called ‘that true phoenix’. Unfortunately, when he really met his match in Lorenzo Da Ponte, we know all too little about how they collaborated. They worked on three great operas in close proximity in Vienna, so not a glimmer of correspondence survives, and we have to rely on the extremely self-serving accounts in Da Ponte’s much later memoirs. ‘Europe and the whole world owe the exquisite vocal music of this remarkable genius largely to my own perseverance and determination’, Da Ponte writes modestly.
Da Ponte had an extraordinary career from priest to poet, grocer, bookseller, professor, always living on the very edge of disaster. Like Cairns, Anthony Holden writes extremely well, telling the racy story energetically, though, as music as such is not perhaps his strongest suit, it was a wise move to concentrate instead on the words. He provides a rattling good read, filled with vivid anecdotes (the mistaken identity of lovers under a veil in a gondola sounds straight out of Don Giovanni). When Da Ponte seduces his Venetian landlady or falls in love with a lovely mother and two of her children simultaneously, he sounds like the Alan Clark of his day with the added complication of being a priest. But the problem with the hilarious and compelling story is: how much of it can one really believe? We do not even know whether Da Ponte really married Nancy, the partner of his later years. As Holden expertly sifts contemporary evidence from later sensationalised recollection, we read rather too often the caveat ‘if Da Ponte is to be believed’ when clearly what made Da Ponte such a good librettist was his ability to elaborate life into fiction with such glee.
Holden keeps Mozart in the picture as far as possible — and in the awkwardly ungrammatical title; wouldn’t ‘Mozart’s true phoenix’ have done the trick? He is rather too credulous of suggested links between the two: I do not think there is any real evidence that Da Ponte wrote either the text of Mozart’s oratorio Davidde penitente, or libretto of the abandoned opera Lo sposo deluso? (And though Holden has read widely, he oddly always refers to the Mozart scholar Andrew Steptoe as Patrick.) Another memoir, by the Mozart singer Michael Kelly, provides surely the best judgment of Da Ponte: ‘The Abbé stood mighty well with himself and had the character of a consummate coxcomb’. As Holden traces his later years embroiled in money-losing ventures in London and then moving to America and becoming an Italian professor, and you read of Da Ponte reaching his 90th year, bridging the operatic world from Handel to Wagner, behind the racy story there is always the nagging question: what on earth might Mozart have achieved if only he had lived so long?
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