Arts

Is God Mozart-like?

Hans Keller

On Thursday night, 12 July, at 7.30 at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Tamas Vasary will conduct the Northern Sinfonia in an all-Mozart concert in which he will also play the C major Concerto, K.467; Radio 4 will relay the event live.

How many great composers are there who don't lose if an entire concert is devoted to their music? After close on 20 years on the planning side of our musical world, I speak as a practitioner gently robbed of any theoretical prejudices when I say: nothing short of the universality of a Bach, later Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and, yes, Schoenberg and Stravinsky will do. With the exception of Wagner, that is, none of the great romantics was all-embracing, and Wagner didn't, couldn't write much great concert music.

How much safer one feels in one's critical assessment on this empirical basis, how much more concretely intriguing the problem of universality becomes. It is one's own problem — of grasping the most godlike composers' solutions of the disparities, conflicts, incomparabilities, contradictions of our physical and mental existence — not to speak of our metaphysical guesswork. As a matter of fact, one has to speak of it, for the revelation of metaphysical reality is the one central preoccupation which all the few greatest have had in common; no atheists, no anti-believers among them, no agnostics even, whatever their chronological position in the history of religion and anti-religion.

Nor is their deification an act of adolescent adoration or else of sober cynicism: without them, only God would remain omniscient, and with due respect to Him, we have more direct and less controversial intimations of their all-knowingness (OED's 'infinite knowledge' for 'omniscience' isn't good enough, hard enough). In other words, I can only hope that God's knowledge is like Mozart's. If it is, He must have created diversity out of an allembracing unity: this would distinguish Him from us, rather than His mere longevity. For while we integrate as best we can, and call that a good, 'healthy', indeed wholesome life, Mozart can only smile: some whole! Once a genius, i.e. at 39, he heard life as an integrum in the first place; it remained to discover all its contrasts — and there is no contrast between you and a table though there is one between you and me.

We make light of seriousness when we can't bear it or simply wish to deny it, then call the (oh so integrated) result humour — and, what is worse, proceed to re-create Mozart in our own image, to deem him humorous. We thus get hold of the wrong end of the stick which he has handed us to go along with him: there we limp, then, a pitiful sight. For what he discloses is not the funny side of the serious, but the seriousness of lightness. In direct spiritual descent from the Bach suites he didn't know (even the most dissimilar of the greatest tend to be among themselves rather than us), both divertimento and serenade turned, in his hands, into heavy light-weights.

Of such serenades, the Kleine Nachtmusik is the best-known example — still underrated, though, as a serious masterpiece, which status the C minor wind Serenade has, superficially, more easily and completely attained, perhaps because of its minor mode and, more relevantly, Mozart's own arrangement for string quintet. In some clearly definable respects, the string version is, in fact, even better than the original: otherwise, it wouldn't have happened. The wind Serenade in E flat (the penultimate work next Thursday) had no such luck; our knowledge of its omniscience is still severely limited, intensely though it looks forward to the heaviest light-weight of them all —the Divertimento for string trio in the same key.

Written less than three months after Mozart started Die EntAhrung, the E flat Serenade contains, significantly, one of Mozart's rare adagios. He certainly never treated that tempo character lightly, and duly came to re-introduce it in that utterly undiverting, profoundly concentrating Divertimento — which, in one dimension, contradicts the background of the preclassical suite more violently than does the Serenade: the Divertimento's two slow movements are not in the home key, whereas all the Serenade's five movements are. After Bach, it was only Mozart who invested such extended homotonality (as I call it) — extended, that is, beyond four movements — with omnipotent contrast. (I am happy to hear that OED is thinking of including my neologism in the next edition: it's one word instead of half a doien or so.) Not that Mozart was unaware of his Serenade's unconventional achievement — however modestly he expressed his awareness. On 3 November 1781, he writes to his father that 'the chief reason why I wrote the Serenade was that I wanted Mr von Strack . . . to hear something of mine, and it is for this reason that I wrote it in a fairly reasonable manner' (as opposed to the genre's traditional thoughtlessness); the antiarchaising translation, incidentally, is my own. Now, what I call his omniscience and he calls his reasonableness is instinctive, artless art in all domains but one — the one in which he did come to be in direct, wellnigh traumatic touch with Bach.

Yes, the artless art of fugue, its secret, died with Bach. (When I made some such remark at question time after a lecture, a distinguished member of the audience, George Malcolm, got up and said, 'It was also born with Bach.' I take his point.) Mozart's master fugues are masterly, the way the passacaglia at the end of Brahms's Fourth is masterly, only more so; they are conscious, at times even self-conscious masterpieces, and as such superhuman rather than godlike. The C minor Adagio and Fugue (first on Thursday) confirms my submission, especially if we take its genesis into account.

For this is another string arrangement in C minor that's better than the original, and what makes it better is not the fugue. This show of mastery started life in 1783 as a two-piano work in which Mozart 'sums up the fruit of his contrapuntal studies and of everything he had learned from Johann Sebastian Bach' (Einstein) — everything you can learn as distinct from everything you can't but know: as distinct from the core of Mozart's creative personality. Then, five years later, that core emerged, when he decided to arrange the master fugue for string quartet — and simultaneously for string orchestra, as the autograph's concluding divisions into cellos and double basses show.

For now, with the quartet sound in mind, characteristic quartet thought emerged — another of those rare, deep adagios, to introduce the fugue: a signature at the outset, Mozart the god introducing Mozart the master; the difference, in the creative event, couldn't have been more striking, more elemental. Or rather, the adagio is elemental, the fugue isn't. Yet all he says in his private catalogue of works is — 'a short adagio for two violins, viola and bass for a fugue I wrote a long time ago for two pianos.' A short adagio indeed — 52 slow bars introducing the 119 quick bars of the fugue! Compressed, not short.

Mozart's slow introductions are yet rarer than, and as powerful as, his adagios: in both respects, when the structural occasion arose, he made the character traits of a Haydn or Beethoven part of his own characteristic universality — to which Vasary is sufficiently sensitive to have• included no fewer than three adagios and two adagio introductions in his programme: the 'Prague' Symphony will conclude it. And there is another way in which the work evinces Hayclnesque or Beethovenian potency, as if Mozart had been their twin brother-in-art — which, as a character type, he wasn't.

Both Haydn and Beethoven, that is to say, were passionate developers in the technical sense, whereas Mozart would often happily renounce development, shorten it, or reduce its modulatory intensity. Equally happily, however, if far more rarely, his all-pervasive mind would do the diametrical opposite, of which the 'Prague' is the extreme, example: it turns the primitive three-movement scheme, which used to be sonata-less, into developmental sonata structures all the way — towards which purpose, I suggest, the minuet had to be excluded. The work thus becomes the only classical symphony which, dispensing with the most striking formal contrast of symphonic tradition, celebrates a continuous sonata festival, with new contrasts instead.

But the centre-piece of Vasary's evening is, of course, the work he will play — the first of those two towering C major Concertos Mozart wrote for himself in Vienna within the span of 22 months. Well, if it should turn out to be true that God is second to one, the reason may well be that He isn't personal enough; in the history of the world as we know it, at any rate, He seems to have proved ever more impersonal. Mozart, on the other hand, conveys his all-embracing knowledge omnipotently when he is at his most personal — which happens most readily, of course, when his player-addressee is he.

What about his operas, you may ask. The answer is that like the symphonies, they are in his piano concertos too: Thursday's slow movement is an aria-plus — because it's minus the human voice, which the pianist not only moves into the background, but replaces by a foreground that adds meaning — by singing on what is not a singing instrument. Once again, then, the arrangement is better.