C.S. Stone


Mozart and the Music of Intrigue


In the winter of 1870, Cosima Wagner recorded an exchange between the young, as yet unknown Fredrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy still fermenting inside him) and her husband, the composer Richard Wagner. Nietzsche was a frequent house guest that winter as the Wagners dwelt in alpine exile in the Swiss town of Tribschen, and the Wagner home a convenient journey from Basel, where Nietzsche had been appointed to a professorship in philology at the tender age of twenty-five. Wagner had spent the afternoon at the piano, playing selections from The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Marriage of Figaro, when Nietzsche asked him if Mozart had invented "the music of intrigue." No, Wagner replied: Mozart had redeemed the music of intrigue with melody. In Beaumarchais, the characters plot and intrigue, while in Mozart, they suffer and lament.

An odd, ambiguous, conspiratorial, phrase, "the music of intrigue." Odder still, perhaps, is that Wagner knew precisely what his morbidly perceptive young friend meant by it. True to habit, Wagner did not hesitate to pronounce his verdict. Wagner the overweening egoist was, like so many nineteenth-century critics, often dismissive of Mozart's art - deriding it as "frivolous" or "merely ornamental" - while Wagner the composer knew better. So did Nietzsche, as he prompted, with a mixture of admiration and amused malice, the creator of Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde, into confessing something like a debt, by acknowledging an affinity.

It is difficult to imagine two more dissimilar artists, temperamentally. The worlds of Parisfal and Così fan tutte (a work that Wagner disliked on both moral and musical grounds) could not be further apart: the one a Teutonic saga of Christian redemption, the other a bitter Enlightenment fable of erotic disillusionment. Their affinity shows itself not so much in the musical means - the tonal landscape is too far apart, most of the time - but rather in the musical ends, with the portrayal of sexual temptation and its repercussions, and the overwhelming power of eros to define human relationships. Allied with this is a mutual interest in music itself as a form of seduction. Nietzsche's probings on the meaning of the music of intrigue wrings from Wagner a roundabout admission: that it was Mozart who invented a musical language capable of expressing the multiplicities of erotic feelings as immediate psychological realities, as his characters veer from jealousy to bewilderment, to triumph, to doubt from fleeting moment to fleeting moment. Wagner was wrong, or rather half wrong: Not only did Mozart invent the music of intrigue; but, as Wagner understood, the music of intrigue made opera—the musical dramatic form as we know it—possible.

Mozart's achievement is not confined to opera by any means; but it is possible to say that all Mozart's music in some sense (in its emotional complexity, its anguish and its delicacy by turns), aspires to drama. In turn, Mozart's mastery of all forms (chamber music, the concerto, the symphony) enriches the musical and emotional vocabulary of opera.

The music of intrigue holds a two-fold meaning, one explicit to the music itself, and another implicitly, as the composer works upon the senses of his listeners. In Mozart the "merely ornamental" is a masque, and beauty often a distraction that disguises and softens for our amusement a world of anguish, of sexual betrayal and sexual violence, of hedonism plummeting from comedy to tragedy and back. Beauty is the simplest, most captivating, least resistible means of seduction, and a lovely phrase the quickest and surest manner of beguiling an ear. Mozart himself was very fond of masquerades; he composed his sadly little-known masquerade music (K. 446), some of which is lost, for a pantomime he performed with friends at the Hofburg in Vienna during the carnival of 1783. Mozart's art is an art of masques, an art of the hidden, and of the false revealed. It is the signature of an eighteenth-century, aristocratic understanding of human interactions, where it is related to and merges with the pastoral, which is but the beautiful masque applied to nature. It is the premise on which are hung the plots of all the da Ponte operas, although it emerged as a central theme of his work much earlier:

The opening tableau of the almost nineteen-year-old Mozart's La finta giardiniera....rises upon a seeming Edenic haven of security, a garden in which five protagonists sing together in bucolic contentment. Then, one by one, they reveal their true feelings, dissecting their emotions in a series of short solos telling of hidden sorrow, furious jealousy, and both unrequited and unwelcome love. Having disclosed the pain and eroticism beneath the idyllic surface, they reassume their public postures in a repetition of the beginning ensemble, now revealed to be a fiction (Mozart: A Cultural Biography, Robert W. Gutman, 123).

The same nineteenth-century prejudice which charged Mozart with being frivolous upheld an artistic ideal that was the antithesis of Mozart's. Ever since, art which aims to disclose the "authenticity" of the self has asserted a primacy it has refused to relinquish. Linked to this was an erosion of the idea of music as pleasure, as opposed to the emerging Romantic view of music as "expression." Mozart and his great contemporary Haydn were the last exponents of aristocratic values in art - the tradition of classical humanism, of proportion, of harmony, of grace. As Mozart put it in one of his letters to his father, Leopold:
... passions, violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never offend the ear, even in the most horrendous situations, but must always be pleasing, in other words always remain music ... (Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, Robert Spaethling, 286)
This classical taste was characterized by an indifference toward the self, and toward the need for the "improvement" of either the individual or society. As such, aristocratic mores constituted a personal and social danger: the nineteenth-century taste wished to be uplifted and edified, not beguiled or seduced. Any artist who could make the unpleasant not just attractive, but seductive, could be considered immoral: in this light, Mozart reigns as the master immoralist. Yet by the end of his life, this world was collapsing both politically and aesthetically, at the prompting of a popular, middle-class taste - which Mozart exploited - for the mythic (as in the Egypto-masonic obscurities of The Magic Flute) and the supernatural (as in the finale to Don Giovanni). Ultimately, the classical taste was drowned by the Romantic urge to replace those verities lost in revolution with the "heroic self," the world of Beethoven, whose central subject is his own artistic struggles and ambitions; and of Schubert, who glimpsed the infinite within in the intimacies of the Biedermeier drawing room.


"They still think of me as a child!" he wrote with vexation to his father Leopold from Paris in 1778 (the curse, it seems, regardless of the age, of all child stars). Born in Salzburg in 1756, and christened Johannes Crystomus Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart, the first two were soon dropped, and he became Wolfgang, or Wolferel.

His childhood was a public spectacle. In an age before mass communications, the Mozart children were celebrities, known across Europe. From the age of six to the age of ten, Wolfgang, accompanied by his sister, Nannerel, toured the public halls and private salons of Europe almost nonstop, one of history's first and longest-running family acts. Cities, towns, courts, grand palaces and backwaters, Leopold booked them all. It goes without saying that Leopold was the prototype of the stage parent: driven, shrewd, paranoid, gauche, domineering, fawning, tightfisted. Ready to capitalize on every circumstance, he was not above taking advantage of his son's diminutive size to diminish his age by a year or two, to heighten the awe in which the prodigy was invariably held. Leopold is easy to caricature, but the urge should be resisted, despite his failings. He was one of the great pedagogues of his age, and wrote the standard manual on violin instruction for the next half century. His voluminous letters detailing the family's travels show a man of keen, if myopic intelligence; and few things escaped his notice: the inns, the local customs, the weather, the food, the audience, the generosity, or lack thereof, of well-born patrons.

It was lucrative business, but time was Leopold's enemy. What was miraculous at six, and astonishing at eight, loses a little of its charm with each passing year. A child of six might coyly demand a kiss from an empress; a boy of ten could not. Inevitably, once the astonishment wore off - and it did - there came the inevitable backlash. There was a growing distaste for the spectacle of children dragged around Europe as performing monkeys according to Leopold's rigorous schedule. Pushy and irascible, Leopold seldom endeared himself, and his neglect of his duties in Salzburg (where he served as violinist in the Prince Archbishop's orchestra), in order to display his offspring did not go unnoticed at other courts where the ensemble performed.

The experience was equally definitive for Mozart. From his father he learned to see the possibility of music as business, as entertainment. In an age of patronage, he had learned to see the advantages of becoming his own master, as well as absorbing the insecurity and restlessness of the artist on the road.

In Vienna, the Wunderkind became the impresario. It is no reach to see the oedipal contours of his escape from Salzburg and the influence of his father and the Archbishop. Once in Vienna he soon married, and enjoyed his first taste of popular success with an opera, The Abduction from the Serraglio, and a subscription series of piano concertos. But popular taste is fickle and the success did not last: The irony is that for most of his lifetime Mozart was considered "difficult" - daring and dense, harmonically complex, even dissonant - an avant-garde composer before such a term had any cultural meaning, laboring to create "the music of the future" without the army of sycophants and hangers-on to proclaim his genius.

For the odyssey that led him to Vienna, and the precarious life of a free-lance artist, illustrate an ambivalent relationship with the social order of his time. Vienna was a step he felt compelled to take only because after repeated failures he despaired of finding a position as Kapelmeister with some musical court: the type of position Haydn enjoyed with the Esterhazy. His two Italian journeys with his father while in his teens had such a purpose, as did his meanderings through Germany and France with his mother, who would die in Paris. He was offered, supposedly, the position as court organist at Versailles, but the twenty-two-year-old Mozart turned it down as not prestigious enough. Admitting defeat, he was forced to take employment with the insufferable archvillain of his (and his father's) life, Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. Mozart's letters during these years chronicle his attempts - often frustrated - to seek the regard of aristocratic patrons, and openly boast of favors sought and won. They are frank testimony to Mozart's recognition that the cultivation of aristocratic taste was paramount for the life of a composer and for the vitality of musical art.

Proof of this can be found in that neglected but immense chunk of Mozart's oeuvre that is devoted to opera seria. Not to contemporary taste, and a declining form in Mozart's day, opera seria reigned for almost a century as the house style of enlightened despotism, with a heyday spanning the first half of the eighteenth century. The stereotyped plots showed royal authority (often disguised in Roman garb) conspired against by those closest to the throne; the perpetrators then discovered. The ultimate scene was an act of forgiveness by the wronged monarch, in lieu of the terrible punishment that the deeds deserved. As a musical form, opera seria consisted of a string of solo arias displaying the vocal pyrotechnics of individual singers, such as the great castratos. The stereotyped roles were more or less uniform from opera to opera, based on sentiments expressed rather than characters lived, and singers would often substitute arias interchangeably from one work to another. By Mozart's time, it no longer filled the public opera houses, but still played a significant role in court theaters. New works were commissioned as the entertainment for major festivities: weddings, coronations, the birth of an heir, the yearly carnival gala.

Although his genius would finish it off, Mozart composed some of the finest examples, along with Handel, of the genre. His list of compositions is a long one: Mitridate, Ascanio in Alba, Il sogno di Scipione, Lucio Silla, and Il rè pastore were all composed before his twentieth year. Seldom performed today, much of this music is turbulent and ravishing. Idomeneo, commissioned by the Elector of Bavaria, broke free of the stereotypical sequence of solo arias of the seria form. Leopold's letter during its composition attempted to persuade his son to think of the musically unsophisticated. Father's advice was ignored, and Idomeneo did not play the Met until 1982.

Mozart's last completed operatic work, La Clemenza di Tito, was taken on commission to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia. Mozart, financially strapped and ill, created the funeral music to opera seria: Lush and shrill, the music has a strained, static, corpselike beauty; harmonically demanding, it echoes the past before drowning it. The characters have been stripped of the vestiges of nobility: corrupted by their own cruelty, they are engulfed in treachery and weakness. If The Magic Flute, composed almost simultaneously, was the future of opera, the future of music, then Tito was a death knell for the eighteenth century, and a social order that upheld the aristocracy as the sole arbiter of artistic form and taste. No wonder that the new Queen, Maria Luisa, was rumored to have called Tito "a German pig." Mozart would perish with it. Within six months of the premiere of Tito, Mozart would be dead.

By the time of Mozart's death in 1791, Marie Antoinette, the sister of the recently deceased Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II, had been imprisoned by her own people. Mozart was a revolutionary only in his art. His restiveness when confronted by the indignities of social inferiority and subservience, as demonstrated by his profound and prolonged dislike of Archbishop Colloredo, was based on an belief in equality conferred by the fact of his genius and the tenets of freemasonry. In The Magic Flute, the social order exists as a kind of dream allegory, wherein an elite of wit and wisdom, a brotherhood of initiates in the mysteries, confounds the ancien regime of Maria Theresa (in the guise of the malevolent Queen of the Night), with the aid of the feral, but benign birdmen, the Papagenos. As it happened, the children of nature were not so benign.

In the Mozartian version of The Marriage of Figaro, revolutionary intrigue is diluted in favor of erotic intrigue. The comedy is not so much a contest between Figaro and the Count, as an unmasking of male futility and erotic pride by women, who prove more adept at intrigue, and more insightful, though it is insight gained at some cost. Mozart has left open the possibility that erotic disillusionment extends to a disillusionment with the social order, but in Figaro an act of forgiveness preserves at least the illusory return to contentment, with the Count humbled and a sexual injustice abolished. But in Così fan tutte, no such return is possible: disillusionment has struck too deep to pretend that the world can be put again as it was. Mozart's characters suffer and lament, but they are never redeemed. They are left with a world void of illusions, with which they must cope as best they can.

For most of the nineteenth century, Mozart was patronized as a weaver of dainty rococo filigree whose corollaries in the art of the late eighteenth century could be found in the pastoral idylls and erotic indiscretions of a Watteau, a Boucher or a Fragonard: an art of idealized ennui and shepherd blouses frolicking outside the Petite Trianon. It was an unfair and perhaps deliberately obtuse characterization: Mozart's art is far greater, more dangerous and more sensuous, as the idyll gives way to raptures of sublime beauty, heart-rending melancholy, or slips unexpectedly into fear and terror.

In Either/Or Kierkegard claimed that Don Giovanni was the greatest of all works of art because the essence of music is erotic seduction, and the power of music to seduce, and the experience of being seduced by music, are all epitomized by Don Giovanni. We listeners are just another of the Don's conquests to be listed in Leporello's catalogue aria: "Mille et tre," he tells Donna Elvira, a thousand and three; but it could just as easily be a thousand and fifteen, or a thousand and forty-seven, as we fall under the Don's, and Mozart's, spell. At the end of the opera, the Don is consumed by the demonic forces he both provokes and exemplifies. But having allowed ourselves to be seduced ensnares us, says Kierkegard, in moral ambiguity too, and brushes us with a moral taint, a sin that reproduces, in miniature, the fall from the garden.

Mozart's reply is that the garden of innocence was always a dangerous illusion, and that we continue to believe in it at our peril. Our gardens of sensual delight are tempered and constrained by knowledge. Mozart is a supreme artist: the master seducer and voluptuary, the creator of a strange and uneasy momentary paradise; of a pastoral idyll where hedonism flirts with decadence. His great subject is the decay and death of the age of aristocracy: he fabricates an art of pleasure that escape the moorings of church and state, and the commercial boundaries of an uncertain and fickle public. The consequences of liberty, of knowledge, are anguish and sorrow, where our pleasures may console, but they cannot undo.


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