THE MOZART CORRESPONDENCE
The Letters of Mozart and His Family. Translated and
.edited by Emily Anderson. Three vols. (Macmillan. 54s.) MR. Polar of Punch has made comment with his pencil upon various aspects of our national character, but he has not so far portrayed the tendency of the English professional classes to produce first-rate works of literature and scholarship out- side the range of their proper studies. Musical history has been particularly fortunate in the devotion of such amateurs. The original editor of Grove's Dictionary was by profession a civil engineer, who, indeed, allowed his interest in music eventually to absorb his whole energy, but whose amateur status was not invalidated by his abandonment of engineering. In what other country would such a work be entrusted to and so brilliantly carried out by a man who had not been through the regular mill of musical education? And where, except in England, would work of the quality of this edition of Mozart's correspondence be accomplished in the spare time of a civil servant?
The mere size of Miss Anderson's task is staggering enough, but beyond the bulk of more than boo letters turned into English lie even more exacting labours. For Miss Ander- son has not been content to take Schiedermair's German edition for her text, but has gone behind it to the original documents. That meant deciphering an enormous mass of German script, sometimes scored through by von Nissen's editorial pen, often hurriedly scrawled and written now and then in dialect, in Italian or French, in cypher and even in gibberish. Then there was the tash of selection. For, though she has given us every word of Mozart's own letters, includ- ing much that has not previously been printed, to have pub- lished the whole of his father's lengthy epistles would have meant enlarging these volumes beyond reason with trivial gossip of no possible interest to modern readers.
Finally, and second in importance only to the careful trans- lation of this huge volume of material, there was the task of editing, annotating and indexing, at whose immensity imagi- nation falters. There is hardly a person mentioned in the letters, however insignificant, about whose identity and life Miss Anderson has not dug out some fact from Heaven knows what multitude of sources. And the whole work is most thoroughly indexed, so that the reader can turn up references to persons, to major incidents in the lives of the principal characters, and, most important, to any one of Mozart's compo- sitions that is mentioned in the text. One further service to the reader has been performed by the arrangement of all the letters in their chronological order, so that the book presents, with Miss Anderson's notes and brief commentary, a com- plete and consecutive biography of unimpeachable authen- ticity. And there are reproduced all the important portraits of Mozart, his family, and acquaintances.
For the translation itself it is difficult to find adequate words at a time when the most extravagant praise is habitually given to the second-rate and " masterpiece " has become a synonym for the ephemeral. Miss Anderson is not only scrupulously accurate wherever I have checked her with the original, but preserves in an uncanny way the spirit of the text. Mozart himself was fond of playing with words, punning, juggling with rhymes, allowing his imagination to range in the higher nonsense, and turning his sentences inside out in a way that one had thought impossible to reproduce. Yet these facetiae are faithfully preserved without becoming more unintelligible than they sometimes are in German. Nor has Miss Ander- son blenched at the scatologous passages that were too much for Schiedermair's stomach. This pre-occupation with the excremental functions of the body in Mozart's adolescence may shock readers in a politer age, especially as they are rarely amusing, an exception being the passage at the end of letter No. 236. The justification for reproducing these passages bluntly is that now we know what Mozart did write and that it turns out to be no worse than this.
Mozart was a lively and interesting correspondent. He does himself less than justice when he writes to his father (No.
238a):
"I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician. So tomorrow I shall play at Cannabich's a Whole congratulatory composition in honour of your birthday."
Has any father received a more charming and affectionate greeting than that? No wonder Leopold regarded him as a miracle (No. 62)! Mozart had a knack of hitting-off character in words that is the counterpart of the gift that made him a supreme composer of operas. His description of a monk, written when he was fourteen (No. to8a), is worthy to set beside Steme's of the Franciscan friar encountered at Calais : • " We have the honour to go about with a certain Dominican, who is regarded as a holy man. For my part, I do not believe it, for at breakfast he often takes a cup of chocolate and immediately after a good glass of strong Spanish wine ; and I myself have had the honour of lunching with this saint who at table drunk a whole decanter and finished up with a glass of strong wine, two large slices of melon, some peaches, pears, five cups of coffee, a whole plate of cloves and two full saucers of milk and lemon. He may of course be following some sort of diet . . . "
These excerpts give the flavour of the translation, which is direct and vigorous, and makes no affectation of eighteenth- century style which would only have landed us in Wardour Street.
" I am a musician," that is the confession of faith that runs through these letters, and to the majority of readers their chief interest will lie in the revelation of Mozart's attitude to his own music and that of other composers. He does not parade theories and his references are tantalisingly incomplete. Music
was so much his whole life that he had no need to argue about it, except when practical considerations, like the compo- sition of Idomeneo at Munich while his librettist was at Salz-
burg, necessitated a discussion. Beneath his charm and vivacity there always appears an immense seriousness in all that concerns his art.
Mozart's own character and that of his father, less dour and unsympathetic than it has been painted by some of the biographers, come out with wonderful vividness from a read- ing of these volumes. Wolfgang is summed up objectively in a letter (No. 46o) from Leopold to the Baroness von Wald- statten, who engineered the marriage to Constanze, which, taken with Grimm's report on the boy from Paris (quoted in No. 323), reveals the secret of his failure in the eyes of men. He was a compound of impatience and indolence, in a hurry for the success he justly regarded as his due, but too little inclined to work for it. This may seem a strange accusation against a composer of his enormous output. Yet he did not work in the way that might have achieved the success that was always round the corner and which, in fact, arrived just too late. Circumstances were adverse. He hated Salzburg, which was too narrow for his wings to unfold, and Vienna, of which he hoped so much, turned a superficial ear, that was ready to be tickled by a novelty but would make no sustained effort at comprehension, to his piping. The story has all the elements of great tragedy, and one cannot read this tale of the -dis- illusionment and slow crushing of a sweet and noble soul by an unthinking world without profound emotion.
DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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