Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the
Halls of Musical Culture
By Mark EveristThursday 26 September 2013
Book review: Mozart's Ghosts, by Mark Everist
The original published version of my Times Higher Education review of Mark Everist's Mozart's Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture may be found by clicking here. The text is reproduced below.
At the heart of Mark
Everist’s new book lies the not unreasonable claim that our “modern reverence”
for Mozart’s music is founded upon its earlier reception, that reception being
a more complicated matter than an artist composing and the audience or critic straightforwardly
receiving. As Everist notes, it is far easier to track stagings of Mozart’s
operas at major European houses than it is performances of even his large-scale
instrumental music, especially before the mid-twentieth century. Publishing
records, however, including arrangements, are more amenable to study, likewise
literary and other dramatic treatments.
Footnotes and bibliography render
abundantly clear the thoroughness of Everist’s research. His field may verge
upon the infinite, and coverage cannot but be selective, but the cases
presented are tellingly indicative of more than themselves. We look at the
treatment of Mozart in Gaston Leroux’s novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra and in silent film treatments thereof.
Gounod’s Faust remains the central “opera”
of the Opéra, yet Mozart’s phantom persists, not least in the guise of
references to his Requiem, celebrated as an unfinished, final work – always a
draw to a Romantically-, indeed sensationally-inclined audience. We consider
Offenbach’s fascinating adaptation of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor as L’Impresario
to legitimise his theatre as a place of serious musical endeavour. Nineteenth-century
keyboard arrangements of Don Giovanni,
severely criticised both at the time and thereafter, both by familiar figures
and composers none of us is likely ever to have heard of, transform Mozart into
a purveyor, or at least a facilitator, of popular dance tunes. (He wrote a
considerable amount of “real” dance music for Vienna, an exquisite Cinderella
of his output that, since the death of Willi Boskovsky, awaits the return of
Prince Charming. That, however, is another story.) Everist is, in proper
post-modernist style, scrupulous not to judge; I could not help wishing for
some æsthetic judgement to be brought to pass upon the striking observation that,
in this genre of dance music, “almost any melody of Mozart could be reworked in
almost any meter, style, or dance genre”. At what point does Mozart himself
fall silent, or at least find himself more or less drowned out, or am I merely
succumbing to antediluvian prejudices concerning the “musical work”?
Perhaps the strangest case is
that of Mozart’s so-called ‘Twelfth Mass’, published posthumously in 1819 by
Vincent Novello, and very shortly after considered spurious in German-speaking
lands, always the core of Mozart reception. The Anglophone world, however,
treated this work very differently. Not only did performance persist; the piece
“took on a significance for Mozart reception out of all proportion to the
position it ought [a rare judgement, almost malgré
lui] to have held.” Republication continued, for instance by Novello in
1850, in a set of “Three Favourite Masses”, alongside undoubtedly authentic
works by Haydn and Beethoven,. ‘The triumphant strains of the Twelfth Mass
rolled forth’ (neither my words, nor Everist’s, but the author’s) in Jack
London’s 1910 novel, Burning Daylight.
It even, designed to designate middlebrow musical taste, has an epiphany in Ulysses: “the Gloria in that [mass] being to his [Bloom’s] mind the acme of
first-class music as such, literally knocking everything into a cocked hat”.
That is perhaps not so difficult when competition is comprised of confused
recollections of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Saverio Mercadante, yet that is part of
the point; Joyce’s ambiguity almost has one believe he knew the game was up,
though, barring the emergence of new evidence, it seems unlikely. In addition
to offering a partial history of a swindle and some explanations as to why so
many were taken in by a work probably composed by one Wenzel Müller some years
after Mozart’s death, Everist informs us that the mass – much, I admit, to my
surprise – continues to be performed. Perhaps most bizarre in a truly bizarre
tale is the use of its “Gloria” to celebrate the opening of a new airport
terminal in Guernsey in 2004, though Chester-Novello’s continued provision of
parts for hire, with nary a word concerning provenance, should elicit
eyebrow-raising en masse.
There is much, much more in
this fascinating tale of musical spectres. That Everist’s aversion to Mozartian
hagiography – “the Mozart effect” – is very much of our time offers no reason
to cavil; instead it provokes us to questioning that he should and, I suspect,
would applaud.