A Free-Market Mozart

Like most birthday celebrations, the hoopla surrounding the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth in Salzburg, Austria, has had its highs and lows. For me, the apogee was a series of three concerts this month at Alice Tully Hall.Mozart’s concertos and symphonies were performed with grace and emotion by the Hungarian-born pianist/conductor András Schiff and his instrumental ensemble, the Capella Andrea Barca. At the other extreme, there have also been kitsch exports, ostensibly for consumption, like Mozart Liqueur, and — shades of “South Park” — Mozart Chocolate Balls. Somewhere between the high and the low is a new book from the University of Chicago Press,”Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography” by Piero Melograni, ably translated from Italian by Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 304 pages, $30).Mr. Melograni, born in Rome in 1930, is a prolific journalist, political gadfly, and author of “Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution.” On his personal Website, he explains how he belonged to the Italian Communist Party for more than a decade, before being disenchanted by the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Hungary in 1956. Like many Italian ex-Communists, Mr. Melograni has jumped aboard the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist political party, Forza Italia. He served as a Forza Italia deputy in the Italian Parliament and is a founding member of a Berlusconi-supporting think tank, Nova Res Publica.The free-market and moderation play a major role in Mr. Melograni’s Mozart biography, which reinterprets Mozart’s life with the trajectory of a Berlusconian hero, based on the composer’s letters and some secondary sources. All previous writers have bemoaned Mozart’s penury and lack of royal patronage, but Mr. Melograni stresses that this was an advantage: “By not putting himself in the service of an old-style prince, [Mozart] encountered a new and more modern prince, the public of consumers.” Despite being famously poverty-stricken, Mozart found professional “salvation” in the “free music market” of Vienna, according to the author.The musical products for consumers that Mozart created are not described in detail in this book, apart from some dutiful résumés of opera librettos. We are told that Mozart wrote “two splendid string quartets (K. 515, 516)” in 1787; a “splendid Clarinet Quintet,” and the “splendid motet Ave Verum Corpus.”Aspects of performance are almost entirely ignored, as in this comment from the bibliographical notes: “Mozart symphonies, sonatas, operas, and concertos have of course been recorded by many interpreters and put out by a number of record companies…The performers are too numerous to mention.” We are told that Mozart’s 40th Symphony is so popular that its opening measures are echoed in the ring-tones of “millions of cell phones,” while a few pages later the same symphony is described as appearing in the ringtones of “thousands of cell phones.”Instead of music, Mr. Melograni focuses attention on characterizing Mozart as a “moderate in politics,” flying in the face of generations of music historians who point to the social revolutionary themes in the operas “Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni,” both with librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte. “Politics were marginal in Mozart’s life,” writes Mr. Melograni, and if there is anything revolutionary in “The Marriage of Figaro,” it is thanks to Joseph II, the German emperor between 1765 and 1790, who commissioned it and permitted its advanced ideas to be expressed.Moreover, in Mr. Melograni’s view, despite ample evidence in “The Magic Flute” and other works, Mozart was not genuinely influenced by Freemasonry, but became a Mason mainly for careerist reasons. Of course, the mere subject of Freemasonry is awkward for Italy’s political elite. In 1978, Mr. Berlusconi secretly joined Propaganda Due, an extremist Masonic lodge that had the goal of taking over the Italian government; his membership caused a scandal when it was revealed in 1990. Only last year, Guido Crosetto, a Forza Italia member of Parliament, claimed that the governor of Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio, embroiled in a banking takeover investigation, was the victim of a “Jewish Masonic plot.” Mr. Crosetto added, as widely reported in the Italian press: “The liquidity of Italian banks is inviting for a lot of people, especially the Jewish and American Freemasons who are already at our doors.”Instead of an idealistic Freemason or political progressive, Mozart is really an attractive beacon for moral ambivalence, Mr. Melograni asserts; in Mozart’s works, “Good can also be bad, and bad, good … Don Giovanni is a libertine and a murderer, but he is a fascinating man.” Mozart’s “ambivalence” corresponds to our world, Mr. Melograni adds, in which “dependable rules of conduct are fewer, and a growing number of people find it difficult to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, the good person and the bad one.”So it is, at least in Italy. Fortunately, at Alice Tully Hall, when Mr. Schiff played and conducted Mozart’s piano concertos No. 24 and 25, the expert expression of a blessed mixture of childlike innocence and ageless wisdom made for a rare experience of absolute good, of a permanently revolutionary kind.Mr. Ivry is author of biographies of Ravel, Poulenc, and Rimbaud, and the poetry collection “Paradise for the Portuguese Queen.”

A Free-Market Mozart

A Free-Market Mozart

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