Schwabenstreich
Mozart On The Way To Prague. By Eduard Moerike. (Blackwell. 5s.)
Was: is a " fragment of imaginative composition " short and not at all to the point, but at least short, which is nowa- days so rare a quality in a literary work that one cannot . refrain from commending this book for having contrived, in
• 20,000 words instead of in 200,000, to exhaust the inessential. Nevertheless, it is to be feared that some of those " Mozart lovers " to whom it is dedicated may find the process over- long, as it undoubtedly was for Eduard Moerike, whose talent was sporadic, eager in attack and rapidly exhausted. That his was an energy intolerant of discursive amplification is plain to anyone who reads his Balladen, if possible more tedious than the verhorpeter Mondschein of his Minerva, inland ; or the autobiographical Maier Nolten, which he frankly aban- doned ; or even the Meirchen and Novellen. What he could do, when the fit seized him and he could snatch a moment from his professional engagements as pastor and pedagogue— for business never stood any nonsense from art in Swabia— to attend to the raptus, was write a lyric. Denk' es, 0 Seele, with which this story concludes, and Ein Stiindlein wok' vor Tag arc not inferior to anything in Eichendorff.
In the autumn of 1787 Mozart sets out from Vienna with his wife Kostanze to produce his Don Giovanni at Prague. They halt at midday ; Mozart saunters into the pleasaunce . of one Count Schimberg, helps himself (with a pensive smile) to an orange, is apprehended by the gardener, dashes off - his excuses to the Countess, proceeds on her invitation (Kapell- meister Mozart ! Grande, grande Mozart !) to be installed "with Kostanze in the Schloss and most comfortably and excellently entertained ; sings, plays (billiards and Klavier), gorges, boozes, flirts, reminisces, performs in a free version some numbers of his Don Giovanni, from Or sai, chi l'onore no doubt to the " trombones of silver " of the blood-curdling Finale, sleeps the night, gratefully accepts in the morning the parting gift of a smart travelling carriage and proceeds on his way. Such is the material from which Herr Moerike has presumed to extract " the picture of the artist's individuality." What emerges is the species of paranoiac entertainer who, in the service of Archbishop Hieronymus, was greeted in such abusive terms as Flegel, Lump and Gassenbube.
Mozart's improvidence, his obsession with death, his creative processes (for which Moerike had the incredible ins- pertinence to " cherish a sense of affinity "), the theory of Correspondences, that trusty standby of all the Romantics from Hoffmann to Proust, these, together with certain inner obliquities embracing Madame de Sevigne and Mozart's salt- , box, are the elements that complete the cartoon. There are a number of passages—the description of the orange exhaling its aria, the Neapolitan masque, the scene in a Viennese skittle-alley—that would be pleasant enough in a less pre- . tentious context. But when such writing, valid as isolated exercises in lyrical prose, is pressed into an undertaking that has betrayed all the ingenuity and intelligence of men very much more highly endowed than Eduard Moerike, and in which all writing, qUa writing, is bound to fail—the under- taking, that is, to elucidate the ultimate Kunsitrieb of a Musical genius—then there is nothing at all to be said for it nor anything too strong to be said against it.
For it is not merely a betrayal of itself ; it is a violation of its subject. No one is likely to question the right of Herr Moerike to make what abuse he pleased of his own peculiar talents, but he should have been restrained from presenting the Hexenmeister of the Jupiter Symphony, the A Minor Sonata, the Requiem and The Magic Flute as a compound of Horace Skimpolc and Wagner in half- hose.
SAMUEL BECii-Efr.
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