More On Mozart

Here's an interesting essay on the Man Of The (New) Year, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, by jack-of-all-arts culture journalist and blogger Terry Teachout of About Last Night. Mr. Teachout has a positive genius for turning out wonderfully engaging and engagingly written pieces the principal substance of which is made up of the thoughts of expert others and making it all sound his very own, and this essay is no exception. In the main, it concerns itself with Mozart's relatively few minor-key, multi-movement instrumental works, and it makes for engaging reading indeed. I would take exception only to a peripheral matter: Mr. Teachout's,

[T]here is the still greater puzzle of the apparent incongruity between Mozart’s music and his personality. Forget the foul-mouthed idiot savant of Peter Shaffer’s movie Amadeus (1984); the real Mozart is elusive enough without benefit of caricature.

First, and I don't mean to be quibbling here, that incandescent movie is Milos Forman's, not Peter Shaffer's, even though Peter Shaffer wrote the screenplay based on his award-winning stage play. What I take exception to, however, is Mr. Teachout's characterizing the movie's portrayal of Mozart as a "foul-mouthed idiot savant"; a "caricature" of the historical Mozart. It's nothing of the kind. First, Mr. Teachout seems to have forgotten who's telling the story in Amadeus. It's Salieri, of course, not an historian or objective outside observer. And it's a work of fiction, not a biography. Even so, Amadeus's portrayal of Mozart captures and embraces in a brilliantly dramatic, theatrical, and, as befitting Mozart, comic way the awesome contradiction between the to all appearances ordinary man — a man, pace Maynard Solomon, as much child as man — and an astonishing body of work which, when he died at the age of thirty-five, was "so extensive and all-encompassing that it might as well have been the work of a fully mature composer who died at sixty, or even eighty," as Mr. Teachout so rightly puts it. Had Amadeus's Mozart come across as a "foul-mouthed idiot savant," and a mere "caricature," he would not have — could not have — captured as he did the hearts and minds of millions world-wide, most of whom knew Mozart previously only as a synonym for the precocious much in the same way Einstein has for almost a century been a synonym for genius. The Mozart of Amadeus is as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and as true to the essential spirit of the historical Mozart as he's come down to us through numerous historical and scholarly accounts as are the principal characters of Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and true to the essential spirit of the archetypes they represent. That's the genius of Amadeus as it is of the stageworks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, God's amanuensis.