Mozart's problem

It has been calculated that it should have taken every hour of every day of Mozart's brief life just to write out the sheer quantity of music he composed.  That it plainly did not is a measure of how far genius transcends crude calculations based on the abilities of lesser mortals.  But leaving aside the question of how Mozart found time both to compose and to write out so much, there remains a more fundamental problem: how did he find time to compose at all?

This may seem ridiculous.  Clearly, you might say, he just sat down and wrote.  But Mozart was not producing knitting patterns; it has been the universal experience that his music is among the most human ever written - it seems to speak to us in a uniquely direct fashion.  His overmastering desire to write operas - the musical art-form closest to the everyday, for all its ludicrous conventions and excesses - is eloquent and undeniable testimony to this.  His music seems to tap into some deep vein of knowledge about his fellow men and women - and particularly about their complicated and messy interactions.

Nor is this knowledge purely theoretical or simply inscrutable intuitions of genius. We have his own story, minutely chronicled through his witty and articulate letters, as evidence that he drank life to the lees.  When his music sings of ecstasy and anguish we can be sure that it comes the scarred heart of the man.

The question of when Mozart found time to compose can therefore be refined; when, we might ask, did Mozart find time to live life so deeply and then transmute his experiences into music?  It is not, of course, only Mozart's problem.  But because of his extraordinary fecundity, together with the two-handed way he took on all that life had to offer, he presents the problem in its clearest form.

And that problem is the problem of art which every artist must confront.  As well as the artist, art is predicated upon an audience, be it one or a million, manifest or potential.  Art is about communication between the artist and the audience.  If art is to have any value for the audience, it must treat, however distantly, of human things; which means that the artist must know and understand the same.

In some ways, then, the artist must live in the outside world, or at least outside art.  For Mozart this meant a punishing social round of parties and balls and meals and private concerts of dirty songs; for Proust it meant countless visits to salons and dinner parties among the elite of the Faubourg St Germain; for Rembrandt, it meant worrying about his creditors and looking in the mirror at a man growing old.

The paradox is, of course, that while artists are gathering this raw experience, they are not creating the art they ultimately live for.  There is thus this constant tension between art and experience.  Art needs the input, but the gathering of it precludes the production of the art which it fuels.  Perhaps the best definition of genius is someone who manages to balance this impossible equation as Mozart did, supremely.

(18.10.87)

See also Moody Sonnets - Wrong Time, Wrong Place 

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