Mozart and classicism — René Schiffer

When you were to google classicism and you go to Wikipedia’s article with that name, this picture is what pops up first: Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii. In Holland that’s pronounced hor-UH-tsee-ee, when saying it in English I encounter more than anywhere else the awkwardness of the English language to say anything in foreign tongues except Chinese, but that’s beside the point (lingerie is more attractive to me because of its deliciously wrong American pronunciation than for what it is, but that is also beside the point[1]). Here’s the point: this picture has nothing, but then absolutely nothing in common with Mozart’s music. So why do we call Mozart classicism?

Jaques-Louis David, the Oath of the Horatii, 1784, Louvre, Paris — Jaques-Louis David, *the Oath of the Horatii,* 1784, *Louvre*, Paris

Here’s why, from what I gather: the Rococo is a very unpretentious style, it’s all about gentleman’s pleasure, and since Mozart’s music belongs to the absolute top in music history, exemplary in inner depth and form perfection, partly a result of incorporating Bach’s polyphony; and since the style called classicism originated in exactly the same time that Mozart started to write his mature works, and Mozart’s great Successor in his middle and late period more than matches David’s paintings in what’s being expressed and how … ergo, Mozart is classicism. I find a similar erroneous but suggestive assessment about late Beethoven being “romantic” or Monteverdi being “baroque” or conservatives being “uncaring”. These categorizations, especially the one about Monteverdi, may have good musicological (= scientific) foundations, but they do not feel right at all (correction: the one about conservatives may feel right to some but has no musicological foundation). Beethoven, especially in his last period, constitutes the reign of logic, which is the opposite of romantic, where reason is overridden, “overwhelmed as it were, by a strong, sometimes sinister emotion. I find that literally nowhere in Beethoven’s work: the rational Beethoven is always in control. Don’t think that strong emotions - unleashed by the French Revolution, or that of which the French revolution was a result [2]- are automatically romantic: reason takes or should take emotions into account [3], classicism just demands reason to be in control.

David’s Oath breathes a Beethovenian spirit. It is an enormous, literally shocking break with the old graciousness that reigned ever since the Renaissance and the Baroque, in which an actor was never allowed to stand straight, and every human in painting or sculpture should be depicted in some or other gracious curve. Every male in the Oath, not even speaking about the swords, shows the straight line of purpose. Even the stern Roman architecture in the background is a discontinuation from the music more elegant rococo curls and curves (Mozart didn’t like Greek/roman architecture, though that’s just a bonus). And the women? Overwhelmed, devastated, destroyed by grief, again, gone all the grace and elegance. Nothing in this painting shows Mozart’s ever elegant music, where emotional understatement gives its heartrending beauty, like in the Figaro, where the countess cries out her loneliness in a riveting melodic D major. To the contrary, everything in this picture surpasses Angela Lansbury’s most overacted performances.

No, the Lady with the cat in Fragonard’s painting is much closer to Mozart, though I have decided that Fragonard’s texture is probably even closer to Haydn. Here are the round forms, the grace, the elegance, and unconcerned levity of a ‘homely’, in America we say homey, feel. The same grace, the same elegant ease of easy elegance we find in Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Mozart himself (he didn’t know it was Mozart, who had come to him in the disguise of an English boy, which accounts for the painter’s astonishment about the boy’s accent, claimed to be playfully adopted and consistently kept throughout the day - this we call creative historiography). The silken suit resembles Mozart’s gorgeous sound, unmatched, as far as I’m concerned, by any composer except maybe Brahms and oh yes, Debussy. Only the background reminds me of Schubert, there’s the Romantic, vague, suggestive clouds, tearing away. Compare that to Louis David’s self portrait, where all ornaments except his bow, part of his daily clothing, is gone, and only a preeminent look of purpose is left, the one thing always concealed in the Rococo. That’s why trills in the 18th century almost always begin with the upper note: the things are expressed by emphasizing the elements around the core; when David’s classicism, in which the essential is highlighted, broke through, musicians began their trills again with the main note. Look at the many curlicues Mozart still has in especially his earlier music, a sign of the Rococo. Even the Jupiter symphony from 1788, though rid of the more typical rococo embellishment like in the Theater Director overture and the beginning theme of the Linz symphony, bar 3 and 4, still expresses itself in terms of grace, not like Beethoven 5 where the elegance has made way for a granite display of purpose and essence. Late Mozart is actually well depicted in late 18th century art like Fragonard and especially this wonderful and very singular portrait of Mrs. Montresor by John Singleton Copley, unique - and to me: superior - in his repertoire; where the overly abundant appearance of ornaments of the “high Rococo” has made way for a simpler treatment of elegance. Again, the background feels romantic, but the detailed depiction of dress as well as the ease of the posture - no purpose, Mrs. Montresor just revels in her gracefulness, that’s enough - still very much belongs to the 18th century.

We can also look for signs in Beethoven’s development. From the very beginning, when he still sounds very much like Mozart (I call him Muscle Mozart) he never has the rococo embellishments, and the themes already have a bareness in it that you rarely find in Mozart: the very theme of the Eroica (maybe his last work rooted in the 18th century, and therefore extremely rich, the crossing of two habitats) is still filled with the lightness of the Rococo, but already down to the bare essentials, the triad, lingering on the main notes (there is no single ornament in the whole theme). The main theme of the C major piano concerto op. 15 are also just notes of the scale, and the rumble before m. 3 reminisces already of the muscular grace notes in his Emperor concerto, first bar of theme in orchestra, a 'whole nother’ way of using “ornaments” than in Mozart’s style. Op. 15 also stops every time, ideas posed, thoughts rather than gracious rhetorical melodics. In the Emperor, David’s classical style has of course fully arrived, with everything on the main notes - though infinitely richer and warmer, and that says something because David was no small boy.

Musicologists or more often limited to studying the external elements of a piece, its history, the composer’s biography, or identifiable music-technical components. I look at what the music tells me, very personal. My messages are very much not scientific, but that's needed too. The historians, the scholars need something to bounce off from, something that stirs their imagination, so they can find new patterns, new connections in a way much better than I will ever be able to do.

There is for instance the revolutionary aspect of the librettos Mozart chose. For instance, Figaro is a thoroughly classical story by Beaumarchais, where the first thing you see is someone who walks on stage and checks his wallet: purpose over style. It’s the story where two servants become the main characters in a serious tale, unheard until then. It is also feminist, in that it has the women carry out the plot, and the count who has to apologize to his wife at the end, not because he is dumb and we laugh about it, but because the women are morally right - very classicist features, showing a new era where every human being counts. But that’s just the story. Mozart sets this story to the most wonderful music ever written, of which the style however is not classicist or classical, but still strongly embedded in the grace and elegance of the Rococo.

So what painter do I really link to Mozart? Jean Antoine Watteau. Though dead 30 years before Mozart was born (also died very young), therefore representing the Rococo at its beginning rather than at its end, his characters are the only ones I know in the 18th century that can form a match to Mozart’s emotional depth (his understated but unspeakably profound human stirrings I only find expressed elsewhere in Bach and Schubert), and which (Watteau’s) texture resembles the velvety beauty of Mozart’s instrumentation. Look at the secret loneliness and insecurity in the charming pose of the girl whose beauty is observed and judged by the man with whom she is in a relationship that may not be the best for her inner health.

Jean Antoine Watteau, Fêtes Vénitiennes 1718-19, Edinburgh Museum — Jean Antoine Watteau, *Fêtes Vénitiennes 1718-19, Edinburgh Museum*

Footnotes

[1] my favorite is orangutan with its inappropriate Latinized emphasis - but I shouldn’t be too hard on Americans, who pronounce Bartók way closer to the Hungarian than we Dutch who think we know better…

[2] Today we may expect another French Revolution where perhaps thousands of people may well become destitute for just being white males - and if that’s too extreme, then at least great works of art and music like the Magic Flute and the St. Matthew Passion may well be censored, changed into nonsense, or simply forbidden. - l’histoire se répète.

[3] which is why reason and emotion cannot be opposites, like shoe laces are not the opposites of penmanship: reason takes or should take emotions into account, emotions never take anything into account but themselves.