Mozart is everywhere. Turn on the television: piano concerto K466 sells Macintosh computers, while Don Giovanni adds class to detergent. Go to the supermarket and you will find Mozart kugeln chocolates invitingly placed next to the till, while your morning coffee at Coffee Republic will be enriched by the overture from the Marriage of Figaro. The recovery of a Mozart symphony-even if juvenilia-receives front-page coverage in The Times; and Mozart autographs sell for the price of rare paintings. The famous (but disputed) "Mozart effect" claims special powers for Mozart's music. Research shows that unruly 11-year-old boys improve their academic performance after listening to Mozart. It is apparently Mozart's combination of simplicity and intellectual complexity which stimulates the adolescent brain. In the flurry of millennium polls last year, Mozart repeatedly achieved top spot among classical composers.
Mozart's popularity today is such that we take it for granted, but it was not always so. Only a few Mozart works which appealed to the romantic imagination, such as Don Giovanni and the Requiem, were played in the 19th century. Although Mozart was reevaluated in the 20th century thanks (among others) to Richard Strauss and Thomas Beecham, it was still very difficult to hear works such as the C major piano concerto K503 or Cosi fan tutte, let alone Idomeneo. Mozart's rise has been a continuous process since the 1941 sesquiecentenary celebrations; it culminated in the 1980s in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, play and film, causing Mozart to challenge Beethoven's predominance for the first time.
What explains Mozart's current primacy? His music is more in tune with our times than the earnest, life-asserting triumphs of Beethoven. It is the ambivalence of Mozart's musical language which appeals and unsettles us. His music expresses a vibrant ephemerality. It doesn't preach or moralise, but leads us gently by the hand. Moral strictures are of little importance in his operas. The final scene in Don Giovanni is not primarily a moral judgement, but an attempt to restore equanimity to a world thrown into turmoil by supernatural intervention. His operatic characters are fully-rounded human beings. There is a wonderful book called Who's Who in Mozart's Operas, by Joachim Kaiser, which concentrates on these characters, treating them as if they were real people. Kaiser shows how each musical phrase contributes to the portrait of individual characters. Donna Elvira's opening words, for example, in Don Giovanni tell only of her desire for vengeance. Yet the music conveys love, pride, humour and a deep sense of longing.
The irony and detachment of Mozart's musical world also seem modern. Irony features strongly in the operas, and was a characteristic of the man himself, as we know from his letters. It is no coincidence that the past few years have seen a huge rise in popularity of the most ironic of his operas, Cosi fan tutte. In Cosi, the text restricts Mozart's scope for characterisation, but it enables him to perceive the characters individually stripped of their outer layer. The story, while seemingly about a test of lovers' fidelity, in fact shows, as the critic AW Turner wrote, "delight, anguish and desperation of human hearts who, finding themselves behaving exactly contrary to their own preconceived notions of what they are and of what they want to be, are bewildered and tortured." Mozart's musical detachment-his ability to transcend the events of his life-is also part of his genius: the joyous clarinet quintet was composed at a time of ill health, loneliness and financial trouble in 1789; while the unearthly beauty of the Adagio for Glass harmonica came out of his dreadful last few months in 1791.
The 20th century has also given us a clearer understanding of the link between Mozart the man, and the composer. In the final years of his life, and following his death, there were numerous rumours about Mozart's supposedly amoral lifestyle and huge debts. These rumours even reached the Austrian emperor, Joseph II, who questioned Mozart's wife Constanze about them when she applied for a pension following her husband's death. Constanze told the Emperor the facts, and received her pension. None the less, the rumours persisted, so that Beethoven, for example, refused to improvise before Magdalena Hofdemel on the grounds that she had had an affair with Mozart. Pushkin used the scandals as the basis for his short play, Mozart and Salieri, which was then developed by Schaffer in his play and in the film, Amadeus-both reinforcing the myth of the gulf between the flawed man and his genius. But we now know, thanks to the huge literature on Mozart and his own wonderfully frank letters, that there is a glorious synthesis between the generous, ironic, humorous and somewhat proud man, and the sublime music. The rediscovery of Mozart is one of the great achievements of the 20th century.
