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Sunday 7 September 2008

Mozartian magnificence

Robin Holloway raves about Hermanm Abert's Mozart

It’s the best book about one of the greatest composers. I’ve devoted odd moments of this autumn and winter to absorbed intake of Hermann Abert’s Mozart and am lost in admiration for its achievement, simultaneous with renewed wonder and delight at the achievements of its subject.

Though regrettable that this classic (it finally appeared in German between 1919 and 1921) has had to wait till now for a complete translation, there are compensating gains. Notably in the comprehensive updating, via hundreds of footnotes incorporating almost 90 years’ worth of further discoveries, biographical and textual. The scholarly task of modernising the annotations has been magnificently discharged by Cliff Eisen of King’s College London, and the vast task of actual Englishing is accomplished by the indefatigable Stewart Spencer (better known for editing and translating Wagneriana). It reads with elegant fluency, and there’s a lightness of touch that I suspect the original might not always possess. Two tiny reservations are that the (generous) music examples are mistake-prone; and that sometimes the numeration of Professor Eisen’s additions to Abert’s notes seem to have slipped their moorings in his text.

Abert’s achievement (for this Mozart-lover, who has steadily pursued his acquaintance with the oeuvre since buying his first miniature score — the G-minor Symphony — for his 11th birthday) is to gather it together in all its ramifying diversity, fused into a single multifaceted entity. And the great revelation is to place this entity within a diverse, wide-ranging context.

Mozart, the boy prodigy toured the length and breadth of musical Europe, responding eagerly and fruitfully to everything he encountered, absorbing matters of technique, style, expression, mastering every instrumental and vocal advance, early learning to sharpen inborn taste and discrimination, transforming all he assimilated with natural avidity, taking everything thus devoured further, higher, deeper, more: be it tricks of the trade, routines and tropes, virtuosity, individual and corporate, or notable individuals’ personal traits. This receptivity, so fructifying to his eclectic nature, continued into his brief, supercharged adult life. He responded equally to ephemeral phenomena and to the complex challenges presented by outstanding creative personalities: the living — Gluck, Haydn, the two principal composers, as well as J.S. Bach’s sons, Carl Philip Emmanuel and Johann Christian — and, eventually, the grateful dead: Handel and J.S. Bach himself.

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