The composer and his phoenix

One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household.

David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations are real … his vision embraces the pain and cruelty as well as the compassion — the darkness and the light; but it is the light that prevails’. Even if you feel that the truth about Mozart’s emotional ambiguity at moments like the end of Figaro is that it leaves that balance of light and dark totally open, Cairns’s is a wonderfully sympathetic, convincingly expressed view. We will be very lucky if the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth produces a more perceptive and moving book than this new study of Mozart’s mature operas.

Born of a lifetime’s experience of these pieces, tracing the steps which brought him to value them so highly, Cairns’s book is, essentially, an extended meditation on what makes Mozart so marvellous. Not for him the cynicism of a Norman Lebrecht (who recently wrote ludicrously that Mozart ‘merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience’) or even the more judicious scepticism of Peter Phillips in these pages last week. By the end of his prologue Cairns has already written several profound sentences about Mozart’s genius, evoking ‘all that the music’s impeccable control concealed — the intensities, the layers of irony, the longing, the undercurrents of sadness, the co-existence of the celestial and the earthy, the sheer intelligence…’ Cairns feels the ‘presence of Mozart so strongly that I am surprised not to see him there’ and communicates that closeness with vivid understanding.