Waiting for Amadeus

By R.Z. Sheppard

MOZART by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, translated by Marion Faber Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 408 pages; $22.50

Author Hildesheimer wastes no time telling us that he is the sort of fellow more interested in the hole than the doughnut. "Our task," he states, "is to blot out existing ideas, but not to mediate between Mozart and the reader. On the contrary, the intention of this study is to make the distance between both sides even greater . . . between Mozart's inner life and our inadequate conception of its nature and dimension."

What follows is not mostly Mozart but mostly Hildesheimer. His book is an exercise in middlebrow beating that challenges the accepted premises of biography: a life is a story with a beginning, middle and end that exerts a satisfying dramatic unity and humanizes its subject. Such notions are wishful thinking and Philistine romanticism, says the author. His own view is that the meanings of Mozart's life and music are completely separate, that Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus in fact hid behind his nonverbal art. The author paraphrases Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni: "Don Juan is not someone who creates himself by thought, but someone who can only reveal himself musically, since the erotic principle by which he lives evades his consciousness or its conscious verbal expression."

Mozart spoke music more fluently than anyone else who ever lived. But he kept no journal and left no autobiography. There are, of course, his famous letters. He was always respectful and loving to the censorious Papa Leopold. For Maria Anna Thekla ("Baesle"), the "little cousin" from Augsburg, he concocted an impish scatology ("Our arses shall be the symbol of our peacemaking!"), and his epistolary requests for from his generous friend Michael Puchberg read like a parody of abject pleading.

For those who feel that a day without sunshine is like a day without Mozart, there are the familiar images passed down and touched up for 200 years. "A little man with his wig and sword" is Goethe's description of the child performing for Europe's nobility and dazzling Kapellmeister with feats of improvisation and phonographic memory. There is the prodigy as meal ticket: Wolfgang and his gifted sister Nannerl carted from court to court by Leopold for a few gulden, ducats, florins, pocket watches and snuffboxes. If a theater poster announced an eight-year old Wunderkind even though Mozart was nine, who was Leopold to correct the error? Such was the perishable nature of his merchandise.

The older Amadeus--the name means love of God--does not seem to compose music but only to transcribe it whole and flawless from some inexhaustible supply. Legendary scenes include Mozart the billiards player jotting down measures between shots, and dashing off the overture to Don Giovanni in two hours on the day of performance. A new piece sent to his sister was accompanied by the line, "I composed the fugue first and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude."

The death in 1791 at age 35 is a rich source of drama and speculation. The man whom Joseph Haydn unhesitatingly acknowledged as his superior struggles against a fatal fever to complete his last composition. The D Minor Requiem is written for Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach, who wormed a place in history by secretly commissioning the work in order to pass it off as his own. Several bars of the Lacrymosa are probably the last notes Mozart ever wrote. The requiem was completed by his student Franz Suessmayr.

Mozart's death has been variously ascribed to rheumatic fever, uremia and even murder by poisoning. Alexander Pushkin wrote a play that pinned the guilt on Mozart's musical rival Antonio Salieri, and Rimski-Korsakov turned the literary libel into a miniopera. Playwright Peter Shaffer recently gave the Salieri legend a new stage life with Amadeus, in which Mozart has the sex habits of a randy poodle and the court manners of John McEnroe.

Such greasepaint and graven images are verboten in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's temple of the pure genius: "However much we search the reservoir of our imagination for an image whereby Mozart became real to us, we find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author, 66, is best known as a painter and playwright with an intellectual kinship to Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco.

Chasing the ineffable can make gymnastic philosophy and entertaining drama, but Hildesheimer's pursuit is a didactic lust for lifelessness. Having cleansed Mozart of the cliches of romanticism and Victorian propriety, he spills the cliches of existentialism and psychoanalysis. There are speculations on the speculative and a dozen ways to say perhaps. In one breath the man and his art are separated; in another, "we always experience Mozart's music ... as the catharsis resulting from one man's sublimation of his personal crisis." Mozart is certainly elusive, as Hildesheimer claims, but here he is hidden twice: once behind his music and again behind his latest biographer. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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