Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work.
Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state. When twentieth-century scholars transformed Mozart’s bland, idealized nineteenth-century image into that of a modern revolutionary expressionist, they paradoxically restored the reputation he had among his eighteenth-century contemporaries. Mozart became once again a complex innovator, challenging to perform and to understand.
Drawing on a variety of critical methods, Rosen maintains that listening or reading with intensity—for pleasure—is the one activity indispensable for full appreciation. It allows us to experience multiple possibilities in literature and music, and to avoid recognizing only the revolutionary elements of artistic production. By reviving the sense that works of art have intrinsic merits that bring pleasure, we justify their continuing existence.
Charles Rosen was a concert pianist, Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and the author of numerous books, including The Classical Style, The Romantic Generation (Harvard), and Freedom and the Arts (Harvard).
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From Chapter 9: Mozart and Posterity
In 1783, when Mozart was only twenty-seven years old, the teacher of the thirteen-year-old Beethoven in Bonn said that "he would certainly become another Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he continues as he has begun." Evidently Mozart had recovered from the often damning reputation of a child prodigy and was already accepted as one of the leading European masters, although outside the German-speaking countries (and even within them) his music was often contested for its difficulty, complexity, and unintelligibility until well into the nineteenth century. We may conveniently assess the character of Mozart's fame by the poets and artists to whom he was compared. In a conversation with the emperor of Austria, Joseph II, in the 1780s, the composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf compared him to Klopstock, a poet renowned for his difficulty and his pretensions to the grand style, who transferred the meters of classical Greek poetry to German verse.
Less than two decades later, Mozart's glory had reached the summit from which it could no longer be dislodged, although it could be shaken, and different views of his music would develop over time. In a novel of 1803 by the Romantic master Jean Paul, who would be the favorite writer of Robert Schumann, there is a discussion about music in which Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart are compared grandly to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. One of the company objected that “it was all right about Gluck and Haydn, but Mozart was more like Shakespeare.”
Only four years after this, a disciple of Jean Paul wrote a review of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, in which he compared Beethoven to Jean Paul, for his fantastic imagination and humor, and Mozart to Schiller for his passion—"unfortunately we have no composer like Goethe," he added. This is the figure of Mozart exploited a few decades later in 1843 by Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or: he had become the model Romantic composer, with Don Giovanni as the ideal, or, indeed, for Kierkegaard, the only possible, opera, embodying the essentially erotic nature of music.
In the nineteenth century, however, the standard coupling of Mozart with another artist was to be Raphael, a comparison possibly initiated by the painter Ingres, who idolized both, and Mozart was transformed into an icon of classicism, an emblem of grace and purity. As the century proceeded, both Mozart and Raphael suffered, not from a loss of prestige—that was only too firmly in place—but from a growing disdain among the avant-garde of practicing artists and composers for the established classicism in favor with the academies of art and music. Bernard Shaw protested acutely that people did not realize how powerful Mozart was because his music was so beautiful. Brahms's appreciation of Mozart was equally passionate and nostalgic: how wonderful it must have been to be a composer at the time of Mozart, he thought, "when it was easy to write music," as if Mozart was the great representative of a prelapsarian age, before the exile from paradise.
The view of Mozart as a master of a conventional, respectable style obviously called for revision, and it was sensibly provided by an age of expressionism in the early twentieth century. With the generation of Arnold Schoenberg, the qualities of morbid passion, tragedy, complexity, and radical experiment were restored to Mozart: he became a modern composer. The most systematic expression of the new view was found in the work of the greatest biographer of Mozart, Hermann Abert; he revised Otto Jahn's nineteenth-century biography, but made it into basically a new work, with the emphasis on the music, its sources, and its development, rather than on the life [1]; he also wrote the article on Mozart for the 1929 Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, a once indispensable reference book. The editor, shocked at its dark revisionist view of Mozart, printed it out of respect (Abert had just died), but protested that Mozart had always been compared to Raphael, while this made him seem much more like Michelangelo.
