MOZART has never been one of my favourite composers. Since I feel much the same about such divinities as Michael Nyman or Philip Glass, this is obviously no criticism but an abject mea culpa. My money stays in my pocket whenever Grafton Street buskers lurch into Eine kleine Nachtmusik (likewise, Pachelbel's Canon has me reaching for my gun, and Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba provokes my hasty departure).
I have no doubt that Mozart's status as one of the supreme cultural fetishes of the West has little to do with the undeniable greatness of a tiny proportion of his massive output, and much to do with the banality and predictability of the hundreds of works he composed to keep the pot boiling. In an age when classical music serves primarily as a means of reassurance for the middle classes, the regularity of Mozart's phrases, the tonic/dominant tick tock of his harmonies, and the repetitiveness of his cadential formulae offer stressed out musiclovers the comforting illusion that music is easy: composing by numbers evokes listening by numbers. This also accounts for the vogue of hacks like Nyman and Glass.
The Mozart cult is accompanied by an extraordinary proliferation of books, many of the coffee table variety. The persistence of this phenomenon is all the more bizarre in that the old myths and legends that sublimated the humdrum events of the composer's short life have long since been exploded (although they persist in the popular imagination alongside such obstinate fantasies as JFK's idealism or the supremacy of French cuisine), and Andrew Steptoe is scrupulous in adhering to the latest interpretation of the facts.
Constanze Mozart is no longer an opportunistic harpie but a loving and beloved companion, Salieri is no longer a saturnine conspirator but a devoted admirer, the cloaked stranger who commissions the Requiem is no longer an envoy of Death but an intermediary for an aristocratic amateur eager to take credit for other composers works, the premature death is a result of kidney failure rather than poisoning, the unmarked communal grave is one of Joseph II's rational hygienic measures, and the composer's supposed neglect is belied by a requiem mass in, Prague that attracted 4,000 mourners.
Steptoe adds one or two disillusioning insights of his own, e.g. The melancholic atmosphere [of the Clarinet Concerto] seems appropriate for a work written two months before the composer's death, but really owes more to the timbre of the clarinet than to any premonitions of mortality." Nonetheless, he solemnly warns us that "there is no really satisfactory full length biography of Mozart in English", so no doubt the industry is set to keep grinding on. Indeed this Everyman EMI Music Companion will be followed by a second volume to include letters, contemporary reviews and commentaries.
OF course where Steptoe's book wins out over the competition is in its inclusion of three full length compact discs, containing a carefully chosen sequence of Mozart's best works no "lollipops", no Eine kleine Buskermusik - recorded by such artistes as Roger Norrington, Daniel Barenboim, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kiri Te Kanawa, and David and Igor Oistrakh.
Since most books on music nowadays adopt the inverted elitist position that musical examples should be avoided, this stratagem is both a satisfactory compromise and a very real bargain for those seeking a representative selection of recordings rather than a comprehensive collection. In addition, Steptoe writes well (for a Professor of Psychology) and the whole package is handsomely produced. Perhaps Everyman EMI will now extend the formula to some less familiar composers?