Mozart

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

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I interpret Mozart as longing for a liveable life, while a friend Armin Groepler honours him as a human being.

On my birthday I made sure, even if alone, to do something special, something to remember. Once it happened to be a movie about Mozart. The film was in black and white. There was the first phase when as a miracle child the entire court in Paris turned out to see this genius play at a huge piano. When he later returned to Paris, but this time as a young man, no one remembered those early days and he left many places empty handed, even worse nothing in the pocket and deep in thought he felt shame towards his father, the world and most of all towards himself. It was an unforgettable moment in the film. As he walked back home in such sober mood, his look was downcast as if feeling the weight of the clouds hanging deep in the sky. The film was shot at that moment as if being him looking down on the wet cobble stones.

No one thought of him then and even that lasted until his death. He died out of neglect of the society in those days. Some commentator made the remark 250 years later, today, that the people then wanted to see composers in such a way, namely that they suffered. As if suffrage was a key to being recognized by an upper and snobbish society which stepped on feelings rather than letting them be expressed. Always a face was a mask and even Watteau came to the conclusion only children of the fields, of peasants and workers had still that amazing inner-outer unity as they would express all feelings through their faces. So Mozart confronted the same society Beethoven did as well but there was a difference of tutelage from first the father and then the concert master. Mozart was a rebel, Beethoven the revolutionary who did not bow to Napolean but together they complement one another in a way that Mozart lived only fully when not in Salzburg, the place about which Thomas Bernhard said leaves anyone with only two choices, namely to become either a business man or else commit suicide, nor when in Vienna, that city which strives on aristocratic pitched fevers when going to the ball while experiencing the craziness being the circular on which to travel through life. For Mozart wrote some of his best music in Italy where beside him a couple was shouting, an opera singer practicing her voice one floor higher and the fruit dealer praising his commodities under the window where he was writing. Mozart felt then close to vibrant life with no one shouting to shut up out of love for not thoughtful peace but cemetery like stillness.

To Mozart that latter stillness was frightening and so he began to revolutionize music like never before. Since then the established society has been experiencing keeping his music in reigns and while the musicians may after another concert be packing in their instruments, the sounds he created vibrate through the entire room, go out the door and fill the entire city. These sounds can be heard provided people are willing to listen to this calling of love for life. In that sense it is of interest what a friend Armin Groepler wrote out of his own perspective, one who knows songs and therefore the figures of speeches in Mozart’s music. That Armin links life to being born as a human being and equally dying as a human being is not much, but also not little if we take life as measure that can change the human being into something else, something out of tune and even worse producing horrible tunes in abstract spaces devoid of all signs of life. Mozart surely filled the voids and abstract spaces with a music enticing everyone into making a revolt in order to leave behind that sad life. Here then the words by my friend Armin Groepler living in Berlin and teaching there song.

“As participant in Mozart’s existence I am motivated to say a few words on his 250th birthday because I want to thank him. Not that I had considered him to be in my youthful days as my ‘favourite composer’ – Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert and Brahms were much closer -, because I could earn a living for myself and my family thanks to him. And that counts (by the way also for Franz Schubert)!

When learning to play the piano I never got to know Mozart and the songs that my mother sang to me: „Come, dear May and make again the trees green…!” or „Sleep my little prince, sleep.“, I did not know to attribute them to Mozart.

Only my study of song, in which I was delegated to the course bass baritone, brought me closer to the composer and as a matter of fact at first with difficulties, for as mentioned already, my intentions in substance tended towards the tragic and the Romantic all the way to the self destructiveness and such a type of papageno seem to me to be more like a comical figure and teasing mood of the composer. The deeper significance of these figures of the stage, in particular the Mozart music that I realised only much later.

Good! Beethoven clings also onto life and never gives up, even screams sometimes out aloud. But Mozart accepted life in all its shades. Even in his opera „The marriage of Figaro“ there is missing the Prometheus impetus. But before I venture here into psychologisms, I dare straight forward to make one claim:

Mozart is the sum of all his opera figures. He is the „Man“ in „Cosi fan tutte“ as well, like the Bassa Selim in the „Kidnapping from Serrail“, the „Don Giovanni“, as the Papageno, indeed, even the Sarastro in „magic flute“ that is he. He was born and died and had experienced between birth and death all the happiness and all the suffrage and to express all that in a musical way, because he was a musician, to whom music is equal to language! The myth of godly resurrection he did not need, in order to last, for he was born as a human being and he died as a human being. And that one hears still today out of all his works all the way to the„Requiem“!”

Armin Gröpler, 27.1.2006 (translated by Hatto Fischer)