Mozart: The Early Years by Stanley Sadie (Oxford University Press £25, pp672)
Mozart and his Operas by David Cairns (Allen Lane £22, pp304)
Anniversaries generate their own momentum. The 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth has prompted, among other responses, the online publication of his diary and two excellent biographies, both by musicologists who have made Mozart a lifetime's study. Neither has any time for the gibbering, foul-mouthed idiot savant that Peter Shaffer made of Mozart in Amadeus. They are agreed that, although music came to Mozart as a gift of nature to the most peculiar extent, he was an educated man, the beneficiary cum victim of a father determined to see him make the absolute most of his talents. Both books are written out of passionate engagement with their subject and both do a good job of making Mozart's life interesting, despite the fact that it consisted almost entirely of travelling, performing and composing.
The longer of the two books, Mozart: The Early Years, represents both a triumph and a tragedy. Stanley Sadie was the editor of the extraordinary New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a man of encyclopedic knowledge. His projected magnum opus was a complete revision of the life of Mozart, taking full account of new research, both musical and historical. That it has ended up as a meticulous study of its subject's first 25 years is due to its author's untimely death and the quality of the first volume makes the absence of the second something to be profoundly regretted.
Mozart's life is very well documented, because he was a member of a close family who spent much of their time apart and therefore wrote large numbers of highly informative letters. This material has been so much studied that it is impossible to say anything very new. However, one area where the book really scores is that Sadie's detailed knowledge of all Mozart's music allows him to make a variety of suggestions about the finer points of ascription - to judge, for example, which of the seven symphonies at one time or another credited to the nine-year-old Mozart in London are legitimately his (three). He also allows the musical record to illuminate the historical record in subtle ways: 'Their first overnight stop was Lodi, not mentioned in the Mozarts' letters or travel notes, but recorded on the manuscript as the place of composition, on 15 March, of a string quartet, Mozart's first.'
He is enlightening on tricky questions, such as whether Mozart's string quartets K168-73 are indebted to Haydn. This has been argued on the internal evidence of Mozart's treatment of his themes, but Sadie, with all the facts to hand, is able to show the unlikelihood of Mozart having had access to the works in question.
Sadie is also very good at contextualising Mozart's achievement: the work he was measuring himself against; the formal demands that were made upon him. Salzburg was intensely musical; a kapellmeister of a couple of generations back, Biber, had been a composer of extravagant invention whose work is still played. It was taken for granted in 18th-century Salzburg that public events would not only be marked by music, but by new work composed for the occasion. The archbishop supported a musical establishment of 99.
Mozart's ancestry was mostly respectable artisans: in effect, he was little more than a craftsman himself. The idea that there is something special about creative artists was not part of the culture he inhabited. He composed on demand, a mass one week, a sonata the next; he tailored his work round the resources available and the specific voices of the singers he expected to use. Indeed, singers might insist on his rewriting arias on order to show off their best notes.
Sadie even allows one to feel a certain sympathy for the Archbishop of Salzburg, so often the villain of the story. He makes it clear that, at a time when Colloredo was, for perfectly good reasons, trying to prioritise preaching and de-emphasise church music, he was faced with an extremely arrogant minor employee making impossible demands in the name of 'my son the genius'. The fact that Leopold Mozart was quite correct in this assessment does not prevent the situation from being extremely difficult on both sides.
Mozartians will respond to this book with the awe it rightfully deserves. A reader whose knowledge of is more superficial will, if he or she so desires, find that Sadie is the gentlest of authoritative guides into the unfolding of Mozart's genius, though the ideal response to this book would be to rush out and buy 50 CDs and to read and listen simultaneously. This is less a biography than an account of Mozart's life in music. It assumes that the basic facts of its hero's life are already known in a fair degree of detail and it therefore leaves some surprising issues unexamined and even unmentioned.
Presumably in the interest of reclaiming Mozart as artist and craftsman, together with a scrupulous determination not to go beyond the limits of the knowable, Sadie gives almost no impression of Mozart the man. Crucially, he says absolutely nothing about his subject's sexual life except that he fell in love at 22 with a charming singer, his future wife's sister (the book ends before Mozart's marriage). Later on, writing to his father to explain his desire to marry Constanze, Mozart hints that he was a passionate man, but Sadie does not even raise the question of whether he was in a position to visit prostitutes. What did they cost? Were there reasonably salubrious women available? Was Mozart's religion sufficient to keep him from temptation? Or did he probably go virgin to his marriage bed? Given the amount we are otherwise told about the minutiae of life at German courts, this is a very curious omission.
However, Sadie makes complete sense of the side of Mozart that Peter Shaffer so emphasised. He points out that not only were Mozart's parents given to heavy-handed jokes about shitting, but so was their entire society. Mozart's robust clowning is not pathological or aberrant, but is an indication of the considerable distance between his world and ours.
Overall, it is not unfair to say that this book will be best appreciated by readers who are deeply familiar with Mozart's oeuvre. It is not that Sadie writes inaccessibly; it is merely that the lavishly detailed discussion of individual works will not inevitably hold the interest of a reader who cares about Mozart's music only up to a point. A reader with a less specialist interest will be better served by David Cairns, whose book, Mozart and his Operas, makes a strong case for opera as the form closest to Mozart's heart. This book has the great advantage of portraying Mozart's entire life and career, whereas Sadie ends when Mozart was 25, when most of his best-loved work was still to be written. Cairns writes lucidly and with affection and engages far more than does Sadie with Mozart as a person and with his expression of personality through his music. But in their separate ways, these are both splendid books.
