Allen Lane £22 pp288
Mozart’s anniversary year is a deeply satisfying prospect for both performers and audiences; and it sees, too, the publication of a profusion of books. Inevitably, with a subject already minutely probed and examined, the territory is familiar. But all of us who venture into it now do so with the hope that our individual arc lights will shed specific illumination on well-known ground. David Cairns’s beam examines Mozart the man through the whole creative process of his operas, and in so doing offers lovingly detailed exploration into, and commentary on, the operas themselves.
As always, the narrative is compelling. Cairns’s text is richly supported by quotation from the Mozart letters (that exhilarating treasure trove of eyewitness accounts) and many other contemporary documents, and he draws, too, on commentary and interpretation by current writers, directors, scholars and practitioners, giving the rather pleasing impression of a team effort. And from this wide sweep, the personalities of the protagonists emerge with pinpoint precision. There is Leopold, Mozart’s complex father, at once the most positive and one of the most negative influences on his son’s development; there is the lofty but sympathetic imperial presence of Joseph II; and there are Lorenzo Da Ponte and Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart’s two most brilliant librettists. The examination especially of the work he and Da Ponte did to reconstruct Beaumarchais (for Le nozze di Figaro) or Bertati (for Don Giovanni) shows Mozart’s perfectionism in his creations. It appears again in his dealings with theatre managers: in one vivid anecdote, when Mozart argues in Munich with Count Seeau about the inclusion of trombones for the oracle scene in Idomeneo (an appearance lasting mere minutes, but for which the musicians would require full payment), the whole timeless question of funding in the arts is strikingly encapsulated. Constanze, Mozart’s wife, perhaps gets rather short shrift: she is always treated sympathetically, but Cairns does not give her sufficient credit for grasping the nettle of the disastrous financial state into which the family had sunk in the late 1780s, and dealing with it. (Cairns attributes the practicalities of the turnaround to Mozart himself.) And he is curiously reluctant to be moved by the most powerful account of Mozart’s last days, as supplied some 30 years later by Constanze’s sister Sophie, declaring that “some of these recollections are obviously imagined”. (Why? How could Sophie ever forget the details of that horrific and traumatic time?) But of course the most dazzling personality of all to emerge, in quicksilver flashes, is that of Mozart himself: human, generous, compassionate, vulnerable.
In the amply rewarding journey that is Cairns’s commentary on the operas themselves, he reveals his complete knowledge of these mighty scores. Again and again he offers arresting insights: he is excellent on ambiguity and artificiality in Così fan tutte, for instance, or on the many in-jokes in the supper scene of Don Giovanni, or on the progress “from the darkness of ignorance to the light of understanding” in Die Zauberflöte. He is rightly passionate about Mozart’s musical characterisation, and eloquent in his explanations of it, though he does not give quite enough credit, perhaps, to the abilities and indeed personalities of the singers who created Mozart’s roles.
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Occasionally, one might quibble with the balance in the book: it is odd, for instance, that Der Schauspieldirektor is dismissed in one brief paragraph, where the abandoned L’oca del Cairo merits three. But his analysis explains layer after layer of compositional technique, showing remarkable key progressions, sophisticated formal processes, utterly original felicities of orchestration, and so on. Sometimes these become a little obsessive, as he doggedly pursues Mozartean leitmotifs (or, as he puts it, “thematic and harmonic reminiscences”), and seems to impose some sort of fierce conceptual padlock on what is essentially Mozart’s effortless and unselfconscious facility of invention. He quotes Carl Maria von Weber (Mozart’s cousin by marriage), and his marvellous comment on the “gaiety and spendthrift youthfulness and warmth” of Die Entführung aus dem Serail. It is precisely that exuberance of creativity that draws to Mozart the “musicians and amateurs” to whom Cairns is specifically addressing this book; but these readers may occasionally be baffled by his perorations.
All of us, performers and receivers of Mozart’s music alike, draw our own conclusions from the same material, and inevitably disagree from time to time. I would enjoy a discussion with Cairns, for example, on Ach, ich liebte, Constanze’s first aria in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which he judges as failing to convey “that the character’s joy has vanished and her eyes are overflowing with tears”; or on the final resolution of Figaro, which he reads as one of contentment; or on the larghetto section of the first Queen of the Night aria in Die Zauberflöte, which he believes to be “contrived in its pathos”; or on the whole of La clemenza di Tito, whose innate imbalance (because the recitatives were not written by Mozart) excludes it for me from the premier league. But that is the glory of this material: it merits and receives countless interpretative solutions, and, with a few wild exceptions, sustains them all. The great value of Cairns’s book is that his elegant and persuasive arguments turn the listener yet again to examine the music from a new vantage point. And it emerges refreshed every time.
Conductor Jane Glover is the author of Mozart’s Women (Macmillan). Mozart and His Operas is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £19.80 on 0870 165 8585