The mythmakers

MARGINALIA

By Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Mozart, we are told by Julian Rushton in his mightily to-the-point Mozart (Oxford, $30), spent the whole of his short life with "the memory of his father's advice about being sure to please his public." Public approbation translated into money, and money was important, since the Mozarts were not rich and the onetime child prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus, had a tendency — one is tempted to say, almost an American tendency — to live beyond his means, even when those means were considerable, as they often were. For Mozart was more than just "Beethoven's agreeably pomaded predecessor." He was famous in his own right, even in his own time, and he made money from his music.

Mozart is, for me, the most companionable of the famous classical composers. His music, melodic and elegant, so much of it written in the major keys, reminds me of birds singing in sunshine in green trees above a great white wedding cake. Who could not like and respond to such beautiful and airy sounds, and, beyond that, would it not somehow be churlish to dislike music that so plainly asks to be liked? Mozart was no patsy; according to Rushton (a British music professor), he was frank with and about others in ways that did not further his career, and his letters are rife with scatological jokes and assorted smut. Still, one cannot imagine him dismissing as "cattle" an audience bewildered by some intricate, difficult piece of his, as Beethoven was said to have done when early audiences choked a bit on parts of his Grosse Fuge.

Beethoven, of course, lived 57 years to Mozart's 35 — 22 extra years in which to be irritated — and was famously bad tempered and moody anyway, not least because he began to go deaf in his 30s, whereas Mozart, Rushton tells us, was genuinely amiable despite an impressive ego. The difference in disposition between the two is apparent even in the portraiture. Mozart's face is smooth and bland, with impish, slightly cunning eyes, while Beethoven, with his unkempt hair and furrowed brow, looks like a dyspeptic prophet, or a crusty substitute teacher facing an unruly class of 14-year-olds with peashooters.

If Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are the three loftiest peaks in the long cordillera of Western music, then Beethoven, from where I stand, rises perhaps just a bit higher than the other two — not because he was better or greater (whatever those words mean) or indifferent to how the public received his work, but because, of the three, he seems, in hindsight, to be the most resistant as a matter of temperament to accommodating public whim. There is something powerfully lonely about Beethoven, and his music, as critics far more learned than I have noted, is full of themes of rejection and sorrow, followed by thunderclap chords of strife and redemption.

A curious and uncomfortable truth of any art is that art, whose creation is perhaps the most intense of private experiences, has no meaning other than a public one. The public can be as small as one person, but there must be at least that one person beyond the creator: someone to whom the creation can be released, someone who can see it, hear it, watch it, read it, love it or hate it, someone for whom the art is alive. It is not even necessary that this person understand the work in question, only that the work's presence, as a fact separate from its creator, has been felt.

Artists, of course, in their many varieties, are among earth's most vainglorious inhabitants, and artistic work tends not to be created with one other person in mind but with 10 thousand, 10 million other people. Artists, like politicians, think in terms of, and seek, the attention not of individuals but of scads of individuals — of publics, preferably adulatory. Publics mean money, as Mozart well understood; also, reputation.

An excruciating paradox is that while art is deeply personal and often drawn from the most intimate and sorrowful episodes, and while it often reflects the artist's exasperation with human buffoonery — the artist as scourge, social critic, prophet — its public reputation will turn on the degree to which it shows and tells the public what the public wishes to see and hear. For art, in the public domain, becomes a form of myth, a story we tell ourselves about ourselves so our lives are acceptable to us. We are great, we are good, we are rich, we are cultured, sophisticated, ingenious, empathetic, righteous, the list is endless, but it is all about self-approbation, even when a piece of art seems to report an unflattering truth, for then, by welcoming it anyway, we are open-minded, self-critical, and so on and so forth, at least if we are not pushed too far.

Art that does not push too far, that remains within the bounds of the acceptable and conventional, that pleases rather than challenges or upsets, is lesser, just as art is lesser that means only to be unpleasant, to shock or upset. But both are likely to win more public approval than art that acknowledges the acceptable before subverting it and subverts it for a reason and, in its beauty and splendor, tells us a story about ourselves we would rather not hear. Bringers of such messages are apt to be slain; cue the Requiem, please. *