Mozart, His “Don Giovanni” and the Requiem
It may well be doubted whether Vienna thought even so much of Capellmeister Mozart as Leipzig thought of Capellmeister Bach. Bach, it is true, was merely Capellmeister; he hardly dared to claim social equality with the citizens who tanned hides or slaughtered pigs; and probably the high personages who trimmed the local Serene Highness’s toe-nails scarcely knew of his existence. Still, he was a burgher, even as the killers of pigs and the tanners of hides; he was thoroughly respectable, and probably paid his taxes as they came due; if only by necessity of his office, he went to church with regularity; and on the whole we may suppose that he got enough of respect to make life tolerable. But Mozart was only one of a crowd who provided amusement for a gay population; and a gay population, always a heartless master, holds none in such contempt as the servants who provide it with amusement. So Mozart got no respect from those he served, and his Bohemianism lost him the respect of the eminently respectable. He lived in the eighteenth century equivalent of a “loose set”; he was miserably poor, and presumably never paid his taxes; we may doubt whether he often went to church; he composed for the theatre; and he lacked the self-assertion which enabled Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner to hold their own. Treated as of no account, cheated by those he worked for, hardly permitted to earn his bread, he found life wholly intolerable, and as he grew older he lived more and more within himself and gave his thoughts only to the composition of masterpieces. The crowd of mediocrities dimly felt him to be their master, and the greater the masterpieces he achieved the more vehemently did Salieri and his attendants protest that he was not a composer to compare with Salieri. The noise impressed Da Ponte, the libretto-monger, and he asked Salieri to set his best libretto and gave Mozart only his second best; and thus by a curious irony stumbled into his immortality through sheer stupidity, for his second best libretto was “Don Giovanni”—of all possible subjects precisely that which a wise man would have given to Mozart. When Mozart laid down the pen after the memorable night’s work in which he transferred the finished overture from his brain to the paper, he had written the noblest Italian opera ever conceived; and the world knew it not, yet gradually came to know. But the full fame of “Don Giovanni” was comparatively brief, and at this time there seems to be a hazy notion that its splendours have waned before the blaze of Wagner, just as the symphonies are supposed to have faded in the brilliant light of Beethoven. At lectures on musical history it is reverently spoken of; but it is seldom sung, and the public declines to go to hear it; and, though few persons are so foolish as to admit their sad case, I suspect that more than a few agree with the sage critic who told us not long since that Mozart was a little passé now. Is it indeed so? Well, Mozart lived in the last days of the old world, and the old world and the thoughts and sentiments of the old world are certainly a little passés now. But if you examine “Don Giovanni” you must admit that the Fifth and Ninth symphonies, “Fidelio,” “Lohengrin,” the “Ring,” “Tristan,” and “Parsifal” have done nothing to eclipse its glories, that while fresh masterpieces have come forth, “Don Giovanni” remains a masterpiece amongst masterpieces, that in a sense it is a masterpiece towards which all other masterpieces stand in the relation of commentaries to text. And though this, perhaps, is only to call it a link in a chain, yet it is curious to note how very closely other composers have followed Mozart, and how greatly they are indebted to him. Page upon page of the early Beethoven is written in the phraseology of the later Mozart; in nearly every bar of “Faust,” not to mention “Romeo and Juliette,” avowedly the fruit of a long study of “Don Giovanni,” a faint echo of Mozart’s voice comes to us with the voice of Gounod; Anna’s cries, “Quel sangue, quella piaga, quel volto,” with the creeping chromatic chords of the wood-wind, have the very accent of Isolda’s ‘“Tis I, belov’d,” and the solemn phrase that follows, in Tristan’s death-scene. Apart from its influence on later composers, there is surely no more passionate, powerful, and moving drama in the world than “Don Giovanni.” Despite the triviality of Da Ponte’s book, the impetus of the music carries along the action at a tremendous speed; the moments of relief occur just when relief is necessary, and never retard the motion; the climaxes are piled up with incredible strength and mastery, and have an emotional effect as powerful as anything in “Fidelio” and equal to anything in Wagner’s music-dramas; and most stupendous of all is the finale, with its tragic blending of the grotesque and the terrible. Or, if one considers detail, in no other opera do the characters depict themselves in every phrase they utter as they do in “Don Giovanni.” The songs stamp Mozart as the greatest song-writer who has lived, with the exception of Handel, whose opera songs are immeasurably beyond all others save Mozart’s, and a little beyond them. The mere musicianship is as consummate as Bach’s, for, like Bach, Mozart possessed that facility which is fatal to many men, but combined with it a high sincerity, a greedy thirst for the beautiful, and an emotional force that prevented it being fatal to him. For delicacy, subtlety, due brilliancy, and strength, the orchestral colouring cannot be matched. And no music is more exclusively its own composer’s, has less in it of other composers’. Beethoven is Beethoven plus Mozart, Wagner is Wagner plus Weber and Beethoven; but from every page of Mozart’s scores Mozart alone looks at you, with sad laughter in his eyes, and unspeakable tenderness, the tenderness of the giants, of Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, though perhaps Mozart is tenderest of them all. He cannot write a comic scene for a poor clownish Masetto without caressing him with a divinely beautiful “Cheto, cheto, mi vo’ star,” and in presence of death or human distress the strangest, sweetest things fall from his lips. And finally, he is always the perfect artist without reproach; there is nothing wanting and nothing in excess; as he himself said on one occasion, his scores contain exactly the right number of notes. This is “Don Giovanni” as one may see it a century after its birth: a faultless masterpiece; yet (in England at least) it only gets an occasional performance, through the freak of a prima donna, who, as the sage critic said of Mozart, is undoubtedly “a little passée now.”
After all, this is hardly surprising. Perfect art wants perfect listeners, and just now we are much too eager for excitement, too impatient of mere beauty, to listen perfectly to perfect music. And there are other reasons why “Don Giovanni” should not appeal to this generation. For many years it was the sport of the prima donna, and conductors and singers conspired to load it with traditional Costamongery, until at last the “Don Giovanni” we knew became an entirely different thing from the “Don Giovanni” of Mozart’s thought. Not Giovanni but Zerlina was the principal figure; the climax of the drama was not the final Statue scene, but “Batti, batti”; Leporello’s part was exaggerated until the Statue scene became a pantomime affair with Leporello playing pantaloon against Giovanni’s clown. Such an opera could interest none but an Elephant and Castle audience, and probably only the beauty of the music prevented it reaching the Elephant and Castle long ago. So low had “Don Giovanni” fallen, when, quite recently, serious artists like Maurel tried to take it more seriously and restore it to its rightful place. Only, unfortunately, instead of brushing away traditions and going back to the vital conception of Mozart, they sought to modernise it, to convert it into an early Wagner music-drama. The result may be seen in any performance at Covent Garden. The thing becomes a hodge-podge, a mixture of drama, melodrama, the circus, the pantomime, with a strong flavouring of blatherskite. The opera is largely pantomime—it was intended by Mozart to be pantomime; and the only possible way of doing it effectively is to accept the pantomime frankly, but to play it with such force and sincerity that it is not felt to be pantomime. And the real finale should be sung afterwards. Probably many people would go off to catch their trains. But, after all, Mozart wrote for those who have no trains to catch when this masterpiece, the masterpiece of Italian opera, is sung as he intended it to be sung.
The Requiem is a very different work. There is plenty of the gaiety and sunshine of life in “Don Giovanni.” The Requiem is steeped in sadness and gloom, with rare moments of fiery exaltation, or hysterical despair; at times beauty has been almost—almost, but never quite—driven from Mozart’s thought by the anguish that tormented him as he wrote. While speaking of Bach’s “Matthew” Passion, I have said it “was an appeal, of a force and poignancy paralleled only in the Ninth symphony, to the emotional side of man’s nature... the æsthetic qualities are subordinated to the utterance of an overwhelming emotion.” Had I said “deliberately subordinated” I should have indicated the main difference as well as the main likeness between Bach’s masterwork and Mozart’s. The æsthetic qualities are subordinated to the expression of an overwhelming emotion in the Requiem, but not deliberately: unconsciously rather, perhaps even against Mozart’s will. Bach set out with the intention of using his art to communicate a certain feeling to his listeners; Mozart, when he accepted the order for a Requiem from that mysterious messenger clad in grey, thought only of creating a beautiful thing. But he had lately found, to his great sorrow, that his ways were not the world’s ways, and fraught with even graver consequences was the world’s discovery that its ways were not Mozart’s. Finding all attempts to turn him from his ways fruitless, the world fought him with contempt, ostracism, and starvation for weapons; and he lacked strength for the struggle. There had been a time when he could retire within himself and live in an ideal world of Don Giovannis and Figaros. But now body as well as spirit was over-wearied; spirit and body were not only tired but diseased; and when he commenced to work at the Requiem the time was past for making beautiful things, for his mind was preoccupied with death and the horror of death—the taste of death was already in his mouth. Had death come to him as to other men, he might have met it as other men do, heroically, or at least calmly, without loss of dignity. But it came to him coloured and made fearful by wild imaginings, and was less a thought than an unthinkable horror. He believed he had been poisoned, and Count Walsegg’s grey-clad messenger seemed a messenger sent from another world to warn him of the approaching finish. As he said, he wrote the Requiem for himself. In it we find none of the sunshine and laughter of “Don Giovanni,” but only a painfully pathetic record of Mozart’s misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but the absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a “human document,” an autobiographical fragment, the most touching autobiography ever penned.
The pervading note of the whole work is struck at the beginning of the first number. Had Mozart seen death as Handel and Bach saw it, as the only beautiful completion of life, or even as the last opportunity given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like the final chorus of the “Matthew” Passion, or given us something equal or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the “Requiem æternam” we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart’s pain was may be estimated by the vigour of the reaction when the reaction comes; for though the “Te decet hymnus” is like a gleam of sweet sunshine on black waters, the melody is immediately snatched up, as it were, and, by the furious energy of the accompaniment, powerful harmonic progressions, and movement of the inner parts (note the tenor ascending to the high G on “orationem”), made expressive of abnormal glowing ecstasy. To know Mozart’s mood when he wrote the Requiem is to have the key to the “Kyrie.” His artistic sense compelled him to veil the acuteness of his agony in the strict form of a regular fugue; but here, as everywhere else in the Requiem, feeling triumphs over the artistic sense; and by a chromatic change, of which none but a Mozart or a Bach would have dreamed, the inexpressive formality of the counter-subject is altered into a passionate appeal for mercy. In no other work of Mozart known to me does he ever become hysterical, and in the Requiem only once, towards the end of this number, where the sopranos are whirled up to the high A, and tenors and altos strengthen the rhythm; and even here the pause, followed by that scholastic cadence, affords a sense of recovered balance, though we should observe that the raucous final chord with the third omitted is in keeping with the colour of the whole number, and not dragged in as a mere display of pedantic knowledge. The “Dies Iræ” is magnificent music, but the effect is enormously intensified by Mozart first (in the “Kyrie”) making us guess at the picture by the agitation of mind into which it throws him, and then suddenly opening the curtain and letting us view for ourselves the lurid splendours; and surely no more awful picture of the Judgment was ever painted than we have here in the “Dies Iræ,” “Tuba minim,” “Rex tremendæ,” and the “Confutatis.” The method of showing the obverse of the medal first, and then astonishing us with the sudden magnificence of the other side, is an old one, and was an old one even in Mozart’s time, but he uses it with supreme mastery, and results that have never been equalled. The most astonishing part of the “Confutatis” is the prayer at the finish, where strange cadence upon cadence falls on the ear like a long-drawn sigh, and the last, longer drawn than the rest, “gere curam mei finis,” followed by a hushed pause, is indeed awful as the silence of the finish. Quite as great is the effect of the same kind in the “Agnus Dei,” which was either written by Mozart, or by Sussmayer with Mozart’s spirit looking over him. Written by Mozart, the Requiem necessarily abounds in tender touches: the trebles at “Dona eis” immediately after their first entry; the altos at the same words towards the end of the number, and at the twenty-eighth bar of the “Kyrie”; the first part of the “Hostias,” the “Agnus Dei,” the wonderful “Ne me perdas” in the “Recordare.” And if one wants sheer strength and majesty, turn to the fugue on “Quam olim Abrahæ,” or the C natural of the basses in the “Sanctus.” But the prevailing mood is one of depressing sadness, which would become intolerable by reason of its monotony were it possible to listen to the Requiem as a work of art merely, and not as the tearful confessions of one of the most beautiful spirits ever born into the world.