Both the music and the Austrian tourist industries are revving up for another “Mozart” year, only a decade and a half after the last one. 1991 marked the 200th anniversary of the great composer’s death, and both the roundness of the number (an even two centuries) as well as the significance of the event itself conspire to ensure that it will be naturally more noteworthy than 2006, which is merely the 250th anniversary of his birth. But there are musical reasons as well why that previous occasion was more momentous than this one, and these lend a certain hollowness to the evident necessity, so soon after the last worldwide bash, to make 2006 even “bigger and better” than any prior Mozart extravaganza.
The 1991 celebrations coincided with the peak years of the record industry’s reckless spree of overindulgence, with its consequent flood of new releases. Philips put the finishing touches on the only complete Mozart Edition, decades in the making. Labels large and small competed with each other to tackle early, neglected, and otherwise unknown works. The shop bins swelled with seldom-heard symphonies, piano sonatas, operas, divertimentos, and other Mozartian musical ephemera. It was insane, for sure, but it did give many listeners the chance to hear some “new” Mozart and draw their own conclusions. Most did just that, and either never played the stuff again, or else felt little necessity to run out and acquire more.
This year’s celebration sees the industry in a very different position. Sure, plenty of new recordings are being made. Every violinist on the planet seem to be releasing the violin concertos and the (mostly boring) violin sonatas. But the majority of what is coming out now consists primarily of reissues. The Philips Mozart Edition is back, having been deleted piecemeal in the interim. Brilliant Classics has cobbled together, from both new and licensed material, a competing (and quite competitive) complete series on 170+ CDs, offered at a super-cheap budget price. All of this only adds to the “been there, heard that” patina gilding this year’s celebrations. The industry is going through the motions, but its heart really isn’t in it. That’s not surprising when you consider the fact that material being reissued usually means that it was deleted because no one bought it the first time around.
You see, there is a dirty secret underlying all the hype: Mozart wrote more junk than any other composer of his stature. That’s only to be expected. The fact that he was composing when he was still in diapers is amazing, but let’s not kid ourselves about the importance or quality of the result. That major artists like Nikolaus Harnoncourt make sweeping statements along the lines of “Second rate Mozart is better than first rate [fill in the blank],” or “Mozart never wrote a dull note,” changes nothing. Artists are not immune from blind enthusiasm, or the need to justify the time and attention lavished on playing and making recordings of otherwise uninteresting music. We heard all of this back in 1991, and subsequent experience has taught us one inarguably valid lesson: not a single early, neglected, or “non-canonic” work by Mozart has joined the ranks of the generally acknowledged masterpieces. Not one.
The problem with celebrating the legacy of a genius like Mozart rests in the simple fact that we all know what his great works are, and few disagree with the judgment of history. So, in truth, there’s absolutely nothing to celebrate. Mozart can’t possibly be more revered, more highly regarded, or more frequently programmed than he already is without the result looking tired and fetishistic, a quasi-religious ritual practiced by rote but devoid of significance or meaning. Indeed, there’s a real risk that listeners might well come away from the latest dutiful, off-pitch, period instrument rendering of some massively long, forgotten divertimento (never mind one of those early, interminable comic operas about a “Finta” something-or-other) wondering what all the fuss was about. This business–for that’s what it is, business–about “If it’s by Mozart it must be great” ultimately does little to enhance the public’s appreciation for him, and may well have just the opposite effect.
Of course, the place where this kind of wanton, self-satisfied exploitation can be seen to best effect is Austria. There is something particularly grubby in the spectacle of an entire country attempting to validate itself on the shoulders of one man’s uniquely personal creative legacy. But then, modern Austria is merely a self-perpetuating bureaucracy without an empire to manage. And so “culture” is its main business, particularly now that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name no longer adorns the stadium of his hometown of Graz. Living off the reputations of the dead has become an Austrian specialty, no matter how poorly these geniuses, Mozart included, may have been treated when they were alive. I mean, if the Austrians could swallow their inherent hatred of Mahler to guarantee the Vienna Philharmonic a continued presence on the world’s most lucrative concert stages, then making a fuss over Mozart is a piece of Sacher-Torte.
To put all of this in historical perspective, I vividly recall a discussion I was having with a colleague in a New York record shop back in 1991, in which we were wondering just who on earth was going to buy the seemingly endless deluge of minor Mozart clogging the CD bins. Suddenly, an older woman with a pronounced Austrian accent interrupted rudely, saying, “I can’t believe vat I am hearing. Don’t you know zat Mozart is Austria’s most famous artist?” “No, he wasn’t,” I replied. “Vell den, who vas?” she asked. I told her: “Hitler.” End of conversation.
David Hurwitz
(author of two books on Mozart’s music, just the good stuff, published by Amadeus Press—Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Instrumental Works, and Getting the Most Out of Mozart: The Vocal Works).
