Listen to This. Alex Ross

no one should be surprised; if, as people say, the Internet is a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of the most opulently geeky art forms in history. The more resourceful organizations are offering live and archived audio (you can hear almost every event in London’s summertime Proms series through the website of the BBC), setting up online listening guides (the San Francisco Symphony has hightech maps of the Eroica and The Rite of Spring), assembling fastidious archives (the Metropolitan Opera site can tell you in a matter of seconds when any singer made his or her debut), and peddling studio-master-quality audio downloads (the Tallis Scholars sell their impeccable recordings of Renaissance masses). Web-savvy young composers, meanwhile, no longer depend on publishers to reach their public, distributing their wares through blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever social network becomes fashionable after this book goes to press.

      The diffusion of classical music online is a boon for fans, and it may also ease the fears of the infamous “culturally aware non-attenders.” Novice concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, read synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, read performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings out on the tundra of the classical experience. First-time record-buyers can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the gaze of a grumpy record clerk. In the days before the collapse of the record business, when megastores like Tower Records were thriving, sepulchral soundproofed doors divided the classical department from the rest of humanity. For better or worse, classical music no longer inhabits a separate room; it is in the mix.

      At the same time, classical music stands partly outside the technological realm, because most of its repertory is designed to resonate naturally within a room. By contrast, almost all pop music is written for microphones and speakers. In a totally mediated society, where some form of electronic sound saturates nearly every minute of our waking lives, the act of sitting down in a concert hall, joining the expectant silence in the moments before the music begins, and surrendering to the elemental properties of sound can have an almost spiritual dimension. Classical supremacists of prior years might have described it as a rite of elevation, but for me it is something more primal and enigmatic. Forms coalesce and then vanish, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s phantom city of Kitezh.

      In 1926, twenty years after Sousa foretold doom, the critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt reflected on the mechanization of music and came to this eminently sane conclusion: “The machine is neither a god nor a devil.” Mark Katz uses that quotation as an epigraph to Capturing Sound, and it nicely sums up the whole shebang. Neither the utopian nor the apocalyptic vision of the musical future has come to pass. People have plenty of pirated music in their cupboards, but they are still turning out for live performances, paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to catch a glimpse of their idols. Music education is in tatters, but the impulse to make music with the voice, with an instrument, or on a computer remains. The critic David Hajdu, in an essay on the phenomenon of home remixing (creating new versions of songs on home computers), notes a curious throwback. “Members of the musical public are again assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales,” he writes. In other words, we are almost back to where we started.

      When I sift through my musical memory, I find that real and virtual events are inextricably jumbled. The strongest echoes are of live performances that shook me to the core: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of the incomparable choral conductor Robert Shaw, with more than four hundred singers roaring forth in the first- and second-tier boxes; the post-punk bands Fugazi and the Ex in a sweat-drenched church basement in Washington, D.C., firing up a mass of youthful bodies; Gidon Kremer and five other musicians in an Austrian village church at midnight, presenting an extraordinarily eerie chamber arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. Then again, certain recordings carry an acute emotional charge: I think of the Bernstein Eroica that I pretended to conduct as a child, the LPs of Mahler’s Sixth that I blasted in high school late at night, the Pere Ubu CD that forced me to abandon my cavalier dismissal of rock music. But I can’t replicate the psychic impact of those first encounters. They were unrepeatable events on a private stage. As the composer and theorist Benjamin Boretz has written, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.”

      Nothing in my listening life can compare to the experience of Hans Fantel, an author and critic who for many years covered audio matters for The New York Times. In 1989 he wrote about what it was like for him to listen to a CD reissue of a classic disc: a live recording, made on January 16, 1938, of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, under the direction of Bruno Walter. Fantel spent his childhood in Vienna, and he attended that performance with his father.

      “We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich,” Fantel wrote. “The music, captured that day by the bulky old microphones I remember strung across the stage, was the last to be heard from many of the musicians in the orchestra. They and their country vanished.” Fantel put on the record and relived the occasion. “I could now recognize and appreciate the singular aura of that performance: I could sense its uncanny intensity—a strange inner turmoil quite different from the many other recordings and performances of Mahler’s Ninth I had heard since.”

      Some of the turmoil was Fantel’s own. “This disc held fast an event I had shared with my father: seventy-one minutes out of the sixteen years we had together. Soon after, as an ‘enemy of Reich and Führer,’ my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss. That’s what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity … Something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.”

PART II

       4 THE STORM OF STYLE MOZART’S GOLDEN MEAN

      Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense blue-gray eyes. When he was in a convivial mood, his gaze was said to be warm, even seductive. But he often gave the impression of being not entirely present, as if his mind were caught up in some invisible event. Portraits suggest a man aware of his separation from the world. In one, he wears a hard, distant look; in another, his face glows with sadness. In several pictures, his left eye droops a little, perhaps from fatigue. “As touchy as gunpowder,” one friend called him. Nonetheless, he was generally well liked.

      He was born in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1756, and he died in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1791. He was a thoroughly urban creature, one who never had much to say about the charms of nature. A product of the artisan classes—his ancestors were bookbinders, weavers, and masons—he adopted aristocratic fashions, going around Vienna in a gold-trimmed hat and a red coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. He was physically restless, quick-witted, sociable, flirtatious, and obscene; one of the more provocative items in his catalogue is a canon for six voices titled Leck mich im Arsch (K. 231/382c). He frittered away money, not least on apartments that he could ill afford. He had considerable success, although he knew that he deserved more. If audiences were occasionally perplexed by his creations, listeners in high places recognized his worth. Emperor Joseph II was a fan of Mozart’s work, and, in 1787, to prevent “so rare a genius” from going abroad, he gave the composer a well-paying position that required little more than the writing of dances. In a letter to his father, Leopold, Mozart had warned that “the Viennese gentry, and in particular the Emperor, must not imagine that I am on this earth solely for the sake of Vienna.”

      As a child, Mozart was advertised in London as “the most extraordinary Prodigy, and most amazing Genius, that has appeared in any Age.” Leopold dubbed him “the miracle whom God allowed to be born in Salzburg.” Prince Kaunitz, Joseph II’s chief minister,