May = Mozart

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Although promises may arrive earlier, nature truly reawakens in May. It can still be cold days, evenings call for caution, and in the old days there was a lot of rain. But everything blooms and leaves, buzzes and sticks, and if you're lucky, early strawberries and cherries will arrive. May, take my word for it, is even more precious in the north, where winter starts very early (in the middle of autumn, as it were) and brings several months of grayness, sometimes even blackness, and the heating season lasts until the end of March. You will easily notice that the societies that have to fight against northern climates are organized, work-oriented, often too serious, without much spontaneity and sense of humor. Some northerners react to spring more strongly than Mediterraneans to August - to the first appearance of the sun, no one sits indoors anymore, they sunbathe in parks, jog shirtless, swim in lakes...

This is the context in which a German poet, in a cycle about the seasons, writes that May is the month of the "Mozart calendar". I understand it as the poet's desire to say that Mozart's music is so natural that it seems that nature itself imitates Mozart, and that in those moments when it awakens and blossoms, when it brings us the first realization of its full beauty. It is difficult to imagine a higher compliment, and it is a good measure of the specialness of Mozart's place in the history of music and German culture (although he was not German).

You don't have to care about classical music, or music in general, to have heard Mozart countless times. He is synonymous with "child miracle", at one time it was believed that his music stimulates the brain of babies, as well as healing, he is famous enough for sweets to be named after him. Miloš Forman's extraordinary film contributed a lot to everything, which dramatically contrasts practically mythologized talent with the absence of discipline and social adjustment. And it is also realistically possible that, as described in the film, you heard one of his tunes only once and remember it after many years.

AS IF HE JUST COMPOSED IT...

The ancient idea of ​​inspiration as divine inspiration is nowhere more confirmed than in the stories of Mozart's childhood. He is one of only a few artists for whom there was no preparation, who happen and it is impossible for anyone to explain them. As a five-year-old, Mozart lost his father's composition and, to avoid punishment, wrote a completely new one. At that age, he plays the piano and violin so well that he gives concerts, he has a "natural feeling" for musical harmony, he easily "hears" new melodies, but he is already "musically literate" enough to know and write it all down. At eight, seeing that his father was disappointed that the performance of a Mozart string quartet had to be postponed due to the musician's illness, he picked up the viola for the first time in his life and, of course, played flawlessly. In the Sistine Chapel, he hears a melody that the church keeps as a secret and writes it down from memory (which is transposed in the film into the famous scene with Salieri's Welcome March). By the age of twelve, he had already written at least one composition in each genre: symphonies, operas, concerts, masses - everything seemed to flow through him from somewhere.

I will admit to you right away that I did not believe these stories, thinking that they happened so long ago that the possibility of verifying their credibility is nil. But not only is Mendelssohn close to us and there are as many interviews with witnesses of Shostakovich's genius as you want, but there is also Mozart's legendary productivity. Imagine that you wrote 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 22 operas, countless works of chamber and church music, concertos for violin, horn, clarinet, trumpet, flute, flute and harp, oboe, bassoon... And all this takes place in poverty, between tours, teaching, fights with censors and a stormy private life, of which marriage and parenthood are only one part. And it all happened in only thirty-five years!? Or try to look at it comparatively: Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, Schumann and Brahms four each, Tchaikovsky six, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler ten each, Shostakovich fifteen; most of them did not write operas or chamber music at all; no one introduced so many innovations, "invented new genres", opened a musical form for something completely unsuspected in the Baroque (and only six years passed between Bach's death and Mozart's birth).

Although we know that this is not true, it seems as if Mozart never spent time with people, that he was writing all the time, as when, for example, in Prague, during the rehearsals of "Don Giovanni", he finished three symphonies during six summer weeks. This music ranges from the sublime, sacred (such as "Et incarnatus est" from the "Great Mass in C minor"), through deeply personal, almost romantic expression (for example in the slow movements of the piano concertos 20-23), to the enchantingly imaginative, playful, childlike in the most beautiful sense of the "Magic Flute", the dark and almost ominous "Don Giovanni" and countless unforgettable melodies that they do not require any deepening (as everyone knows about "A Little Night Music").

JOYFUL MUSIC (NE)FORGOTTEN GENIUS

Whatever the musical form in question, Mozart is recognizable by a kind of "freshness", by the beauty and attractiveness of all his themes. All transitions and developments work perfectly, without any "friction", you never feel strain, something new and special can be created from everything (like when the Three Ladies at the beginning of "The Magic Flute" sing only "Nein, nein!" for a while). Mozart's music always flows perfectly, just as if it were a product of nature. Another peculiarity of her is that she so often conveys mirth and joy, which is very rare, if not unique, in German culture. That's why Mozart, especially in the opera production, sounds like he's an Italian composer, especially in "Cosi fan tute", but Papageno also seems like he's Rossini's hero, and it's impossible to imagine him in Beethoven.

And if you have the impression that Mozart's music is simple, repetitive, undramatic (in the romantic sense), there is one probable reason and two possible solutions. On the one hand, one must not lose sight of the fact that a large part of his music was written for the entertainment of rich aristocrats and therefore, at first glance, seems superficial. More importantly, if you feel that way, try listening to his operas, where you will discover not only that inexhaustible imagination and liveliness, but also practically all the feelings or types of relationships and problems in them known to mankind: Papageno's loneliness, the hellish vindictiveness of the Queen of the Night, Tamino's falling in love at first sight, Leporelle's vicarious enjoyment of how his master uses and rejects women, Cerlina's doubts, Almaviva's moral and emotional decay... Some authors claim that Mozart "brought to life" the same number of characters as Shakespeare! And if you prefer that way, you can start from the very end, from the unfinished "Requiem" or some other sacred composition, where Mozart is neither difficult nor cheerful, but his music sounds sublime and exhilarating. When you go back to, say, the 29th symphony after this, it might sound different in that completely new context.

We must not lose sight of the fact that all these masterpieces were created, so to speak, despite the fact that Mozart is probably the first star in the history of music. Like an early Michael Jackson, his father takes him as a boy to Vienna, Munich and various other capitals of still-unified Germany, as well as Paris, England, Prague, Italy, shows his virtuosity, makes money from it and hopes for ever greater success and amounts of money. Because of this, Mozart is sometimes said to have been the first European - he has lived in different cultures since childhood, speaks Italian, French and English fluently, his Latin is at the level of a highly educated intellectual of that time, and he also speaks Dutch, Czech, Polish, and knows a few words of Turkish. He also writes the first operas that are not in Italian (which could be his biggest professional mistake).

Mozart's death seems to us to be premature both objectively and creatively. Although widows and orphans suffered greatly and lacked without him, in their age thirty-five was not tragically early. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that his life was cut short in the middle of a series of masterpieces. "Requiem" is unfinished, although he wrote it to the "last atom of strength", it was preceded by "Magic Flute", 27th piano concerto, clarinet concerto - all works that are still in repertoire all over the world. Who knows what other gifts we would have received if the organism had lasted a few more years or decades.

For us, Mozart is a symbol of creativity, it seems that his music will be popular and present forever. However, just a few months before his death, in 1791, he was practically forgotten in Vienna and could only perform as one of several musicians at an almost unimportant concert, and not even as the first. He was so poor that his widow could not pay for a burial place and a monument, so we don't even know where he was buried. Although his spirit had a hard time accepting it, for most of his life he was a servant or a teacher, and as a boy he was considered a miracle of nature and shown in some form of a softized circus. Of his six children, only two boys survived, both showed talent for music and languages, but one turned to administrative work and translation, and the other feared that his compositions would be compared to his father's. Both were introverts, bachelors, childless. So Mozart remains unique, incomparable, forever an unusual phenomenon in the history of music, like a being from another dimension that visited us briefly to bring harmony and beauty that we can always look up to, as nature already does, especially in May.

The author is a psychologist