elegantly dressed purpose of Art

"Mozart was a keen observer of mankind, and boundlessly empathetic, but what he expressed in his music was us, not himself. Put another way, Mozart was the consummate artist, able to manipulate and cajole his listeners, to draw them in and draw them out, to create art, to construct art not for the sake of self-expression but to allow us to express ourselves."

This is Cliff Eisen, writing in his introduction to WA Mozart, by Hermann Abert (reviewed by Charles Rosen in the NY Review of Books) - a definitive work published 100 years ago, and now available in English in a masterful translation and edition. It's $55 in America - really, with the exchange rate as it currently is, hardly more expeisive than a new Ian McEwen novel.

Rosen writes:

"For his contemporaries, Mozart was a difficult composer, not only hard to play but hard to listen to. Most of the more ambitious works, they felt, could only be performed by the finest professionals, or else they would make a poor impression. Not only were there too many notes, there were above all too many new ideas and new themes, all coming one after the other in a profusion that was painful to follow. (In most operas by other composers, the second violins played the same notes as the first violins most of the time, but in Mozart they are more often given an independent line, and the violas, as well, are allotted interesting phrases.) And the harmony was often outrageous and impossible to understand (to this complaint E.T.A. Hoffmann replied that connoisseurs understood Mozart's harmony without difficulty, the uneducated public was emotionally stirred by it, and only the half-educated music amateur was bewildered)."

It seems to your correspondent here that, even without any danger of falling prey to a decadent neo-Dadaist fetishisation of newness or shockingness for its own sake, this insight could be applied to the way we experience art - say, poetry - now. I feel Mozart would never have been a New Formalist, just as he would never have been a "language" poet (though I could be wrong; it could be that a Mozart is all these movements are waiting for). Nor would he have been impressed by poetry workshops encouraging young people to express and "empower" themselves, etc.

(The marvellous picture: Mozart is sitting at the Klavier with his sister Nannerl - looking, one can't help but feel, a little like a very young Patrick Malahide - and his father, who is leaning on the piano holding a violin. A portrait of his mother hangs on the wall. This lithograph, by F. Leybold after a painting by De la Croce about 1781, was published for Mozart's centenary in 1856. Click to see it big. )