known; and only a serious opera on a classical subject could furnish occasion for Gluck’s phraseology and range of feeling to appear at all. How profoundly and independently Mozart seizes Gluck’s method and style may best be seen by comparing the oracle scenes in Idomeneo and Alceste. In the management of the chorus, however, Mozart has, as was to be expected, incomparably the advantage. He has all, or rather more than all, Gluck’s power for portraying panic and managing, by the motion of his music, the flight of a crowd; but he also has an inexhaustible harmonic and contrapuntal invention which lay beyond Gluck’s scope.
The problems of comic opera presented a far more fruitful field. In Die Entführung he speedily showed a dramatic grasp for which opera seria, in spite of all the influence of Gluck, gave him no scope. He had a wonderful feeling for character, and did not imagine, like many French and other disseminators of musical-dramatic ideas (including, in moments of weakness, even Gluck himself), that the expression of character in music was a mere matter of harping on special types of phrase. His melodic invention was clearly and subtly characteristic without mannerism. It is of hardly minor importance that his own literary sense was far higher than that of many a writer of ostensibly superior general culture; and that Osmin, the most living figure in Die Entführung, is Mozart’s creation, words and all.
After Die Entführung, Mozart’s record is a series of masterpieces, accompanied, but not interrupted, by a running commentary of pièces d’occasion. With rare exceptions, everything he writes illustrates the perfect solution of an art-problem, and he often achieves an artistic triumph with the most eccentric materials. The modern organist can find since Bach no grander piece in his repertory than the two fantasias which Mozart wrote for the barrel of a musical clock. Shortly before his death he wrote a beautiful adagio and rondo for the glass harmonica, to which he devised the curious but eminently natural accompaniment of flute, oboe, viola and violoncello. And when at an earlier period it occurred to him to write some processional music for two flutes, five trumpets and four drums, the result, although not artistically important, might well have seemed to indicate long experience in handling the combination. His work in the larger instrumental forms is further discussed in the articles Sonata Forms and Instrumentation. While Mozart’s treatment of form has often been attacked as conventional, and his range of thought despised as childish, his instrumentation and general sense of euphony are at the present day more unreservedly admired by the most progressive propagandists than anything else in classical art.
Mozart’s later operas, from Figaro onwards, represent the nearest approach to a perfect art-form attainable in pre-Wagnerian opera. What he might have attained in serious opera had he been spared to see the solemn triumphs the French operatic stage realized in the austere sincerity of Cherubini and Méhul it is impossible to guess. But we cannot doubt that a Mozart of yet riper experience than we have known would have given tragic opera a history in which Fidelio did not stand in lonely splendour. For Mozart, however, serious opera was an Italian art form, only temporarily rescued from the tyranny of bravura singers by Gluck. After Idomeneo he handled it only once, at the very close of his career, and then, as if to seal its fate, in a pièce d’occasion with an impossibly dull and unsympathetic libretto (La Clemenza di Tito). For comedy, however, his harmonic and rhythmic range was perfectly adapted; and in Figaro he had the advantage of a libretto which was already a finished literary product of consummate stagecraft before it ever became an opera. The perpetual surprises of its absurdly complex intrigues impose no real strain, for no one attempts to follow them; but they keep every character on the stage in a state of excitement which is so heightened and differentiated by the music that, while Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro has its modest but definite place in literature, Mozart’s Figaro is, with all its lightness of touch, one of the most ideal classics in all art. The subject is not edifying; but Mozart does not analyse it from that point of view. His characters are irresponsible, mischievous and fairy-like. Theirs is the world described by Lamb—“the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty and the manners perfect freedom.”
In Don Giovanni the matter is less clear. Mozart rose, not only in the music of the ghostly statue, but also in the music of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, to heights that can only be called sublime; yet he never lost sight of the true methods of that comedy of gallantry to which Don Giovanni stands in some sense as a grotesque tragic finale. It is the business of an artistic intellect to grasp the artistic possibility of a world in which the “Utopia of gallantry” is at war with a full-blooded and incipiently moral humanity until the critical moment determines, not the breaking up of the artistic unity, but the right conclusion of the story. If it is absurd to treat Donna Anna and Donna Elvira as Wagnerian heroines, and so to complain of the inadequacy and conventionality of much of their utterances and attitudes; so, also, is it no less absurd to regard them as “secretly rather gratified than otherwise to be on Don Giovanni’s list.” Donna Elvira has suffered more cruelly from stolidly tragic singers and no less stolidly flippant critics than she ever suffered from Don Giovanni himself. She comes upon the stage expressing herself in thoroughly conventional music, and we are told that the formulas of Italian opera are inadequate for the expression of her sorrows. Look at the sforzando in the second violins at the words Ah se ritrovo l’empio. Mozart is depicting a young girl facing a position she does not in the least understand; expressing herself in stereotyped phrases as much from inexperience of their meaning as from lack of anything that may better say what she really feels. What Mozart’s music with exquisite humour and simplicity expresses is as yet nothing more serious than the wish to scratch Don Giovanni’s eyes out; as soon as his character is revealed to her in Leporello’s comic aria of the “catalogue,” she determines that others at all events shall not suffer as she has suffered; and from that moment her character steadily develops in seriousness and dignity. She is not all strength, and Don Giovanni fools her to the top of her bent; but nevertheless Mozart realizes, on hints of which the librettist was hardly conscious, a consistent scheme of development as dramatic as it is in keeping with the most sublime possibilities of comic opera. Yet it is a common practice to insert Elvira’s last confession of weakness, the aria Mi tradi, immediately after Leporello’s catalogue aria! Perhaps the first place where an intelligent tradition of Mozart as a comic genius of the highest type has been restored is Munich, where the standard set under the conductorship of Richard Strauss will not soon be forgotten.
In Cosí fan tutte Mozart’s struggles with an absurd libretto show even clearer evidence of the accuracy and power of his genius than when he is working under conditions where success is possible. Space forbids our dwelling further on this subject, nor can we do more than glance at his last great opera, Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven thought it his greatest work; for the simple literal-minded sincerity with which Beethoven regarded the question of operatic libretto made Figaro frivolous and Don Giovanni scandalous in his sight. Mozart’s very serious interest in freemasonry, which in its solemn ritual furnished an edifying contrast to the frivolity and uncongeniality of the existing state of church music, inspired him with the most sublime ideas hitherto brought upon the operatic stage. He was further stimulated by the feeling that freemasonry was to some extent a persecuted institution; and the circumstance that his librettist was a skilful stage manager secured for him that variety of action and effectiveness of entry and exit, compared with which an intelligible plot is of almost negligible importance as a source of inspiration to the classical composer, or even as a means of retaining popular favour. Thus Die Zauberflöte is an achievement unique in opera; combining as it does the farcical gorgeousness of a pantomime with the solemnity of a ritual and the contemporary interest of a political satire.
From the solemnity of masonic ritual there is but one step to that most pathetic of unfinished monuments, Mozart’s Requiem. The finished portions of this work contain the most sublime and perfect church music between Bach and the Missa solemnis of
