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February 7, 2006
Previews LISTENING AHEAD
A Guide to the
CHAMBER MUSIC
Powers of Two
CHORAL MUSIC
Ave Maria
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
Blowing in the Winds
MUSIC NEWS
Janos Gereben is on vacation. His column returns next week.
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Mickey Butts, Executive Director/Publisher
Conductor John Eliot Gardiner kicked off the Bay Area's 2006 Mozart blitz on January 15–16 with a spirited performance of Mozart's last three symphonies and the Requiem and C minor Mass. Almost two weeks later, the rest of the world blew out Mozart's 250 birthday candles and launched a year of wall-to-wall Mozart. On cue, gushing praise streamed from the house organs of taste. By now, we all know that we should expect to be buried under a nonstop blizzard of symphonies, concertos, operas, masses, arias, chamber pieces, sonatas, and dozens of other musical forms Mozart dabbled in. "We shall hear the good and the bad, the long and the short, the loud and the quiet, the famous and the obscure," wrote critic Bernard Holland in The New York Times. "It will take all of 2007 to dig our way out." In Austria, tourism officials have been gearing up for this Mozart fest since 2004, spending 100 million euros ($120 million) to promote the anniversary globally. Shops throughout Austria are selling "Wolfie" T-shirts; hats, umbrellas, and ashtrays sporting grinning likenesses of the composer; Mozart sausages shaped like violins; Mozart wine; and "Mozart slices — waffles filled with nougat and marzipan, which are expected to sell 2.5 million times this year alone," Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports. Advertising experts calculate the potential market value of the "Mozart brand" this year at $4.5 billion. The sad thing is, we've heard this story before. Back in 1991, on the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death, Lincoln Center in New York performed a "megamarathon" of all 800 works in the Mozart repertory. "Poor Mozart," SFCV's Robert Commanday lamented in the San Francisco Chronicle. What's unusual this year is the marked increase in the level of resistance to the worldwide ritual of Mozart devotion. The Austrian province of Styria declared itself a Mozart-free zone. The BBC refused to mark the occasion with a marathon of every work ever recorded (which took 10 days in the case of Bach). Officials reportedly feared a "too chocolate-boxy effect." And singer Ian Bostridge declared Mozart's tenor roles "boring" in England's Guardian newspaper. But the ultimate font of Mozart backlash, in terms of both medium and message, belongs to the Internet. Life online is nasty, brutish, and short. The flow of news, opinion, fact, fiction, philosophizing, navel-gazing, ranting, and raving is never-ending. Too often the Internet is a subtlety-free zone. The more controversial and salacious the statement, the better. That's why Norman Lebrecht's well circulated anti-Mozart blast last month on Canada's La Scène Musicale Web site doesn't particularly surprise. I'll quote at length to give a flavor for the style of argumentation: "Mozart is the superstore wallpaper of classical music, the composer who pleases most and offends least. … Unlike Bach and Handel who inherited a dying legacy and vitalized it beyond recognition, unlike Haydn who invented the sonata form without which music would never have acquired its classical dimension, Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. … Where 10 days of Bach on a classical music radio station will flush out the ears and open minds to limitless vistas, the coming year of Mozart feels like a term at Guantánamo Bay without the sunshine. There will be no refuge from neatly resolved chords, no escaping that ingratiating musical grin. … Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing for mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters." Lebrecht, the English author of The Maestro Myth and Who Killed Classical Music?, has never shied away from classical-music controversy. He may or may not have a point, depending on your musical tastes. But his argument is buried under an onslaught of invective. It's one of those practiced, antagonistic stances that practically begs, "You wanna fight?" It's like tossing chum to the sharks. The blogs lit up with predictable outrage and counterinvective. Marginal Revolution, a blog run by two economics professors at George Mason University, called on other bloggers to rise up: "Devote at least one post next week to Mozart; surely he has played some role in your life," they commanded. Dozens of Marginal Revolution readers thrashed over Lebrecht's article on the site's comments section. Elsewhere across the blogosphere, on sites with names like Deceptively Simple and Samizdata, the controversy raged. On his blog, composer Marcus Maroney launched into a diatribe against Lebrecht: "I'm no huge Mozart fan, usually preferring Haydn for my Classical-era satiation, but this is just so chock-full of misinformation," he wrote. "Lebrecht is frustrating because he takes on this provocative tone which draws people with little to no classical knowledge to his writings, and they take what he professes at face value. What's even more frustrating is that those readers, who probably only know classical music as 'Mozart,' are now reading this and feel comfortable to dismiss the entire genre." But the anti-Mozart attacks only intensified. On Wolfie's birthday, New Yorker critic Alex Ross chimed in on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, with a begrudging "Happy Birthday": "Today, a young man with Mozart's abilities would very likely labor in obscurity, and perhaps give up in frustration. As I once wrote, if Mozart were alive today, he'd be dead. If you really want to celebrate Mozart's world, Mozart's culture, Mozart's life, you would ignore the man himself and listen to music by a living composer. … Celebrate Mozart another time, when he's not being rammed down your throat." And David Hurwitz wrote on the Web site (not technically a blog) Classics Today: "There is a dirty secret underlying all the hype: Mozart wrote more junk than any other composer of his stature. … In truth, there’s absolutely nothing to celebrate. Mozart can’t possibly be more revered, more highly regarded, or more frequently programmed than he already is without the result looking tired and fetishistic, a quasi-religious ritual practiced by rote but devoid of significance or meaning." All this Sturm und Drang over poor Mozart has a larger significance, beyond what it says about the playground quality of online debate. This virtual fistfight highlights our current conception of "taste" and the underexamined history of critical reception. It's hard to respond to Lebrecht's diatribe, on a certain level, because to do so quickly goes the way of circular reasoning and subjective definitions of quality. Lebrecht dislikes Mozart. A thousand people cry, "You're wrong! Mozart is the Great Master!" Lebrecht, now made infamous, says, "No, you're wrong. Mozart is bubblegum for the brain." More people pile on. This goes on ad nauseum until both sides grow exhausted and start arguing about something else. In the absence of any objective criteria for defining what's "good," the argument is basically unsolvable. So it would be quite simple to dismiss things by saying, "It's all a matter of taste." Everyone's right, everyone's taste is equally valid, so let's just separate the two fighters and move on to another round. The problem with this response is that its relativism negates more complex thought about the purpose of music, and what makes certain music art and not others. It reduces discussions of art music to the level of entertainment — we debate our preferences for Mozart over Bach in the same way we argue over which flavor of ice cream or which TV show is better. Julian Johnson attempts to unravel this philosophical tangle in his insightful 2002 book Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value. "History makes it clear that there is nothing natural or essential about the ways we experience music today and the ways we account for that experience," he writes. "Our fiercely emotive defense of our individual response to music (and our claim that this constitutes the sole criterion of its quality and significance) is not only of relatively recent historical origin but, from an anthropological perspective, is actually rather peculiar." Johnson argues that music is as much a socially constructed and communal exercise as it is an individualistic and subjective experience. But the intensely personal nature of our response to music has held sway ever since the Enlightenment (in other words, Mozart's time), and only intensified during the era when Romanticism reigned. Johnson asks if there is even such a thing as "stupid" music. Most of us would argue that there is, but our answers — and they could range from Muzak to rap to bubblegum pop to Mozart to anything, really — say more about our backgrounds and assumptions than about the music itself. And that's part of the problem. In all this tit-for-tat debate over the supremacy of musical taste, we are not talking enough about the music itself, about what makes certain music great, and who decides. Our interpretation and appetite for Mozart's music is as much bound up with intellectual fashions as it is with objective quality. And those interpretations have shifted continuously over time. That some people at this point in history loudly criticize Mozart's music is nothing new, as Gernot Gruber explains in Mozart and Posterity, his era-by-era history of the reception of Mozart among tastemakers and audiences. Mozart wasn't particularly popular at his death, but over the following years, the cult of his popularity was carefully cultivated by his wife, Constanze, as well as by other composers and musicians, to a more or less self-interested degree. Gruber notes that back in 1906, at the 150th anniversary of Mozart's birth, another great wave of Mozart hysteria gripped the classical music world. And once again, a minority of naysayers decried the "rising wave of hero-worship," most notably in Mozart Hypocrisy by Paul Zschorlich. "Fury, threatening anonymous letters, and popularity were the (foreseeable) results," Gruber writes. The 1980s saw waves of controversy over the accuracy (and huge popularity) of the movie Amadeus. The anniversary year 1991 produced debate about programmatic overload, and two years later the so-called Mozart Effect on health and intelligence. Now we have our own little spats. They're hardly new, but they do raise some interesting questions. Why, in any era, are we prone to such excesses of both celebration and resistance? Do these fresh controversies signal the beginning of tectonic shifts in popular taste? Or is this latest argument simply a byproduct of the freewheeling culture of the bloggers, today's soapbox orators on every digital corner? The answers will only be clear in hindsight — perhaps looking back from the next Mozart anniversary. Mickey Butts is executive director and publisher of San Francisco Classical Voice. His writing has appeared in Salon, Food & Wine, The Industry Standard, Wired, Parenting, The Nation, and The San Francisco Chronicle. ©2006 Mickey Butts, all rights reserved SFCV is a not-for-profit enterprise supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. If you enjoy what you find here and want to see our work continue, please consider making a contribution. By virtue of a generous matching grant, it will be doubled. Your contribution (tax-deductible) may be made by credit card
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From September 1, 1998 to September 13, 2005, SFCV has published, in addition to the Music News, feature pieces, and weekly editorials, 2,182 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 52 symphony orchestras (459 reviews), 89 chamber groups (267), 36 new-music ensembles and programs (234), 39 opera companies (306), 29 choral groups (133), 15 music festivals (101), 33 early-music ensembles (170), 24 chamber orchestras (88), 6 musical theater groups (14), as well as numerous world music groups (14), recital presenters (374), youth music ensembles (10), and other organizations (12).
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