Hats Off to A Genius!

By Otto Friedrich

From his podium at New York City's Lincoln Center last week, Raymond Leppard gave a brisk downbeat and drew forth the majestic D that opens the "Haffner" Symphony. In doing so, he began the gala observance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 235th birthday. He also began an unprecedented Lincoln Center extravaganza: to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death by performing during the next 19 months every note he ever wrote.

Leppard's lively performance of the "Haffner," with a scaled-down orchestra assembled from the New York Philharmonic and the Juilliard School Orchestra, was peculiar because it broke off after the minuet. Then came two piano concertos, two piano solos, a serenade and four individual arias (all admirably performed by such soloists as pianist Jeffrey Kahane and soprano Dawn Upshaw) before the "Haffner" finale arrived as a kind of farewell.

This sort of programming was standard in Mozart's day, and Leppard was inaugurating the bicentennial by re-creating a concert that Mozart himself had presented in 1783. "Suffice it to say that the theater could not have been more crowded, and that every box was full," the composer proudly wrote to his father Leopold (which is why we know the details of the program). "But what pleased me most of all was that His Majesty the Emperor was present, and goodness! how delighted he was and how he applauded me!"

The Mozart bicentennial ranges far beyond Manhattan. On the same day that the "Haffner" was resounding in Lincoln Center, Mozart's "Prague" Symphony poured forth in Prague, and nine other European cities chimed in with concerts of their own. Then all 10 performances were broadcast in sequence over a continentwide network, so that Europeans with grandiose Mozart plans of their own could start their celebrations.

The rest of the world has its claims too, for though Mozart was very much the child of the 18th century enlightenment in Austria, he is probably the most universally beloved of classical composers. So while there will be concerts and exhibits almost beyond counting in such traditional music centers as London and Paris, there will also be Mozart festivals in more unexpected places, ranging from Bartlesville, Okla., to Dunedin, New Zealand. When all the cheering finally dies, this will probably have been the largest and loudest celebration of any artist in human history. Says one New Yorker who prefers Puccini: "Where can I hide?"

Mozart has not always been so universally popular. Though he was famous during childhood as a keyboard virtuoso, his myriad compositions were often regarded as dense and difficult ("Too many notes, my dear Mozart," Emperor Joseph II supposedly said). Musicians, however, recognized his greatness. "I love Mozart as the musical Christ," said Tchaikovsky. "The most tremendous genius raised Mozart above all masters," said Wagner, "in all centuries and in all the arts."

But the Romantics imposed their own contradictory misjudgments. While many considered some of Mozart's greatest works admirably demonic (e.g. Don - Giovanni), most smiled on his sonatas as works of tinkly charm appropriate for young ladies to perform in the parlor. That view of Mozart as a divinely inspired but childlike innocent endured well into this century. Only a few enthusiasts such as Sir Thomas Beecham and Artur Schnabel kept emphasizing the depth and drama in his later symphonies and piano works ("Too easy for students and too difficult for artists," said Schnabel). Serious scholarship helped; so did the revival of period instruments. The 1948 arrival of the LP record vastly broadened the availability of pre-Romantic music, and enabled lots of people to hear lots of Mozart for themselves. They loved him.

He is, of course, eminently lovable: melodious, harmonious, beautiful, an escape from all the ills that flesh is heir to. "The only music yet written that would not sound out of place in the mouth of God," George Bernard Shaw once wrote. But each age hears the Mozart it wants to hear, and today's audiences enjoy not only the exquisite serenity of this music but also its emotions, its subtlety and wit. Indeed, Peter Sellars' "modernized" stagings of the operas demonstrate a very contemporary sense of anxiety and unhappiness. Still, the music remains joyous and so eminently worth celebrating.

The bicentennial celebrations are not all musical. The British, for example, are staging a weekend of billiards tournaments to commemorate Mozart's fondness for planning carom shots while he composed music, and vice versa. Japanese entrepreneurs have already started selling Mozart dolls, Mozart watches, even Mozart sake manufactured to the strains of Mozart's music. "Mozart is suitable because it is gentle and smooth, not peculiar or chaotic," says the distiller. Mozart tours are selling well, and France is operating a Mozart train to several cities that the composer visited. The Austrians have put Mozart's picture on their 5,000 schilling note ($500), which will probably be just about enough to buy a small cup of coffee mit Schlag at this year's Salzburg Festival.

Mozart's native Salzburg is the high shrine of Mozartism. The festivities started Jan. 2, when the celebrated Salzburg Marionettes presented the first of the seven Mozart operas that the 78-year-old troupe has in its repertoire. It will tour Europe this spring and the U.S. in November. The Landestheater offers a new Magic Flute as well as a restaging of Peter Shaffer's popular but preposterous Amadeus. For those seeking knowledge, an international symposium will provide 130 scholarly papers in four languages.

Vienna, where the composer spent his last 10 years and which he called "the best place in the world for my metier," has plans that are accordingly sumptuous. The Staatsoper and the Volksoper will play Mozart operas all season. The gilded halls of the Schonbrunn Palace, where the six-year-old Mozart once jumped into the lap of Empress Maria Theresa after one of his concerts, will be the setting for all his string quartets, as well as outdoor performances of Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.

But the Lincoln Center marathon wins the prize for endurance. Mozart's complete works, including unfinished pieces and arrangements, are now estimated to total 835 compositions, instead of the familiar Kochel list of 626. The complete presentation will enable a sufficiently dogged listener to sample such obscure efforts as the unfinished opera L'Oca del Cairo. And the quality of performances should be extremely high -- Itzhak Perlman and Daniel Barenboim playing violin sonatas, for example; Mitsuko Uchida all the piano sonatas; both the Juilliard and Tokyo quartets on hand for chamber music.

Almost equally exhaustive is the Mozart year's biggest recording project: the collected works on 180 Philips CDs in 45 volumes, some 200 hours of music. Released at a rate of 12 to 15 CDs a month, the set already includes all the symphonies, played by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in- the-Fields, and the piano concertos, performed mainly by Alfred Brendel. This month's releases include the violin concertos and wind concertos.

Amid all the cheers, a few small doubts have been raised. "It's hard not to see in Lincoln Center's bicentennial gourmandizing a musical Trump Tower," Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin complained in the New York Times. The Economist was concerned that "the world will be in grave danger of suffering from surfeit." "Mozart will be everywhere," sighed the French weekly L'Express, "on posters, the radio, the front page . . . not to mention Viennese confections and chocolate Mozarts. Mozart wrote, 'I would like to have all that is good, true and beautiful.' Well, so he will and, alas, all that is worst as well." Perhaps so, but while Mozart was not the giggling twit popularized in Amadeus, he did like jokes and games and high living, and he had a rich sense of his own gifts. It is easy to guess that he would have enjoyed his bicentennial enormously.