Sigh...
Anyway, I’m just old enough to remember how Mozart was once dismissed as a pretty but superficial “precursor” to Beethoven’s greatness. Even as a young ‘un, puffing away on my clarinet in Mr. Tucker’s “senior woodwinds” class in high school, that kind of thinking just totally hacked me off!
As in:
“In his symphonies, Mozart suggests the themes Beethoven
would bring to a more profound culmination in the Eroica.”
Yuck! Gag me with a Sacher Torte!
From the first time I heard Mozart’s music in “Music Appreciation”
class in the 7th grade I was just… well… hooked. I immediately felt a sense of
connection that I had never experienced before. I think that’s why I chose to
play the clarinet in the first place. Some music teachers came into class one
day and said, “Who wants to learn to play something besides the radio?”
(Today I imagine they would day the IPod.) Remembering all the wonderful music that Mozart had written for the clarinet
(the trio, the quintet, the concerto), I shot up my little hand and said, “The
licorice stick for me, please!” And how I wanted to play all of those wonderful
solos he created for the instrument in his operas! It seems that every time
Mozart wants to speak about human longing and desire he gives the music to the
clarinet.
As in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCOZbjePXkI
For those of you who followed the link, there are certainly
more elaborate polished versions of this music on YouTube. But I just had to
include this one for the magical moment that occurs about 25 seconds in. At
least it’s magical for any clarinet player!
Despite the poverty, ugliness and horror that I might be
feeling at any particular moment, Mozart’s music was always for me beauty,
happiness, and the longing for a kind of harmony and sweetness that
transfigures and ennobles our lives. And, tootling away on the half-busted
B-flat clarinet that I got for $5 at the local hock shop, I felt I got at least
a few half steps closer to experiencing that loveliness.
Fortunately, those bad old days of Mozart bashing are
gone! Today Wolfgang is celebrated as
the titanic world-changing genius that he was. And the whole idea that he was
just “leading up” to Ludwig van B has gone into the proverbial wastebasket of
musicology. And if you doubt this just think about how many "Mostly Mozart" festivals there are compared to those that are "Basically Beethoven". Yay!
But do I really understand why I’ve always preferred Mozart?
Or for that matter why I also prefer Virginia Woolf to D.H. Lawrence or Scott
Fitzgerald to Hemingway? So I decided to
take a shower and brood on it – as most of my ideas tend to come in the shower.
Something about great clouds of steam unlocking the otherwise fettered
consciousness!
And it hit me! Perhaps the unifying idea here is the theme
of self-deception. This is something that has always haunted me. The idea that
you think you are one thing, or are coming off as one thing, and in reality you
are being perceived by everyone else in a totally different way.
For example:
You think you are like this… …
but everyone sees you as…
A brilliant raconteur A blowhard
Generous and giving Manipulative
A good listener Someone who never shuts up
Progressive in your views A slave to your class interests
Speaking truth to power Someone with tenure
Totally hot and “all that” A candidate for an Oprah makeover
This kind of self-deception is at the heart of all of
Mozart’s operas. In Beethoven, “people” are who they say they are (tortured,
heroic, Promethean, etc.) In Mozart,
however, there is a constant sense that everyone is ensnared by their own
misconceptions. So the Count who thinks he is a great seducer is really a
buffoon. The servant who thinks he is the cleverest guy in the room is really
being led around by the nose. The
“puppet master” who thinks he is pulling all the strings is really a sterile
and lost old man. And so it goes. Of course, Mozart, being a supremely
enlightened person, invites us to forgive them all through the beauty of his
music. And so we do.
As in:
BTW, check out the comments after the video. They’re kind of
wonderful!
With these thoughts in mind, I’ve been brooding on the
degree of self-deception that marks my own life as a “seducer” of audiences.
As in:
I think I am like this… … but everyone sees me
as…
A powerful playwright Meh - and who's up for
with provocative views Chinese food after the show?
who really stands out
from the crowd!
I like to think of myself as creating something of value. But doesn’t every creative person believe that? When I contrast that with the “90% of everything is crap” rule, I can see a problem. We can’t all be right, can we? So there has to be a lot of self-deception going on here! But who is zooming whom?
Of course, this kind of thinking can lead down a very
Hamlet-like hall of mirrors where you can’t pick up a pen without wondering
about your actual motives. And I’m left with a feeling of envy for the “Beethovens”
of this world – the people who truly feel that what they are doing is important
and meaningful and must be shared with the world. Does it matter if this is
self-deception after all? I mean… gosh…. We don’t even know how many universes
we live in or how many dimensions there are. One two, eleven, a hundred, an
infinite number? So if we can’t even understand where we are how can we know
who or what we are either?
As Yul Brynner used to say in “The King and I,” ‘Tis a
puzzlement!'
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