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Snyder Book Collection Contest

Sample essays

Bailey N. Pike, Lawrence KS - Musicology

"The Mythology of  Mozart"

              The life and legends of Mozart have always fascinated me.  I even credit a Mozart biography for my decision to study musicology.  As a very young child, I had read a book filled with biographies and anecdotes about the lives of the great composers.  I immediately became interested in their lives and their music, and began devouring every book I could find on the subject.  An overly ambitious fifth grader, I asked my parents for Maynard Solomon’s Mozart, A Life, for Christmas.  I was delighted to receive the thousand-page tome about Mozart’s life and work, and began trying to comprehend as much as I could.  It was two years before I was able to understand and finish the book, but it had exerted its influence on my future by the end of the day I had received it.  Discouraged by the hard to understand scholarly writing, I had turned to the back of the book, to read the author’s biography.  The biography, of course, listed all of the previous books written by Solomon, but what especially interested me was his title: musicologist.  I had never heard the term before, and wouldn’t know what it meant exactly for several more years, but I knew then that if being a musicologist meant studying composers, it was for me.  Needless to say, Solomon’s book is very special to my collection, not only because it is an exemplary scholarly biography of Mozart’s life, but also because it has largely determined the course of my academic life thus far.

              Roughly three-quarters of my over thirty-piece collection are used books I have found either at used bookstores or library discard sales.  I value these books most; simply because of the rich sense of history these books seem to have for me.  I enjoy the multiple marks of their history, whether it is a school library stamp, old dust jacket, personal library stamp, or a personal message scribbled on the title page.  I make no effort to remove any signs of their “used” status.  The oldest of my books even have a distinctive “old book smell” that I have come to appreciate as a sign of the book’s history.

              The relatively small percentage of my collection that I have acquired as brand new books were bought or received primarily as resources for various research projects I have undertaken as a musicology student.  My most recent acquisition is the lengthy W.A. Mozart, by Hermann Abert.  It contains roughly 1500 pages of mostly primary source material concerning the life and works of Mozart.  I plan to use it mostly as a resource book, but I have been slowly making my way through the text from the beginning as well.  At nearly ten pounds, Abert’s volume outweighs every other book in my collection by a wide margin. 

              Another recent acquisition is William Stafford’s The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment.  I bought Stafford’s book around the time I was attempting to formulate my vast assortment of “Mozartiana” into a cohesive collection.  Stafford’s critical look at the earliest Mozart sources, combined with my knowledge of the Mozart presented in recent scholarly sources and popular culture made me realize that the long and varied biographical record of Mozart really does amount to a kind of mythology.  I came to realize after reading The Mozart Myths that many of the biographical “facts” I had taken at face value throughout my study of Mozart are actually only tenuously based in reality.  Stafford traces the most popularly told stories about the life of Mozart back to their origins in only a handful of primary sources.  Stafford says: “The legends are like inverted pyramids, vast superstructures resting on vanishing points.”   Stafford also points out through his exhaustive look at the biographical record that Mozart’s life is often taken out of context.  Mozart is often seen as a romanticized genius, when, in fact, few would have seen him in this way during his life.  Stafford quotes from Hildesheimer:

In all likelihood, the caesura of his death did not even disturb Mozart’s most intimate circle, and no one suspected, on 6 December 1791, when the fragile, burned-out body was lowered into a shabby grave, that the mortal remains of an inconceivably great mind were being laid to rest—an unearned gift to humanity, nature’s unique, unmatched, and probably unmatchable work of art.

The notion of Mozart as a romantic genius is perpetuated in popular culture.  The general public most likely views Mozart through the depiction by Tom Hulce in the film Amadeus (1984), based on Peter Schaffer’s play from 1981.  In reality, the film is full of biographical error, and overemphasizes an almost non-existent rivalry between Mozart and Salieri.  Despite its shortcomings as a realistic depiction of Mozart’s life, Amadeus is nonetheless a great cinematic achievement; it earned the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1984. 

              Mozart’s life has captured the public’s imagination not only through biography, but also in fiction.  Since the popularity of Amadeus, many novels of historical fiction have been published about the life of Mozart, such as Cowell’s Marrying Mozart.  Many of these novels focus on minor characters in the general Mozart biographical record, namely his sister, Nannerl, and his wife, Constanze.  These novels about the important women in Mozart’s life are part of a larger trend towards the re-evaluation of the role of the women in Mozart’s life.  Historically, Mozart’s wife and sister have been depicted in an almost misogynistic tone, especially by early German biographers.  With the advent of feminism, the women in the Mozart biographical record have undergone a reappraisal.

              A portion of my collection is dedicated to non-biographical sources.  The authors of these sources (such Campbell’s The Mozart Effect and Restak’s Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot) exploit the Mozart myths in order to give credence to their scientific theories.  Their tactics amount to little more than a name recognition marketing ploy, however, because their respective theories have little to do specifically with Mozart or his music.  The words “Classical Music” could easily be substituted into these titles, without changing the results of either study.  To the general public, the name of “Mozart” has become synonymous with “Classical Music,” and authors have begun to take advantage of this fact to great success.  The “Mozart Effect,” although somewhat discredited today, has spawned multiple editions and recordings that claim to be able to raise I.Q. and heal the body.  During its heyday, the “Mozart Effect” even led to some hospitals giving away recordings of Mozart’s music to new mothers, under the contention that it would make their infants more intelligent.  Although listening to Mozart’s music is anything but harmful, The Mozart Effect wrongfully exploits and falsely attributes certain findings to the music of Mozart. 

              Another portion of my collection is dedicated to children’s literature.  Mozart as Wunderkind has been a popular subject for biographers since the eighteenth century.  In the twentieth century, semi-fictional narrative accounts of the childhood of Mozart have become popular as children’s literature.  Wheeler’s Mozart The Wonder Boy and Weil’s Wolferl are good examples of this phenomenon.  I acquired these books as an adult.  As a child, I was influenced by a series of audiocassette tapes, featuring semi-fictional spoken narratives of composers’ lives accompanied by their music.  I have included in my collection two tapes from the series about Mozart.  One is a retelling of The Magic Flute, and the other is an exploration of the life of Mozart through the eyes of his eldest son, Karl Thomas Mozart.  

              I have found the acquisition of many Mozart biographies to be prohibited by both language and cost.  The earliest (and therefore most reliable) sources regarding the life of Mozart are available almost exclusively in German, and usually in expensive, early printings.  Some day, I hope to have at least a reading knowledge of the German language, so that I may read some of these texts in their original language.  As a musicologist, I doubt I’ll ever have the necessary funds, but I would love to own an early edition of one of the first Mozart biographies.   

              I look forward to continuing to expand my collection on The Mythology of Mozart.  I hope to eventually acquire more early sources, so that I may investigate the formation of the myths myself.  Ultimately, I’d like to come to know the true Mozart, apart from the myths.  This task has become exponentially more difficult every year since Mozart’s death in 1791 however, as the Mozart myths have clouded the biographical record, obscuring what little truth could be gleaned from them. 

Stafford, William, The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 141. Stafford, 150.

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