Search
Close this search box.

Behind the Mozart-Mania

On 5 December 1791 Mozart died. Two hundred years later Mozart-mania has gripped the cultural elites of capitalist society. Paul Morris explains what was revolutionary about Mozart’s life and music.

The 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, the event which signalled the birth of bourgeois rule in Europe, was celebrated in 1989. This year marks another major anniversary – the bicentenary of the death of Mozart.

As you may have noticed, the modern ruling class is commemorating Mozart a lot more enthusiastically than it commemorated the bicentenary of its own revolution.

The reason is simple. For the modern bosses the French Revolution represents a moment when the masses had their say. Their historians now refer to it as an interlude of madness in an otherwise rational century. Individuals-poets, politicians, philosophers-came to the fore or were swept aside according to the needs of the mass struggle.

Mozart, on the other hand, represents the triumph of the individual, soaring above the petty concerns and political intrigues of his day to produce timeless masterpieces. This message is being hammered home to us in television programmes and colour supplement articles every week.

The orgy of Mozart worship reaches its climax on 5 December, with the rich and famous queuing up to attend exclusive bicentenary concerts and banquets. Is there anything for workers to celebrate other than a few hours extra overtime for members of the Musicians union?

The answer is yes. First of all because the working class can’t just reject bourgeois culture. We will have to build the classless culture of communist society on the foundations laid by capitalist society.

Secondly because behind the layers of ruling class myth Mozart’s music represents a great conquest in humanity’s struggle to understand itself. And far from being immune to the political upheavals of his time Mozart plunged consciously into political life and, within the bounds laid down by the time and place where he lived, was on the right side of the struggle.

Mozart’s revolution in music consisted of the fact that, alongside his Viennese contemporary Joseph Haydn, he created a new musical language, known to musicians as the Classical Style. The previous style in western music, the Baroque, had begun to fall apart like the late feudal society that produced it. From about 1750 European music consisted of fragmented experiments at writing new forms of music, using new instrumental techniques, and exploring the implication of a recently discovered scientific system of musical keys; known as “equal temperament”.

Mozart and Haydn synthesised these experiments into a new, coherent style. This musical style was designed to express the emotions of a new• kind of human being, the free individual: the man who – according to Mozart’s contemporary Rousseau – “is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”.

Mozart’s operas leave behind forever the type of dramas where Greek gods meander through some mythical story demonstrating a moral lesson. In Mozart’s operas all the classes of rising bourgeois society are represented. They fight each other, demonstrate their human frailty and capacity for selfless action. Clearly Mozart could• not have a socialist understanding of class struggle… even early eighteenth century utopian socialism had yet to appear. But the day to day struggles and tensions between aristocrat, bourgeois, artisan and servant, dominate his operas.

As well as class, the other dominant theme in Mozart’s Operas is sex. Marriage for “love” Was a product of the rise of the bourgeoisie, freeing itself from the feudal of arranged marriage. And this new notion of “individual sex-love” proved a rich source of inspiration for musicians, dramatists and novelists alike. In Mozart it ids all there, the jealousy unfaithfulness, adolescent crushes, sexual violence, gender role swapping.

A mere glance at the plots of Mozart’s operas illustrates the predominance the themes of class and sex: a woman is abducted from a harem; a servant tricks his master out of enjoying the feudal “right of first night” with his bride; two men trick their girlfriends by dressing up as Albanians to seduce them, only to find each falls for the wrong one; a cynical, aristocratic Don Juan goes to hell after seducing thousands of women, then the celebrating bourgeois moralists are ridiculed.

It is not only in his operas but in his instrumental works, especially the Piano Concertos, that Mozart employs this new language to express new and complex human emotions.

Traditional music history sees this achievement as an accident, the product of an exceptional individual in exceptional circumstances. Historical materialism does not have to deny Mozart’s greatness, or to reduce its appreciation of Mozart to an understanding of the musical notes themselves (important though this is). Marxism situates Mozart’s work within the great sweep of the bourgeois revolution which changed economic life and the class structure of Europe radically during Mozart’s lifetime.

We can only understand Mozart if we situate him firmly within the ideological movement which accompanied the rising bourgeois revolution; the so-called Enlightenment. More precisely Mozart experienced the crisis of the Enlightenment and its political project of reform, faced with the reality of mass revolt after 1789.

The Enlightenment began as a movement in science and philosophy. The progressive thinkers of this movement were themselves part of the emergence of the bourgeoisie. This rising class needed constant technical innovation to develop manufacture and commerce. To achieve this they had to free science and thought from the fetters imposed by backward religious feudalism, which had imprisoned Galileo for insisting the earth went round the sun.

But the Enlightenment inevitably became a political movement. It is a short step from blowing away traditional religious explanations of nature with rationalist arguments to doing the same thing to the bishops’ explanations of class society.

Equality of the classes before the law, an end to privilege and religious discrimination, the removal of all legal and political obstacles to the accumulation of wealth by bankers, merchants and workshop owners-this was the political programme of the Enlightenment.

Being profound believers in the power of rationalism and scientific argument the Enlightenment thinkers were convinced that their insights could be translated into action by reform. The rulers could be convinced by the power of argument. Revolution, for Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, was something vile and irrational. Instead they opted to change society by converting to progressive ideas some of the~ most powerful kings and aristocrats. Many Enlightenment thinkers became advisers to the so-called “enlightened absolutists”, kings like Joseph II of Austria, who centralised feudal power and used it to carry through a bourgeois reform process against the old nobility.

But when one not-so-enlightenment absolutist was overthrown in France in 1789 the crowned heads of Europe abandoned all their experiments with reforms to wage a holy war against revolutionary France. The Enlightenment dream was shattered.

Mozart was right at the centre of the Enlightened reform movement in the Austrian empire of the 1789. He had good reason to be. When he set out to make his adult career as a composer and performer he found himself allocated to the lowest stratum of the feudal hierarchy-the status of a servant.

Made to live in, and wear• the uniform of, the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart described a typical dinner time:

“Our party consists of the two valets . . . Herr Zetti the confectioner, the two cooks, Ceccare11i, Brunetti and my insignificant self. Note that the two valets sit at the top of the table but at least I have the honour of being placed above the cooks.”

When Mozart’s career began all musicians lived and worked like this, either in the service of the church or state. Their music was appropriated in a classically feudal way, becoming the property of their masters. Mozart and his contemporaries had to compose and perform according to the whims of their masters or the demands of state ceremony.

But alongside this decaying feudal world a new economy was growing up: the modern city with its bourgeois and petit bourgeois population. Mozart was the first composer to take the decisive step into this economy, becoming a freelance composer in Vienna in 1780, and remaining one until his death in 1791. He was able to sell his music on the market, through subscription concerts and commissions. Though much of the money still came from the nobility Mozart had moved into the world of petty commodity production. This gave him a new freedom to write what he wanted, and to address the urban, middle class audience through his music.

However the open market was a fickle source of income. By the end of the 1780s Mozart’s music was going out of fashion. He had to squeeze his most sublime music into a series of weird and mysterious commissions: concertos for the Basset horn and the glass harmonica, a requiem mass for a deranged aristocrat, a musical drama for the most raucous lower class theatre in Vienna.

Mozart did not just make a personal transition from feudal to bourgeois society. In Vienna he became embroiled in the most radical bourgeois reform movement of the time – the Freemasons.

Today Freemasons’ Lodges are a reactionary drinking club for corrupt coppers, businessmen, Labour and Tory politicians, judges and the odd monarch.

But in the Vienna of the 1780s they were radical bourgeois political societies, where Enlightenment philosophy was mixed with mystic humanism, where middle class intellectuals like Mozart could rub shoulders with the Enlightened aristocrats who advised Emperor Joseph II.

Mozart didn’t just join any old lodge. He joined the Masonic equivalent of the most extreme far left group imaginable – the ‘True Harmony lodge, led by the philosopher Ignaz von Born. In Mozart’s lodge and its offshoots were to be found some of the most radical political thinkers in the city. Johann Riesbeck, whose book on the German peasants was banned, Emmanuel Schikaneder, who translated Beaumarchais’ revolutionary play, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, into German, and Angelo Soliman, the freed black slave intellectual.

These lodges were dedicated specifically to supporting the enlightened reforms of Joseph II and fighting those who opposed them. But Joseph, despite legalising the Freemasons, remained suspicious of them. He placed them under the surveillance and control of the secret police.

When Joseph died, one year after the outbreak of revolution in France, his successor moved to outlaw Freemasonry altogether, fearing it would become the Austrian equivalent of the French Jacobin clubs. In response Mozart and Schikaneder wrote The Magic Flute, a thinly disguised piece of Masonic agitprop in defence of their doomed organisation.

Mozart was a product of the bourgeois revolution. He was a radical reformer who died as the reform process was shattered and reversed. His music is infused with the spirit of rationalist humanism. His operas are full of hatred and ridicule for class and sexual oppression. On top of all that he was undeniably an individual genius.

Is that something beyond Marxism’s understanding, or something that Marxists deny the existence of? No. Under communism our aim will be to create the conditions that will offer the possibility for every human being to be as creative as the individuals we call geniuses today. As Trotsky wrote, in Literature and Revolution:

“[Under communism] the forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx.”

Once you hear Mozart’s music free of prejudice,and understand his life free of bourgeois myths, you can see why Trotsky should have added to the list: “a Mozart”

Content

You should also read
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram