Rudolph H. Weingartner: What is Being a Genius: the Example of Mozart

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The Next Page: The Full Mozart

Genius: What is it good for? Absolutely everything. Rudolph H. Weingartner has been immersing himself in the entire output of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, celebrating the 250th anniversary of his birth. He is more awestruck than ever ...

Sunday, October 29, 2006

By Rudolph H. Weingartner I recently bought the box that holds 170 compact discs on which all the

compact discs on which all the works that Mozart wrote are recorded. That is how I am celebrating this Mozart year, the 250^th anniversary of his birth. The contents of that foot-long box are astonishing, mind-boggling. It contains more than 170 hours of music: over seven days' worth if you play them around the clock; more than 21 days of music if you listen daily for eight hours -- no break for lunch.

	Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette
	Bob Dylan?Frank Gehry?

Mozart did not have a great deal of time to perform this feat. He was just 35 when he died. Moreover, consider what's involved in composing music. Anthony Burgess put it bluntly. While he was a writer, best known for "A Clockwork Orange," he started out as a composer, a pursuit he never wholly abandoned. To write a minute's worth of music, he wryly noted, you have to write any number of separate lines: four for a string quartet, a dozen for a chamber orchestra, two dozen and more for a full-blown symphony or opera. To write a novel, you need to produce only a single line of prose. That's why, he says, he chose the more efficient metier as his main career.
Note that those numerous hours of Mozart's music include 22 operas -- a few of which are really music for theatrical pieces and all of which are being performed this year at the Salzburg Festival; 41 symphonies -- the last three of which, arguably, the greatest, were written during less than seven weeks in 1788; and 27 concertos for piano and orchestra. Since this is no place to produce an endless list, I forgo mentioning the large number of every kind of works of chamber music, the many choral works, concert arias and much more. Mozart's last position was that of Kammermusicus at the court of Emperor Joseph II, requiring him to write dances for court balls -- a not very demanding job, leaving him free to write much else. The catalog of his work lists more than 626 compositions.
Mozart, in short, was immensely prolific. But does that make him a genius?
Other composers have been remarkably productive. Take Antonio Vivaldi from the early 18th century, for example. He wrote no fewer than 40 operas and, hold your hat, more than 450 concertos for a variety of solo instruments, one at a time, or several in combination -- all with orchestra, of course. Attending to Anthony Burgess' concern, each of these calls for quite a few lines of music, if not as many as Richard Strauss had to set down for one of his tone poems.
And yet, pleasant though his music is, I would not call the very talented Vivaldi a genius. Indeed, I am somewhat sympathetic to the wag who maintained that rather than writing all these hundreds of concertos, Vivaldi wrote the same concerto several hundred times.
If Vivaldi is not a genius, but Mozart is, what is the difference between them? Mozart is not primarily an innovator of musical forms. That is the role of his Vienna successor, Beethoven, who by the end of his career had broken practically every rule in the composition manual. That is why Robert Schauffler gave his Beethoven biography the subtitle "The Man Who Freed Music." Mozart, in contrast, mostly poured wine into old bottles, or into bottles the shape of which he had only tweaked.
But what wine! It is in that nectar that we must locate Mozart's genius. Pursuing that theme courts the danger of becoming inarticulate, if not downright tongue-tied. Genius brings into the world something that is unprecedented -- not just novel, but significant and, using a common metaphor, something that is deep or, in the more respectable latinate, profound.

urely that is true of the work of Albert Einstein, the most uncontroversial example of genius.
In 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein published five papers that became the foundation of physics for the rest of the century and beyond. It was both of the physics of the very large (relativity theory) and very small (quantum mechanics). Much later, these achievements prompted Time magazine to honor Einstein as Man of the Century, while in 2005, the centenary of Einstein's "Miraculous Year" was widely celebrated. Both these recent events were, so to speak, obvious. By then, scientists fully understood what Einstein had put forth and were able to build on his work. And even ordinary folk had learned that his achievement had innumerable practical consequences -- from the building of the atom bomb to the invention of the transistor.
But in 1905 and for some years after, not all that many were able to follow Einstein. What he put forward was radically new, overthrowing theories unquestioned since Newton set them down two centuries before.
All the marks of genius are there. One of them, however, has so far remained unexpressed. Consider when we call someone's action or insight "a stroke of genius." Are we thereby conferring on the author of that stroke the mantle of "genius"? Other things being equal, I think not. One swallow does not make a summer. To be a genius, it is not enough to have performed an ingenious act or two. There must be the capacity to perform such acts so that, by virtue of being a genius, many actions and creations -- as was true of Einstein -- are characterized by that trait.
That surely does not raise any problems for Mozart. He literally produced hundreds of works that bear the mark of genius. Although there are some uncertainties about precise timing, during Mozart's 26th year, to pick the counterpart of Einstein's annus mirabiles, he wrote three piano concertos (Nos. 11, 12 and 13), the "Haffner" Symphony, and the "Abduction from the Seraglio" (an opera radically different from one written about a year before, "Idomeneo") plus a bushel of wonderful chamber music.
But nothing has been said about just what traits characterize Mozart's works as that of a genius. What is the new wine he poured into those bottles? I am tempted to say, as one is often driven when trying to talk about music: "For Pete's sake, just listen and if you have ears, you will hear!" I will try to do better, if, alas, by not much. To start with, in spite of those old bottles, Mozart is just about never predictable; compare that with Vivaldi. At every turn he surprises you, defying expectations. But when the surprise comes, the listener instantly believes that what was just heard was inevitable.
Needless to say, melodies and harmony are always inventive, never just routine. Then, even more important, there is the emotional content of his music. Before the era of Sturm und Drang and without vast orchestral forces, Mozart is capable of investing in his music feelings of great complexity: happiness modified by worry, triumph that has an undercurrent of fear, love that is mixed with regret. These are not Mozart's emotions, as most of the "Pathetique" Symphony surely expresses Tchaikovsky's. They are the emotions of Figaro or the Count, or Blondchen or Tamina. When listening to Mozart operas, we have a good idea what protagonists think and feel without understanding the words. In instrumental music, these complex emotions are "simply" embedded in the texture of a symphony or piano concerto or in those sublime 50 minutes during which just three string instruments (in the Divertimento in E-flat, K. 563) reach our ears and minds and hearts. For such reasons and more, there is very little music by Mozart that a reasonably practiced listener will not recognize, almost instantly, as having been composed by Amadeus, beloved of God.

his last long paragraph also holds the secret, I believe, why there are many decent and even good Mozart performances, but not many truly outstanding ones. There are surely more pianists who can brilliantly perform the very difficult Rachmaninoff concertos than there are those who can put across with real conviction the vastly "easier" works of Mozart. Numerous conductors, today, can make Mahler come alive, as they also successfully "manage" his gigantic orchestra. Yet far fewer can perform Mozart in a way that captures most of what he put into his compositions. (The greatest Mozartians, I believe, are no longer with us; among them are two Britons, the pianist Clifford Curzon and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.)
These shortcomings, where they exist, are not the kind that might have been overcome at the conservatory. They are not technical, strictly speaking; they are emotional. The true Mozartian will somehow grasp, intuit, the emotions embedded in Mozart's compositions -- in the notes that are on the paper in front of the performer -- and, having grasped, succeed in expressing them and in conveying them to the audience. That is harder than, and calls for abilities very different from, playing Lisztian double octaves at breakneck speed.

Mozart, I hesitantly venture, is not a musical genius, but the musical genius -- hesitantly, because I really love a great variety of music. Still, if I were ever stranded on that desert island, I would want to have with me that 12-inch box of 170 compact discs by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
But fortunately, I am still here, together with the readers of this piece. Mozart's genius enriches all of our lives, as do many others, from Shakespeare to Moliere to Eugene O'Neill, from Velasquez to Cezanne to Picasso. Geniuses such as these entertain us, in the sense that they give us pleasure as they hold our attention. They don't, however, merely entertain us, whiling our time away like a good detective story or a well-crafted Hollywood romance. They enlighten and even inspire as they entertain. They move us as they reveal aspects and corners of the worlds of mind and heart that we would not come to apprehend without the work of those who have the spark of genius.

(Rudolph H. Weingartner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former board member of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (rudywein@pitt.edu). )

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