Listen to This. Alex Ross

are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why … The golden mean of truth in all things is no longer either known or appreciated. In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no sensible man can understand it.

      One wonders what Mozart would have made of today’s musical scene, where the gap between inanity and unintelligibility is spectacularly wide.

      Scholars have also demolished the old picture of Mozart as an idiot savant who transcribed the music playing in his brain. Instead, he seems to have refined his ideas to an almost manic degree. Examination of Mozart’s surviving sketches and drafts—Constanze threw many manuscripts away—reveals that the composer sometimes began a piece, set it aside, and resumed it months or years later; rewrote troubling sections several times in a row; started movements from scratch when a first attempt failed to satisfy; and waited to finish an aria until a singer had tried out the opening. Ulrich Konrad calls these stockpiles of material “departure points”—“a delineation of intellectual places to which Mozart could return as necessary.” In other words, the music in Mozart’s mind may have been like a huge map of half-explored territories; in a way, he was writing all his works all the time. The new image of him as a kind of improvising perfectionist is even more daunting than the previous one of God’s stenographer. Ambitious parents who play the Baby Mozart video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.

      In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—180 CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set was later reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. One day I transferred it to my iPod and discovered that Mozart requires, at the minimum listenable bitrate, 9.77 gigabytes.

      On a computer, you can use search functions to create cross-sections of Mozart—a dreamworld of adagios, a neo-Baroque swirl of fantasias and fugues, a nonet of quintets (all major works). To listen to his twenty-seven settings of the Kyrie is to appreciate his inexhaustible invention: they range from the ravishingly sweet to the forbiddingly severe, each a convincing simulacrum of the power of the Lord. But the obvious challenge was to go through the whole megillah—to begin with the Andante in C Major (K. 1a), which Mozart wrote when he was five, and proceed to the bitter end, the Requiem (K. 626), which he left unfinished at his death, at thirty-five. It took me three months. I can’t claim to have given every bar close attention—a patch of recitative in the early opera La finta semplice (The Pretend Simpleton) was disrupted by a protracted public-address announcement at Detroit Metro Airport, and most of the Contredanse No. 4 in F (K. 101) was drowned out by the crack drum corps Drumedies performing in the Times Square subway station—but I did get a bird’s-eye view of Mozart’s achievement, and was more in awe than ever.

      From the start, the music is astonishingly well made. (A caveat from the scholarly demythologizers: most of the earliest works were “corrected” by Leopold.) Young Mozart shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of the day: Baroque sacred music, opera buffa and opera seria, Gluckian reform opera, Haydn’s classicism, the Mannheim symphonic school, Sturm und Drang agitation, and so on. Quite a bit of the music is reassuringly routine; Hermann Abert writes, in his massive 1921 biography of the composer, that Mozart “evolved along sound lines, without any supernatural leaps and bounds.” But very early there are flashes of individuality. Some of the first come in the London Sketchbook, which dates from Mozart’s London sojourn of 1764 and 1765 (and which Leopold did not touch). A piece in G minor (K. 15p) features a stormily descending chromatic bass line—a Bachian gesture with a trace of boyish impudence. A piece in E-flat major (K. 15kk) has gently murmuring chords and mournful slips into the minor, forecasting time-suspending andantes and adagios to come.

      Hearing so many premonitions of future masterworks, I got the feeling that Mozart’s brain contained an array of musical archetypes that were connected to particular dramatic situations or emotional states—figures connoting vengeance, reconciliation, longing, and so on. One example appears in La finta semplice, the merry little opera buffa that Mozart wrote when he was twelve. In the finale, when all misunderstandings are resolved, there is a passage marked “un poco adagio,” in which Giacinta and her maid Ninetta ask forgiveness for an elaborate ruse that they have pulled on Giacinta’s brothers. “Perdono,” they sing—“Forgive.” Not just the words but the music prefigures the stupendous final scene of The Marriage of Figaro, in which the wayward Count asks the Countess’s forgiveness—“Contessa, perdono!”—and she grants it, in a half-hopeful, half-heartbroken phrase. I looked at the New Mozart Edition scores side by side, and noticed that the two passages not only waver between the same happy-sad chords (G major and E minor) but pivot on the same rising bass line (B-C-D-E). It is unlikely that Mozart thought back to La finta semplice when he composed Figaro, but the idea of forgiveness apparently triggered certain sounds in his mind.

      As Mozart grows toward adulthood, there is a palpable thrill of emergence. The routine becomes rare, the extraordinary ordinary. Having proved himself as an able technician of theatrical and sacred music (Lucio Silla, of 1772, and the Sacramental Litany, of 1776, are high-water marks of his youth), Mozart now imports exterior drama and interior reflection to instrumental genres: the hard-driving Symphony No. 25 in G Minor, the swashbuckling violin concertos of 1775, the spacious String Quintet No. 1 in B-flat, and, most strikingly, the Piano Concerto No. 9, which is a three-act instrumental opera of energetic play, melancholy withdrawal, and happy return. Whether any of these forward leaps can be connected with events in Mozart’s life remains a matter of debate. Did the traumas of 1778—the failure of his venture to Paris, the death of his mother, Leopold’s scathing criticism—create in Mozart a new musical maturity? During that Paris summer, Mozart wrote his taut, tense Piano Sonata in A Minor, another landmark in his development. The trouble is that we don’t know whether it was written before or after Maria Anna’s death, and, in the absence of other information, we have to assume that one day Mozart banged an A-minor chord like a wedge into the middle range of the piano and liked the way it sounded. Stanley Sadie, in his 2005 book Mozart: The Early Years, concludes unsentimentally, “There is no real reason to imagine that [Mozart] used his music as a vehicle for the expression of his own personal feelings.”

      Then again, it’s hard not to see some connection between the life and the art in the period from 1781 to 1786, when a series of independent acts—Mozart’s escape from Salzburg to Vienna, his marriage to Constanze, his defiant response to Leopold’s objections to the above—coincides with a staggering outpouring of inspiration: the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn, fifteen concertos for piano and orchestra, the “Haffner” and “Linz” and “Prague” Symphonies, the Mass in C Minor, the operas The Abduction from the Seraglio and The Marriage of Figaro, and a dozen other pieces without which classical programming would grind to a halt. The instrumental works, with their architecturally imposing first movements and their slow movements that open up multiple inner worlds, are the most expansive of their time, looking forward to Beethoven only insofar as Beethoven looked back at them. Yet the futuristic broadening of scope is made possible by a study of the past; Mozart immerses himself in the art of Bach, prompted by a fad for old music in aristocratic circles. (The emperor liked fugues.) Also, in the slow movements spasms of dissonance are used to offset the surplus of beauty; Scott Burnham notes that the famous Andante of the Concerto No. 21 contains a quietly shuddering five-note collection that is not so much a chord as a cluster. Counterpoint and dissonance are the cables on which Mozart’s bridges to paradise hang.

      Mozart’s operas, meanwhile, abandon artifice in favor of moment-to-moment psychological realism. In The Abduction from the Seraglio, Belmonte ventures into the Ottoman Empire in search of his kidnapped love, Constanze. Having learned that she is nearby, he sings of the anxious beating of his heart (“O wie ängstlich, o wie feurig”). The heartbeat is indicated in a soft but insistent pattern of falling thirds, in which, Mozart wrote proudly to his father, “you see the trembling, the faltering.” A fluttering, innocent-sounding kind of worry is suggested by rapid runs of flute and muted violins. Toward the end of the aria, the “throbbing”