Patrick Mackie, Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
Listen to Tim Riley interview Patrick Mackie:
Happy to report that the West Coast progressive sheet truthdig has returned, and ran this book review recently…
Mozart weaves human frailties into such noble forms that critics lean on superlatives when describing “The Marriage of Figaro” or his “Jupiter” Symphony. His music achieves a “purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it,” wrote G.B. Shaw, “that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe, waiting to be revealed.” To his late 18th century audience, Mozart conveyed an acute sense of how life felt on the verge of modernity, when Enlightenment ideas found traction, America cast off British rule, the French Revolution shook the aristocracy and the Hapsburg ruler Joseph II kept changing his mind about what kinds of freedoms he might tolerate.
In “Mozart in Motion,” the British cultural critic Patrick Mackie details the final chapter of the composer’s life by explaining how he both captured and broke free from his era’s values. Mackie’s prose gathers momentum by tackling the music’s rich contradictions. He has a flair for aphorisms (“We sometimes become different versions of ourselves when we listen to music…”), and frequently drops thought-bombs that, upon explosion, set off wider reverberations (“Was Mozart ever liable to feel a need to be forgiven for his own mastery?”).
If Mackie’s voice flirts with pretense, a close reading reveals keen ears and a lively imagination, especially for opera fans.
If Mackie’s voice flirts with pretense, a close reading reveals keen ears and a lively imagination, especially for opera fans. He’s particularly insightful when discussing Mozart and forgiveness. The narrative builds toward some fine writing on the late, unfinished “Requiem” that could serve as another kind of headstone. Much of this writing chases music that transcends beauty for beauty’s sake and strikes upon wisdom both humane and inscrutable, a sagacity at once poised and playful. Straddling musicology with historical grounding, “Mozart in Motion” reaches to touch the hem of Mozart’s garment.
Mozart’s third and final decade in Vienna’s 1780s saw him move from the provincial city of Salzburg, separate from his overbearing father and marry at 26, all the while writing down his galloping thoughts in weekly letters to family and intimates. Here’s Mackie’s discursive thumbnail: “The most vivid account that we have of what ensued must originate from [Mozart’s wife] Constanze herself, the younger sister of Aloysia whom the composer would marry a few years later and whose second husband would become his biographer many years in the future.” There you have the tangled contingencies alive in how historians hear Mozart; his music springs not from providence but from a particular set of cozy affections, social circles and bewigged interests…
In our interview, Mackie recommends Mozart’s Women by Jane Glover (Harper, 2006), as much G.B. Shaw’s music criticism as you can find, and conductors Erich Kleiber and Ian Page, pianists Frederich Goulda, Kristian Bezuidenhout and Christian Blackshaw. For postmodernism, he mentions Charles Jencks on architecture.
noises off
classical substack: Lars Vogt, Maria Yudina, Igor Levit, András Schiff
more links at the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites
album of the month
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, V (Jagjaguwar)
House of a thousand guitar sounds
remainders
one of the few anti-Sheeran takes from Damon Krukowski: “bloodless, pointless… but a rip-off for sure…”
Leaping from Mulon Husk’s sinking ship for spoutibles and Notes, stay crispy
pinterest: B. Kliban’s cats preceded Steve Martin’s feline gags