It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future

by Saul Bellow

  Now, “modern” is a curious term: it can be used to degrade as well as (or more often than) to elevate. It can mean decadent, degenerate, nihilistic, abysmal, at one end—or it can signify a capacity to overcome contemporary disorder, or to adumbrate a stage in the formation of a new superiority, or to begin to distill a new essence. It can mean that the best of contemporary minds show qualities of power, subtlety, scope, and resourcefulness, of infinite plasticity, adaptability, of the courage to cope with all that world history has dumped on the generations of this present age. “The human mind,” E. M. Forster observed, “is not a dignified organ.” And he called upon us to “exercise it sincerely.”

  In Mozart’s case, “sincerity” is a marginal consideration, since he was not obliged to seek the truth in German, French, Italian, or English. His objective was not sincerity; it was bliss. But as we will all understand immediately, the view that the mind is not a dignified organ is modern. It is exactly what we expect. It is this casualness, irony, levity, that we seem in our time to take for granted. The starchiness of nineteenth-century ideals, the pompousness of twentieth-century dictators, are rejected and mocked as dangerous and false. Reading about Mozart’s personal life, we recognize that he was informal, to say the least, sans façon. He struck no attitudes—the very idea of “genius” was alien to him. From his letters we see that as an observer he was singularly modern. Let me give a few examples of this. Here is his description of the Archduke Maximilian, a brother of the emperor and the new Archbishop of Cologne:

  When God gives man a sacred office, He generally gives him understanding; and so it is, I trust, in the case of the Archduke. But before he became a priest, he was far more witty and intelligent and talked less, but more sensibly. You should see him now. Stupidity oozes out of his eyes. He talks and holds forth incessantly and always in falsetto—and he has started a goitre. In short, the fellow has changed completely. (1781—aetat. 35)

  And here is his description of a Dominican monk from Bologna:

  … regarded as a holy man. For my part I do not believe it, for at breakfast, he often takes a cup of chocolate and immediately afterwards a good glass of strong Spanish wine; and I have myself had the honor of lunching with this saint who at table drank a whole decanter and finished up with a full glass of strong wine, two large slices of melon, some peaches, pears, five cups of coffee, a whole plate of cloves, and two full saucers of milk and lemon. He may of course be following some sort of diet, but I do not think so, for it would be too much; moreover, he takes several little snacks during the afternoon. … (21 August 1770)

  Mozart has the novelist’s gift of characterizing by minute particulars. He is not respectful, neither is he severe—not even when he writes: “Stupidity oozes out of his eyes.” His manner of seeing comes directly from his nature, perhaps from a source close to the source of his music. The two styles, the verbal and the musical, have something in common. He often comments on the voices of the people he describes. The archbishop holds forth in falsetto. The poet Wieland, whom he meets in Mannheim in 1777, “has a rather childish voice” and a defect of speech “that makes him speak very slowly,” so that he “can’t say half a dozen words without stopping.” As for singers, he comments extensively on them: “A fine singer, a baritone, and forced when he sings falsetto, but not as much as Tibaldi in Vienna.” “Bradamante, in love with Ruggiero … is sung by a poor Baroness. … She appears under an assumed name … has a passable voice, and her stage presence would not be bad, but she sings off pitch like the devil.”

  He has a keen modern appetite for personal impressions, Einstein notes. About landscape—though he is a great traveler—he rarely writes. “About art he did not express himself at all.” Einstein adds a little further on that in Rome, “the most beautiful flowers did not interest him, for he was sitting at home covering paper with music.” From Rome, Mozart had written to his sister jokingly that beautiful flowers were being carried past in the street—“so Papa has just told me.”

  To be modern is to be mobile, forever en route, with few local attachments anywhere, cosmopolitan, not particularly disturbed to be an outsider in temporary quarters. On his journeys Mozart composed in his head. He was mobile by temperament. Nissen, one of his early biographers, records that Mozart’s sister-in-law remembered that in his last years “he looked at everyone with a piercing glance, giving balanced answers to everything, whether he was merry or sad, and yet he seemed at the same time to be lost in thought about something entirely different. Even when he washed his hands in the morning he walked up and down, never stood still, knocked one heel against the other and was always reflective. … He was always enthusiastic about new entertainments, riding and billiards, for example. … He was always moving his hands and feet, always playing with something, e.g., his hat, pockets, watch-chain, tables, chairs, as if they were pianos.…”

  What was permanent, evidently, he carried within. In 1788, he writes from Vienna: “We are sleeping tonight, for the first time, in our new quarters [in Währing], where we shall remain both summer and winter. On the whole the change is all the same to me, in fact I prefer it. … I shall have more time to work.”

  Einstein tells us that Mozart and his wife changed their residence in Vienna eleven times within a period of ten years, “sometimes after so little as three months. Their life was a perpetual tour, changing from one hotel room to another, and the hotel rooms were soon forgotten. … He was ready at any time to change Vienna for another city or Austria for another country.”

  Nor was art a “project” for him, as it was to be for others in the nineteenth century. Nor did the thought of being a genius fortify him. He shed superfluous externals, and he appears early in life to have made his reckonings as to what could be dispensed with. This was done with intuitive rapidity and sureness—the clear signs of a pure and faultless freedom. To a modern, the posturing of Romantic geniuses has become hateful. It smells of public relations and imagemaking. In this line we think of Wagnerian megalomania, histrionics, cultism, and politics. Mozart has none of these defects or designs. He does not care about politics. “Power,” in the classic modern sense, holds no appeal for him. Scheming is utterly alien to his character. And on the practical side he is utterly without foresight. His recent biographers agree that the management of his own affairs was disastrous. From these failures he withdrew into work. Among his Viennese contemporaries, says Peter Porter, summarizing the conclusions of Hildesheimer, he was judged to be unserious and improvident by nature. But this negligence or inability to foresee consequences (how could he fail to understand that Figaro would antagonize the Viennese aristocracy and that it would punish him by boycotting his concerts?) is something like the Roman flowers, the endless procession of carriages on tour, the landscapes he ignores, the many changes of residence. These transient experiences are a background or horizon. The Marriage of Figaro had to be written; the withdrawal of patronage consequently had to be endured. And so with other snubs, defeats, and disappointments. He fell in love with a woman who would not have him and made do with her sister. Of the lively interest he took in Constanze we know from the boisterous sexual candor of the letters he wrote her. Was he making the best of things, or are his fantasies about his genitalia and hers also on the transient horizon, a pleasant subject for correspondence—not after all the main thing?

  We today have a particular fondness for Mozart’s adolescent levity about sex (and what Porter speaks of as his “coprophilic fun and his … infantile sexuality”). But Mozart’s own contemporaries were habitually freer in this regard than we are. His mother, too, used plain language. The nineteenth century gave us an interregnum of puritanism. I have often thought that “repression” and “inhibition” as described by Freud refer to a temporary shift of “moral” emphasis. Students of English literature are familiar with this move from the open sensuality of Fielding and Laurence Sterne to Victorian prudery (“propriety”) in Dickens or Trollope. Rousseau’s Confessions or Diderot’s Les B
ijoux Indiscrets confirms this. What the twentieth century has is a “liberation,” with all the excesses and exaggeration the term connotes. It would be wrong to take Mozart as a herald of the “freedoms” we “conquered” at midcentury. He was not at all the pioneer “swinger” of Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus. Seventy years ago, my Russian immigrant uncles, aunts, and cousins were still speaking freely and colorfully about bodily functions and things sexual—“country matters,” as Shakespeare called them in Hamlet. (Such lewd double entendres are common in his plays. Specialists in Tudor and Stuart literature have collected them.) Bawdry has a long pedigree. Conversation in the courts of Elizabeth and James I was not what we came later to call “respectable.”

  Mozart’s lewdness in his letters to his “Bäsle”—a first cousin—might have been recorded, Mr. Porter says, for a textbook on infantile sexuality. But it is nothing like our modern street language, which is seldom funny and tends rather to become routine. The high-spirited obscenities of the eighteenth century disappear from the Romantic literature of the nineteenth—perhaps as a concession to the self-improving bourgeois reader with his peculiar ideas of gentility.

  Yet it is no use pretending that Mozart was not curiously erratic. There is plenty of evidence that he acted up, that he clowned, performed tricks, made gags. He had a liking for low company too. A certain Frau Pichler, who wrote historical novels, observes that both Mozart and Haydn never “demonstrated in their personal intercourse any unusual intellectual power at all, and scarcely any learning or higher culture. In society they displayed only a common temperament, insipid jests, and [in the case of Mozart] a thoughtless way of life; and yet what depths, what worlds of fantasy, harmony, melody …” etc., she writes.

  As this same lady once sat at the piano playing “Non più andrai” from Figaro, “Mozart, who happened to be present, came up behind me, and my playing must have pleased him, for he hummed the melody with me, and beat time on my shoulder; suddenly, however, he pulled up a chair, sat down, told me to keep playing the bass, and began to improvise variations so beautifully that everyone held his breath, listening to the music of the German Orpheus. But all at once he had had enough; he jumped up and, as he often did in his foolish moods, began to leap over table and chairs, miaowing like a cat and turning somersaults like an unruly boy.” Hildesheimer speaks of such outbursts as “physical necessities, automatic compensation for a transcendent mind … they are the results, as well as the reflection, of mental distraction.”

  To think about Mozart’s personality and the circumstances of his life is, to me, very pleasant—his boisterous humor is so very contemporary. Still, we can no more understand him than we can understand our contemporary selves. We come away from books like Hildesheimer’s study of Mozart confessing that the riddle of his character is beyond us. It stands concealed behind his music, and we will never get to the bottom of it. When we say he is modern I suppose we mean that we recognize the signature of Enlightenment, of reason and universalism, in his music—we recognize also the limitations of Enlightenment. We have learned from history that enlightenment, liberation, and doom may go together. For every avenue liberation opens, two are closed. Within Mozart’s cheerful daylight secularity there is always an otherworldly darkness. And the freedom he expresses is never without sadness, a deep submission to melancholy. We are endowed—so I interpret him—with comprehension, but what we are required to comprehend is too much for us.

  Hildesheimer is persuaded that both Mozart and Beethoven carried what he calls “a metaphysical aura.” Beethoven was aware of this, and he cultivated and exploited it. Mozart, not knowing that he had such an aura, “exaggerated his physical presence with continual diversionary tactics, which became routine.” He was clownishly demonic. He was a “stranger” who never understood the nature of his strangeness. Beethoven asserts his greatness. Mozart does not. He is not concerned with himself; rather he is intent on what he was born to do. In him there are few indications of ordinary amour propre or common vanity, and no signs whatever of grandezza.

  Now, all this talk of “metaphysical auras” can be irritating, I know. Still, when people who are clearly sensible insist on speaking of metaphysics and auras, we had better control our irritation prudently and ask ourselves why clear-minded, well-balanced people are obliged to forsake the positivist common sense on which we all rely. It is the music itself that drives them away from the rules of intellectual respectability. The music presses us to ask why it is so continually fertile, novel, ingenious, inexhaustible—why it is able to tell us so much more than other languages can tell us and why it is given so readily, easily, gratuitously. For it is not a product of effort. What it makes us see is that there are things which must be done easily. Easily or not at all—that is the truth about art. Concentration without effort is at the heart of the thing. Will and desire are silenced (as many mystics have understood), and work is transformed into play. And what we see in Mozart’s earthly record is the preservation of what matters amid distractions and harassments—shall we make a sketchy list of these: lodgings, taverns, salons, cold and stupid aristocrats, unpaid debts, petty tyrants like the Bishop of Salzburg and his flunkies, endless travels, irrelevant landscapes, bad music, disappointments in love. Even the burden of a natural superiority, which breeds rancor in others and must therefore be dissembled.

  Against this, there is the understanding that work should be transformed into play—perhaps as Wisdom puts it in the Book of Proverbs: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made. … I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before Him at all times; playing in the world. And my delights were to be with the children of men.” (Proverbs 8:22–3, 30–1)

  We can’t speak of Mozart without wondering “where it all comes from,” without touching on certain “eternal,” “mysterious” questions. Many have credibly argued that he is “modern” (“one of us”), and yet it is the essence of the “modern” to demystify. How is it that our “modern Mozart” should increase mystery? We are inclined to think of mystery as woolly or amorphous, yet Mozart, working in the light, openly, is all coherence. Although he does not use a cognitive language, we can, up to a point, understand him fully. His sounds and rhythms correspond to states of feeling that we have all somehow learned to interpret. This musical mode of speech is different from the semantic one that allows us to specify or denote. We feel moved to go beyond such speech, either in the direction of the pure exactness of mathematics or in the direction of the higher affects of sound or sight. The latter, the affects, are all the more powerful because they go beyond the definitions of speech, of intelligible discourse. This music of Mozart is the speech of affects. What can we call it but mysterious. In it we hear; through it is expressed our sense of the radical mystery of our being. This is what we hear in Così Fan Tutte or in the G-minor Quintet. In the latter more than a few writers have told us that they hear “the prayer of a lonely man,” “the Garden of Gethsemane”—“cutting pain,” says Abert. I prefer the term “radical mystery” to these religious interpretations. Radical mystery leaves Mozart freer to go into the problematic regions of existence in his Mozartean way. And all we can say about it is that it is “from beyond.”

  A few remarks now about the conditions of those of our contemporaries who listen to music. They—or, rather, we—can’t be taken for granted. They are not what they were in the eighteenth century. I have already referred to Mozart as modern and drawn the usual unflattering picture, distorted if you like, of man in the present age. A strange creature—cerebral but not too intelligent, he lives in a special realm of consciousness, but his consciousness is inadequate. Applied science and engineering have so transformed the external world that it affects him as something magical. We know of course that it isn’t magical; it is highly rational—a kind of rationality that might as well be magical. Self-respect demands that he (the p
ronoun includes us all) make gestures of rationality to signify that he is capable, at any rate, of keeping up. But you would agree—I think we are all ready to confess—that this “keeping up” is very tiring.

  Civilized man does not give himself a good press. I don’t say that he deserves to hold a good opinion of himself. Philosophy and literature have been particularly hard on him from the beginning of the modern age, and by now “Eurocentrism” has become a terrible reproach. We reproach ourselves even for the few decencies, bourgeois relics, with which we cover our shame. We hear from all sides that we are “inauthentic” and that we are, every one of us, impostors.

  All of this, I think, comes from us. It is we who set up and we who knock down. If we are impostors, we are also those who expose impostors. This “being human” is our very own show. All that mankind is said to be, pro and contra, comes from mankind itself. Everything that we can possibly conceive is made into fact, and it all comes out of bottomless reservoirs of our invention and fantasy. Everything has to be tried out. Funnily enough, the same mind that takes in “Dallas” or rap music is also accessible to Homer and Shakespeare.

  These are not merely diverting speculations. The awful truth is visible behind them. In this century, although briefly, slavery reappeared in Europe—in the wartime factories of Germany and in Siberian mines and forests. Only a few decades later, the finest kitchens and bathrooms in history were produced in the West, a wide-scale consumer culture such as the world had never seen.