Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 1, April 2008
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Ruediger Goerner, ed., Mozart--eine Herausforderung fuer Literatur und Denken. Jahrbuch fuer Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A. Kongressberichte 89. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. 360 pp. ISBN 978-3-03911-177-0
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This collection of fifteen essays, based on the eponymous 2006 conference in London, continues earlier attempts within Mozart scholarship to reframe the composer’s oeuvre in the context of literary scholarship, philosophy, and European cultural studies. It has as its historical focus the “Nineteenth-Centrury Mozart,” i.e. the reception of Mozart’s life and work during Romanticism, which, in itself, opens the door to such interpretive traps as the genius myth and fallacies of authorial intention. Aware of these, Goerner, whose earlier Mozarts Wagnis (1991) points to the risk of reading and misreading Mozart’s musical futurism, frames the central inquiry of this volume as a question: Does the composer’s music reveal or obscure the artist’s soul? Is it possible, at all, to “know” Mozart nowadays, especially given the fact that his music permeates our culture, from commercial jingles to Baby Einstein soundtracks? Is it advisable even to try?
The contributors to this volume approach these questions from various angles, often using Don Giovanni as a starting point for their critical engagement. In his investigation of the Don Giovanni myth, Dieter Borchmeyer offers a new analysis of ETA Hoffman’s romantic reading of Mozart’s play with the divine and the demonic in Don Juan (1813) and the cynical nihilism that his exchange of the transcendent for the erotic begets. As a popular-cultural contrast, Emanuela Abbadessa explores the impact of Mozart’s complex relationship with his own father on Don Giovanni’s struggle against his metaphorical castration, his alignment with the Antichrist as the consummate seducer, and his resurrection as Frank-N-Furter in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1976. Three more essays, by H. J. Hahn, Andrew Cusack, and Julia Schoell, attempt new readings of Don Giovanni’s structural and philosophical impact on German romanticist Eduard Moerike’s whimsical novella Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (1856).
But the focus on Don Giovanni informs only part of this volume, and the reader may appreciate more esoteric and surprising studies, such as Kris Steyaert’s investigation into Mozart’s “demonic” presence in nineteenth-century Dutch poetry, Andreas Bloedorn’s discussion of Goethe’s quasi-fragmentary Der Zauberfloete Zweyter Theil as a cosmological allegory to Mozart’s operatic work, or Ruth Neubauer-Petzold’s look at Norbert Elias’s discussion of Mozart as a sociological exception. In this context, Marianne Tettlebaum’s “Mozart in Search of Enlightenment,” which reflects on the appropriateness of Mozart as a theoretical construct for explaining the wordplay inherent in En-light-en-ment as a cultural phenomenon itself, stands out against more traditionally archival musical influence studies on Schubert or Suessmayr.
The most original insights, however, occur in discussions of Mozart’s influence on twentieth-century cultural icons: Salvatore Campisi’s convincing study of Mozartian principles in Milan Kundera’s and Italo Calvino’s understanding of “lightness” and in Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf points the way to a performative understanding of the composer’s presence, far away from the more traditional influence studies. So do Christine Ivanovic’s discussion of Ingeborg Bachmann’s reflections on Die wunderliche Musik (1956), whose final piece, “Blatt fuer Mozart,” celebrates the recurring death of Mozart as the thematic beginning of current musical historiography, and Martin Hainz’s look at intentio auctoris and intentio operis, ethics, aesthetics, and authenticity which Hermann Broch’s modernist reframing of Mozartian themes pits against each other in his seminal novel, Die Schuldlosen (1950). It is in this area that literary scholarship and what is currently left of critical theory meet the composer’s presence in truly successful analyses.
As one would expect from a collection edited by Ruediger Goerner, Mozart--eine Herausforderung fuer Literatur und Denken points towards the necessity of exchanging the old, purely musicological, analyses of Mozart’s oeuvre for a more culturally relevant cross-disciplinary tack on a phenomenon called Mozart that has, from muzak to Baby Einstein, grown larger than life.