Remembering mozart and 250 year anniversary and amadeus and presenting life and writing biography

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth. In honor of this event, orchestras small and great are devoting considerable effort to present the work of this Austrian genius, whose fame seems to be growing with the years. The release of the play and movie Amadeus in the mid-1980s not only assured that Mozart's reputation and popularity will continue to soar for the foreseeable future but also bequeathed to us a certain (outdated) biographical portrait of Mozart which has been challenged in more recent scholarly literature. In short, this "newer" biographical picture of Mozart questions the popular picture of a carefree but misunderstood genius who was miserably treated by employers until he died in penury and was cast into a common grave in 1791 at age 35. The purpose of this and the next essay is to place this reorientation in assessment of Mozart in the context of changing biographical fashions in the English-speaking world of our day. I will argue in brief that different modes of perceiving biographical subjects are primarily driven not by new textual finds or more "accurate" reading of the evidence, but by changing philosophical fashions in the current culture on how we perceive a life is lived. Let me begin with this point.

Perceiving How to Present a Life

Each age has its dominant tone of speaking, its language of interpreting and presenting life. Our popular speech today draws on terms from economics, popular psychology, sociology, medicine and a host of other disciplines in order to express our ideas. Normally we adopt terms from the disciplines as a sort of shorthand to describe what is before us. "He has a complex" would have been such a statement from 30 years ago, while metaphors of growth, taken from economics, seem to capture us now. But underlying these metaphors are what I call root metaphors of the culture, basic ways of perceiving human responsibility and freedom in the world. For example, I would characterize the time of the 1950s and 1960s as the gradual triumph of sociological thinking in our culture (sociologists were popular on campus; students sought out the major eagerly). This thinking is characterized by the notion that social forces, rather than individual choices, tend to determine a person's lot in life. These forces are unleashed on us as soon as we are born, and begin with the most simply of interactions--language between mother and child. By the time a person is able to speak, however, sociologists of the 1960s would have told us that this child's destiny is largely fixed. Of course, there could be some mobility and some advancement along the way, but the child's patterns of belief, behavior, expections and actions are already determined. If this is the case, then, people are really not fully responsible for the way they ultimately turn out in the world. You can see, then, where this theory of the human life leads us. People who commit crimes are ultimately to be understood rather than punished; to be rehabilitated rather than judged; to be given more chances rather than locked up.

But this belief in social determinism, if that isn't too strong a phrase, had its impact on biographical writing of that period and especially in biographical treatments of Mozart. In a brief piece in the 2006 Chamber Music Northwest summer program (Portland, OR) the renowned Mozart scholar Cliff Eisen says that Mozart was perceived by the previous generation of scholars as follows:

"The 'facts' of Mozart's life are so well known that they hardly bear repeating: born in a small and undistinguished provincial town, the child prodigy was praded around Europe by his money-grubbing father, plagued by his employer the Archbishop, and eventually had to fend for himself in Vienna. For a while, at least, things went well: between 1784 and 1787 Mozart gave concerts, published several works, and composed an almost unbroken string of masterpieces. But his success was fleeting. The Viennese publich turned against him, he sank into debt, and after bouts of depression and illness he died prematurely at the age of 35, broken and forgotten, in the midst of composing a requiem that he had come to believe he was writing for himself."

This, then, was the regnant picture of Mozart coming out of WWII which was finally popularized in the play and movie Amadeus in the 1980s. Mozart is, in a word, a tortured genius who was victimized many times: by his father, by the Archbishop of Salzburg, by the Vinnesse public.

The Times They are a Changin'

The period of time in which the language and approach of sociologist was dominant in our culture abruptly ended in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Call it what you will: the Reagan revolution, or tax revolt fever or the birth of the victims' rights movement, but it amounted to a sea change in the root metaphor of how a life was perceived in America. What I mean is that images of responsibility reemerged; theories of rehabilitation were gradually replaced by approaches of vengeance or "just desserts;" psychologists and others gradually rediscovered the language of "fault" or personal responsibility in order to explain a person's situation and what they could do to extricate themselves from their situation. Though this movement only became evident in the early 1980s, it still reigns today. Perhaps the most potent cultural figure representing this "new approach," is Dr. Phil, the popular television shrink. Though I don't spend much time (or any, really), watching him, a two-minute exposure to him is enough to convince me that he is a "you are responsible for your problems" type-of-guy, and that you can and must do things to "take charge" of your life for the better. In other words, we now live in a time where responsibility is placed on individuals for their past, for their present and for making their future "work." If the metaphor for the 1960's was "it really isn't his/her fault," the metaphor since the mid-1980s is "it's your own damn fault." This is, naturally, an oversimplification, but I think this change in perspective is now dominant in our culture. It drives death penalty lawyers and other criminal defense attorneys crazy, in a way, since they have to try to come up with strategies a jury will buy to be lenient on their clients when the overall cultural tone is to "throw the book at them."

It seems like I have wandered far afield from biographical concerns but I really have not. How does this discussion affect scholarly portrayals of Mozart? The next essay probes this question.

1956