Mozart and Enlightenment Thought

James Donelan
Karpeles Library
September 26, 1999

Good afternoon. I’m delighted to see that you have come to hear about Mozart, but that’s really no surprise—he has been one of the most compelling figures in music for over two hundred years, and his short life—from 1756 to 1791, only thirty-six years—and his extraordinary talent have made him into one of only two dominant images of the genius/composer. The other image, of course, is that of Beethoven, the Romantic, tormented, deaf composer, unappreciated in his time, able to hear only the music of his imagination. Mozart, on the other hand, was the naïve genius, to whom everything came so easily, and for whom music was the triumph of the mind. Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, along with Milos Forman’s film version, is only one of many examples of this image of Mozart, which, while not exactly false, was not exactly true either.

I could easily list a number of Mozart myths that deserve debunking: Salieri didn’t poison him; he was neither despondent nor entirely bankrupt when he died; the man in black who commissioned the Requiem has been identified, and didn’t plan to pass it off as his own, and so on, but myth-debunking always runs the risk of painting an equally false, opposing version of the myth. Even though it doesn’t have a play and a film, this myth is also fairly prevalent: the image of Mozart as the quintessential Enlightenment composer, eminently reasonable, demonstrating a cool, mathematical perfection in everything he wrote, a sort of musical Descartes. A more accurate picture of Mozart, both biographically and critically, that is, in what we know of him through his life and through his music, reveals that he was neither a tortured early Romantic, nor a cool, reasonable, dispassionate servant of the Enlightenment aristocracy. He belongs to a transitional period in the late Enlightenment, when composers, who formerly tended to work for a single church or noble patron as a sort of in-house artisan of music, began to write and perform for a more bourgeois audience and become independent contributors to intellectual life. This step in the direction of artistic and intellectual freedom was a central part of the Enlightenment, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, at the end of the period, because it set the stage for the creation of the artist/hero myth so strongly associated with Beethoven and the Romantic era. Mozart’s accomplishments and the emergence of the Mozart legend did much to create the conditions that Beethoven and other Romantic era composers would find essential to their artistic freedom; Mozart himself, however, held an ambivalent attitude toward the intellectual and social atmosphere of the Enlightenment in which he actually lived. Although his balanced phrasing, symmetrical forms, and clear resolutions indicate a deep-rooted and sincere belief in the Enlightenment ideals of reason and order, other elements in his work indicate an equally strong desire to subvert these ideals.

Before I go too much further, I should define a few of the terms I have been using. When I say "Enlightenment," I mean the principles embodied by the major European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly Descartes, Locke, Hume, Boyle, Leibniz, and Voltaire, who believed generally that humanity progressed through the rational acquisition and organization of knowledge, and that real knowledge resulted from observation and logic rather than tradition, speculation, or divine inspiration. When I say "Romantic," I refer to the artistic creations of the period immediately following the Enlightenment, from the end of the eighteenth century after the French Revolution in 1789, to about 1850, a date I pick arbitrarily because it was the year of the Wordsworth’s death. These creations, such as the poetry of Hölderlin, Wordsworth, the late Goethe, and Shelley, the music of late Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, and the painting of Constable, Turner, and Friedrich, have a characteristic emphasis on the subjective self and the ideal of the individual imagination.

I’m sure many of you noticed something odd about these definitions: first, that I omitted Immanuel Kant from the list of Enlightenment philosophers, and second, that I defined "Enlightenment" in terms of philosophy and "Romantic" in terms of art works. I did neither of these things by accident; Kant, like Mozart, had a curiously ambivalent attitude toward the intellectual atmosphere of his time, embodying its principles to a great extent (Kant even wrote an essay called "What is Enlightenment?"), yet setting the stage for those who would go beyond those principles.

I believe that Mozart’s position as the last Enlightenment composer and a transitional figure to the Romantic era makes a strong analogy to Kant’s position as the last Enlightenment philosopher and a transitional figure to Idealism, although I have found no evidence that Mozart spent much time thinking about philosophy, nor that Kant spent much time thinking about music. Indeed, Kant’s grasp of music is exceptionally weak—he calls it "the beautiful play of the emotions" in the Critique of Judgment, relying on an earlier doctrine known as the Affektenlehre, where elements of music have corresponding emotional states—but his contribution to the fields of metaphysics and aesthetics overall led the way to both the development of the Idealist school of philosophy and the Romantic reassessment of music’s importance as an art form. As I mentioned a little earlier, listeners of the Baroque and early Enlightenment eras generally did not consider music the supreme expression of sublime artistic genius that listeners of the Romantic era did, and that we continue to do, to some extent, in our own era. Instead, art music before the turn of the nineteenth century had two main functions: it decorated the homes and palaces of the wealthy and powerful, either as dance music or as entertainment, and it praised the glory of God in his churches. Most composer’s positions were like those held by Johann Sebastian Bach, or both Mozart’s and Beethoven’s fathers: the office of Kapellmeister, or church composer, whose job was to turn out a steady supply of hymns and oratorios, and who occasionally wrote something on commission for the local nobleman.

What changed this attitude toward music was a fortuitous combination of a number of factors, including Kant’s philosophy and Mozart’s extraordinary achievements, events which were, I should emphasize, simultaneous, but not directly related occurrences. In 1781, Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, the first of his three critiques; the same year, Mozart obtained his release from the service of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and settled in Vienna to become an independent composer. If we believe Mozart’s own account of his dismissal, he got a kick in the pants on his way out, and, leaving aside Kant for the moment, I’d like to examine the biographical, social, philosophical, and even musical importance of this historic kick in the pants.

First of all, why would Mozart want to be released from such a good, reliable position? It was, after all, the position his father occupied, and the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg lived well and would undoubtedly provide him with a steady income and both secular and religious assignments. Mozart’s family, while far from poor, was concerned about money, and Mozart had no assurance of a steady income in Vienna. Here are Mozart’s own words on why he was tired of Salzburg, in a letter to Abbé Bullinger of 1778, three years before he finally left for good:

Basically, he was frustrated and bored. Having been the foremost prodigy in the history of music (a position he still holds), Mozart knew what it was like to be adored by kings and queens, and he knew most of all that he was a better musician and composer than anyone in the world. Salzburg was a dull outpost; Vienna was the center of the musical world, a cosmopolitan city with a steady flow of composers, musicians, and patrons from all parts of Europe, and a wealthy, enlightened, music-loving Emperor, Josef II. This city would give him the resources and the audience he craved, and ample opportunity to demonstrate the full range of his abilities.

As I’m sure you all know, Mozart didn’t exactly become rich, nor did he gain the position of court composer to Josef II, although the Emperor appreciated his abilities and eventually gave him a small pension. However, it’s fortunate for us that he didn’t get what he wanted easily, because the uncertainty of his position forced him to compose and to perform in ways that enhanced his musical style, and I should explain what I mean by that in a little more detail. As a young child, Mozart was capable of writing fully realized compositions, and by the time he was a teenager, his compositions really reach a kind of perfection within the classical style. However, Mozart’s mature works transcend even that level of perfection by introducing elements that reflect an increasing desire to go beyond the assumptions, constraints, and philosophy of music of his time. In other words, his frustration with his situation in Vienna, which had an active musical life, yet lacked a full appreciation of his musical genius, became elements of subversion and even transcendence in his music.

I realize this is a very abstract thesis, but let me tell you what I mean in very concrete terms. As a composer and performer, Mozart wanted to take Vienna by storm, and between 1781 and 1785 he performed more and more, and wrote more and more complex, dramatic, and powerful piano concertos to demonstrate his talent. To give you just a couple of examples, I’ll play just a brief excerpt from the Adagio movement of Piano Concerto No. 23, Köchel 488, one of six concertos he wrote in 1786: [Play Track 2 of Horowitz]. I’m sure you noticed the remarkable delicacy and depth of emotion in this movement—Mozart isn’t trying to be flashy here; he’s demonstrating the expressive power of a carefully written, yet simple theme. Rather than burden you with my analysis, I’ll just quote Charles Rosen on this movement:

Rosen goes on to describe exactly how Mozart accomplishes this in technical terms, and here I’ll summarize. What Mozart is doing is making more with less: he takes a relatively simple theme and does more complex, less predictable, and more reflective variations on the theme than his predecessors, or even his contemporaries would have done. In this, he is setting a precedent for Beethoven, for whom this became a central compositional principle. He is also stating by example that music, above all, is important and significant, in particular with regard to the display of the individual mind in relation to society. All good concertos, to some extent, have this dialectic between individual virtuosity and social ensemble at their center, but in Mozart’s case, it’s especially important to notice the restraint he shows toward flashy playing in favor of the integrity and complexity of the work as a whole. He is also taking full advantage of the technical possibilities of the pianoforte, a relatively recent invention, which enabled the player to use loud and soft notes, unlike its predecessor, the harpsichord. You should also notice the use of clarinets in the orchestra; writing for this instrument is also fairly new, and the instrument became one of Mozart’s favorites; his clarinet concerto is, as I’m sure you know, one of the standards in the repertoire. As for this concerto and others of this period, the remarkable thing about them is the degree to which Mozart’s clear intent is not necessarily to dazzle the audience with virtuoso playing, but to elevate the art form, and that these concertos were written for a subscription series of concerts, not for an individual patron.

Whatever this achieved for Mozart personally—he abruptly stopped writing concertos in 1786, focusing his energies instead on opera—they achieved something extraordinary for instrumental music in later years, and the intellectual framework established by Kant prepared the way. As Peter Kivy, the distinguished philosopher of music, has also noted, Kant himself on music is notable for a missed opportunity to abandon the already antiquated notion of the Affektenlehre, or "doctrine of the affections" for a more formalist view of music that would more closely correspond with his overall view of aesthetics. By 1795, only four years after Mozart died and five years after Kant had established a view of art as the disinterested contemplation of formal beauty in his Critique of Judgment, Schiller had this to say about music in the Letters on Aesthetic Education: "Music, at its most sublime, must become sheer form and affect us with the serene power of antiquity." In only five years, music, in particular instrumental music, with no accompanying text, has gone from being described a merely pleasant art to a "sublime" one, and instead of needing something to make the vague feelings it evokes concrete, it "must become sheer form." In 1795, Beethoven is only twenty-five and far from famous; this change in attitude, here in a text that openly acknowledges its basis in Kantian principles, results from the combination of a Kantian belief in form, rather than imitation, as the source of artistic beauty, and exposure to the purely formal pleasures of Mozart’s music. Naturally, there is still a large debate over the degree to which music’s pleasures are "purely formal," and the position of absolute music, that is, works, such as symphonies and concertos without a referential text, but our conception of these works as having equal significance to that of visual or literary art comes from the terms set by Kant, Schiller, and the Idealists.

The final part of Schiller’s statement, that music must "affect us with the serene power of antiquity" contains the prophetic beginning of another idea that would take hold of music aesthetics slightly later. Schiller, as is well known, in addition to writing the Letters on Aesthetic Education, also wrote Concerning Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, and defined two contrasting strains in art: the naïve, formal beauty of classical antiquity, and the sentimental, emotional, and symbolic beauty of Western art. The idea of this division gained a great deal of currency and was applied to a number of paired comparisons, not the least of which was that of Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart, as both a former child prodigy and Beethoven’s Enlightenment-era predecessor, became the naïve genius of classical perfection in this formulation, and Beethoven, naturally, the belated, sentimental genius, who longs nostalgically for the Golden Age of his predecessor. The pervasiveness of this idea is extraordinary, and is somewhat responsible for the exaggerated and caricatured Mozart we encounter in Peter Schaffer’s play. By the way, the most egregious aspect of this mischaracterization is the notion that Mozart would have behaved inappropriately in front of social superiors; this idea runs absolutely contrary to what we know about him and the fact that he had been trained to be polite in front of important people from an early age.

In any case, the naïve-Mozart sentimental-Beethoven idea persisted, particularly among several important composers, including Schumann, Wagner, and Mahler, but it is in the nature of great artists to mythologize, exaggerate, and polarize their predecessors. The question that remains for us to resolve is what, precisely, did Mozart himself think of his society, its beliefs and belief systems, and his place in it, and how can this enhance our understanding of his music today? To answer this complex question, we should return to the year we left off late in Mozart’s life, 1786, when he and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, completed The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart had written several operas before, both in the opera seria and the opera buffa style, but had never had tremendous success. This time, however, he was working with an experienced and skilled librettist, and they were using a subversive play by Beaumarchais as the opera’s source. The Marriage of Figaro is the second of Beaumarchais’ Figaro plays that had caused a sensation across Europe. The first of the plays, The Barber of Seville, had already been made into an opera by Pasiello; just to keep things absolutely clear, I should mention that the version of The Barber of Seville that we hear in opera houses today is not Pasiello’s, but Rossini’s, and is a nineteenth-century work. In The Barber of Seville, Figaro, a barber and servant, helps his master, Count Almaviva, gain the hand of Rosina, the ward of Doctor Bartholo, who wants to marry her himself when she becomes of age. The plot contains many of the familiar devices of French comedy that you will probably remember from Moliére, such as disguises, mistaken identities, and so forth, that were the elements of Italian comedy and classic opera buffa. Its resolution, when the Count marries Rosina thanks to his clever servant, restores everything to its natural order, and both master and man are happy.

That’s how it goes in comedies; social order is restored, everyone ends up with the right person, bad people learn their lesson, and the audience goes home with the feeling that all is right with the world. Last year, UCSB put on a wonderful production of a much earlier Mozart opera, La finta giardiniera, under the direction of Simon Williams, which has all the characteristics of classical Enlightenment opera buffa: a moment of passion and unreason has thrown everything into disorder; people threaten constantly to lose their reason if order is not restored; there is a lot of hiding, dissembling, and eavesdropping, but in the end, everyone pairs off in a beautifully symmetrical manner, nobles with nobles, servants with servants, and, as Alexander Pope once put it, "Everything that is, is right." We are left with a "best of all possible worlds" of clear social order and responsible behavior according to one’s well-established station in life.

"The best of all possible worlds," of course, is the phrase Voltaire used ironically in Candide to illustrate what was wrong with a lot of Enlightenment philosophy: the assumption that the world as it is represents a kind of perfection. The world of the late eighteenth century was far from perfect, and as we find out in The Marriage of Figaro, those who are noble in birth are not always noble in character. Beaumarchais’ second play in the trilogy, as everyone knew by the time Mozart and da Ponte began to adapt it for the opera, was far more subversive than the first, and far more complex. Even working on it risked the displeasure of the Emperor, who at first wanted to ban it completely, but was later convinced by da Ponte to allow it to be staged, at least according to da Ponte’s account. Also according to da Ponte, it was Mozart who first suggested putting this controversial play to music, and da Ponte later explained their objectives in taking on such a challenging project. Here are his own words on the subject:

What da Ponte says in this long and complex sentence is that The Marriage of Figaro was that they intended to transcend the genre of opera buffa, introducing a far more integrated, carefully written, and varied musical art work, which would expand the taste of the public. You should also notice da Ponte’s acute awareness of the formal constraints on opera composers imposed by the singers, who would object to being "excessively idle," that is, not having sufficiently prominent roles, and the difficulty in keeping the action going without resorting to long recitatives to explain plot developments. These ambitions would require an extraordinarily complex opera, and that is exactly what they produced.

They also produced a work of such importance to the history of opera that it is really impossible to overstate it. The Marriage of Figaro has never gone out of repertory, that is, somewhere in the world, a major opera company has had a production of the opera on its schedule since its premiere in 1786 to the present day, and it is the oldest opera for which that is the case. What accounts for this achievement, and why is this opera so much better than anything that preceded it?

First, the subject matter of the libretto is perfect, and the timing was also perfect for Mozart and da Ponte to put it on stage in musical form. In The Marriage of Figaro, the action is several years after that of The Barber of Seville, Count Almaviva has grown tired of the Countess, and has decided to seduce Susanna, the fiancée of his faithful servant Figaro, on her wedding night, asserting his privilege as her lord and master according to ancient custom, even though he had recently renounced this custom publicly. Let’s listen to how Mozart and da Ponte set up the exposition in the first scene of the opera, where Figaro is measuring his new room for a bed, and Susanna explains the count’s designs. I have provided a copy of the libretto for you in the handout so you can follow the dialogue better. [Play Tracks 2 and 3 of Disk 1 of Figaro]

As the curtain opens, we see Figaro and Susanna; Figaro is counting off the measurements necessary for fitting a bed in his new room, and Susanna is admiring how she looks in the new hat she made for herself. You can already notice several things that indicate that something different from standard opera buffa is going on: this scene of domestic tranquility emphasizes Figaro’s and Susanna’s capabilities as the makers and doers of this world. You can assume he will build his own bed; Susanna has made her own hat, and this opera, based, as you know, on a subversive play, appeared at precisely the time in history when a new bourgeois class of traders, bankers, craftsmen, and merchants were gaining power and significance in European society, and the necessity of having a noble class was being questioned very seriously for the first time. The workers of the world and the bourgeois created wealth, and got things done; the sovereign provided them with a stable government, but what did the aristocracy do any more except hoard valuable resources and put on airs?

You can also notice a particular motif of Mozart’s that gains increasing emphasis in his operas. The two characters, Figaro and Susanna, begin the opera fully occupied by their work or its results, Figaro with his counting and Susanna with her home-made hat. You’ll also notice the way the orchestra anticipates and echoes the dialogue, especially Figaro’s counting. Counting and numbers had an extraordinary significance at this time in intellectual history. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mathematicians had made enormous advances on problems that hadn’t changed since ancient times, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz (who was the basis for Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide), Newton, Fermat, l’Hopital, and a number of others had astounded the world with their accomplishments. In particular, Newton’s Principia had made an extraordinary advance in connecting the natural world with the mathematical world, and philosophers everywhere were trying to emulate him by finding the mathematical basis for everything, including, and almost especially, music, whose connection with mathematics had been a mystical subject since Pythagoras.

The notion of Figaro the mathematician may seem a bit far-fetched, but I assure you, there is more to this idea. About the middle of the eighteenth century, the makers and doers of Europe were swept by the idea of Freemasonry, the organization of groups of skilled people to discuss matters of mutual intellectual importance without the interference of either church or state. In December of 1784, Mozart joined the lodge called "Zur Wolhtätigkeit" or "Benificence," the second most important lodge in Vienna, the first being "Zur wahren Eintracht," or "True Concord." Above all, these lodges were dedicated to spreading the ideals of the Enlightenment, including the idea of a civil society of practical people pursuing secular knowledge, especially the mathematical and philosophical knowledge underlying the world of real things and people. It would therefore be very important to Mozart to establish two things right at the start of Figaro: first, that Figaro and Susanna are not operatic versions of the stock clever-servant characters, but independent, practical people, and second, that the music itself, in the form of these anticipations and echoes and in numerous other ways, would not merely support the text, but participate in the action of the opera.

I realize that’s quite a claim to be made for the music, so let me tell you what I mean by that. You just heard Susanna and Figaro discuss the significance of the ringing bell—for Figaro, before he knows of the Count’s intentions, the "ding-ding" of the bell and the proximity of their room to the Count and Countesses’s chamber makes for a very efficient arrangement, but Susanna makes it clear to him that the Count intends to use these bell signals to get Figaro out of the way and summon Susanna to the Count’s bed. So, what Mozart and da Ponte have established in this duet is that a musical signal, "ding-ding" controls the action, and that control in the hands of the idle aristocracy is not necessarily for the good. Figaro’s response, which I didn’t play for you, but comes up right after what we just heard, is another musical metaphor, the famous aria, "Se vuol ballare," whose lyrics say "If you want to dance, dear Count, I’ll play the guitar for you," meaning that Figaro intends to direct the action, and that music is in charge.

The shift in attitude for Figaro in this first scene has a great deal of significance, in my view, because it represents a sudden coming to self-awareness on Figaro’s part that parallels Mozart’s own changes in attitude toward his relationship with noble patronage and the increasing sense among the intellectuals of Enlightenment Europe that they, and not those appointed by feudal tradition, were the guardians of civil society and the leaders in the improvement of humanity through increased secular knowledge. I know, that’s a big claim to rest on about five minutes of a comic opera, but think of it this way: When we begin, the faithful servant is diligently counting the numbers, then he becomes aware that the authority that keeps his world in order plans to abuse that authority; he then puts his intelligence to work restoring order through music, saying that the Count will dance to his tune. What better metaphor for what Mozart wants to accomplish with Figaro, that is, to establish his rightful and dignified position as a distinguished maker of music, and what better vehicle for this objective than an opera performed in front of the Emperor and the aristocracy of Vienna? I suppose it’s just a coincidence that the administrator of the kick-in-the-pants I mentioned earlier was in fact, a Count—Count von Arco, the Prince-Archbishop’s chancellor, and I like to think of the venom in Figaro’s "Signor Contino" as directed at him.

I could go on about Figaro for a long time; the dancing-to-the-tune motif recurs, and there are many disguises, role reversals, and mistaken identities before everything is resolved. At one point, fairly early in the opera, Susanna and the Countess are trying to get Figaro to play along in their deception of the Count about the authorship of a letter, say "Hold your tongue, stupid, /This comedy must be ended," "La burletta ha da finir," and he replies, "Then to end it happily/ According to theatrical practice, / Let a marriage ceremony/ now follow." Throughout Figaro, there is a clear consciousness not only of the conventions of society that are implicit in comedy—who has what station, what is expected of people in each social level, what constitutes good and bad behavior—but an increasing self-consciousness about the role that theatrical and operatic representations of that social order do to shape it, confirm it, or subvert it.