Dictation from God

Lynn has a good post about Mozart. After reading it the other day, I listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (Chicago SO, Solti, for those concerned with such details). And a month or two ago, I listened to The Magic Flute, for no particular reason other than that I love The Magic Flute. (It was the first opera I ever saw performed on stage, although that's not really why I love it, since I had already owned two recordings of it by the time I saw it.)

I occasionally refer to my days on Usenet here, and I'll do so again now, because even on the rec.music.movies newsgroup, discussions about classical music - - of which film music is something of a bastard stepchild - - used to break out now and then. One view that came up fairly often, frequently enough so as to be depressingly common, was that Mozart is really not that important of a composer. His music is charming and lovely, to be sure, but he's really only held in high regard because he was one of the greatest child prodigies in music history (only Saint-Saens comes close in this regard, and his music is nowhere near as highly regarded as Mozart's). Mozart is "easy listening", because he's not complex at all. This view reduces Mozart to being a mere "placeholder" in music history, so that the textbooks have something to say of the period between Bach's death and Beethoven's emergence.

How anyone could ever seriously hold this view of Mozart is beyond me. It's one thing to dislike his music (although, to be honest, I find that cognitive state about as mystifying as, oh, creationism), but quite another to argue that Mozart's place in history is overblown. "He wasn't an innovator", they claim, ignoring his elevation of opera and his development of music as related to drama, or ignoring his elevation of the symphony and the concerto; they ignore Mozart's more complex harmonic vocabulary and increased use of chromaticism; they ignore Mozart's championing of new instruments and orchestral sonorities. Another claim is "Mozart's music isn't complex", in which they equate "counterpoint" with "complexity", by which measure just about every composer in history falls short alongside J.S. Bach.

And emotionally, it's as if Mozart's detractors have never listened to anything outside of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; hell, one doesn't even need to listen to all that much Mozart to hear the incredible emotional variety and depth in his work. One can get an idea of it simply by watching Amadeus. The emotive character in Mozart is more tempered than that of Beethoven, but comparing a Classicist to the earliest of the Romantics is troublesome, in any event. Mozart's emotional breadth may be more tempered by the classicist devotion to form and proportion, but there is more emotional variation to be found in Mozart than there is in Bach - - which is to be expected, because Bach's primary musical motivation was a spiritual one.

These are pretty much random thoughts, not really developed into a cohesive statement. But I think what goes on with Mozart is the idea that since he lived in the era of powdered wigs, and since a few of his most famous works sound like music from the era of powdered wigs, then there is little reason to expect his music to appeal to those who live outside the era of powdered wigs. That's an odd viewpoint, and it has little to do with the actual music of Mozart.