MYTH OF THE DIVINE CHILD

By Michael Walsh

For two centuries listeners have been trying to reconcile the ineffability of Mozart's music with the childishness and bawdy coarseness of the man who composed it. The easiest and most common method has been to regard Mozart as somehow not a man at all-to view him as a sort of child god whose works welled up spontaneously. In his biography Mozart, published in English in 1982, Wolfgang Hildesheimer succeeded to a large degree in scraping away the legends surrounding the composer, but now Maynard Solomon, in his extraordinary new study, Mozart: A Life (HarperCollins; 640 pages; $35), has gone much further than any of his predecessors in humanizing his subject. Above all, he limns the complex relationship between Mozart and the person who was the center and the terror of his life: his father, the fabulous monster Leopold.

"Homer tells us that the child gods are timeless and unchanging," writes Solomon in his thesis-setting prologue, "The Myth of the Eternal Child." "In the course of time, however, Mozart's physical appearance began to diverge from the world's image of him. It was as though the grown Mozart was quite a different person, one descended from but not identical with a legendary child Mozart. The maturing historical Mozart became the porcelain-child Mozart's double, and the divine child survived his own death." Unable to escape the image that had charmed the courts of Europe when he was a boy, says Solomon, Mozart the man took refuge behind it.

The primary architect of this myth was Leopold, the stern violinist and teacher from Augsburg who knew at once that to him had been given charge of music's greatest talent. Leopold may not have been the first stage father, but he defined the type, dragging the young Wolfgang and his nearly as virtuosic elder sister Nannerl through Europe to secure not only his son's reputation but the family's fortunes as well.

In the latter he was bitterly disappointed, and his subsequent relations with his grown son, so piteously revealed by their correspondence, inevitably revolved around the twin subjects of career and money. Leopold, in Solomon's view, never reconciled himself to Mozart's maturity and in a thousand ways endeavored to infantilize and emasculate him. "Always pursuing his quota of freedom, Mozart constantly drew back and returned to conditions of bondage," Solomon writes. Mozart's lifelong fear of his father determined his behavior. When on July 3, 1778, his mother died in Paris, where Leopold, despite her protestations of poor health, had sent her to accompany Mozart as he sought a high-paying position, he could not bring himself to tell the truth; his letter home that day merely reported that she was very ill, and it was not until six days later that he finally confessed that Anna Maria had died. Naturally, Leopold blamed him.

Solomon, a musicologist who wrote a splendid biography of Beethoven in 1977, relates these and a host of other incidents smoothly and seamlessly, providing us with just enough of the details of court protocol, carriage rides and commissions that make the late 18th century so exotic. Mozart and the members of his circle come vividly alive-not only his father and remote, tragic mother, but also Constanze, his flighty, second-choice wife who turned professional widow (and mythmaker) after his death; and his cousin Basle, with whom he not only exchanged famously scatological letters but also, Solomon suggests, enjoyed active and uninhibited sexual relations.

In sharply written, penetrating chapters, Solomon also treats the fondness Mozart had for riddles, wordplay and bathroom humor; his passionate involvement in Freemasonry; and even, in a short chapter called "Adam," his private, symbolic use of a name that was previously regarded as a misprint of "Amada," the most common form of his middle name. If the author sometimes relies too heavily on Freudian interpretations of symbols-" ... the adoption of the name Adam also has the ancillary effect of canceling God's direct presence-Theophilus [one of Mozart's middle names]"-it is a small fault when measured against the book's overall achievement.

Nonmusicians need not fear endless pages of musical analyses and examples, for Solomon uses them sparingly: this is a book about a life, not compositional technique. By the time the reader encounters the dying Mozart, who was so bloated and reeking of internal corruption that witnesses said the stench was unbearable, and whose last act was to expel a torrent of brown vomit, any romantic clichas of the periwigged rococo china doll who wept when Marie Antoinette refused to kiss him have long been dispelled. In their place is a far more realistic Mozart of flesh and blood, whose musical mastery was not a gift of the gods but the life's work of a man.