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Fantasy Impromptu This summer I reread a biography of Mozart by Marcia Davenport because I was to embark upon a course. My teenage reading of the book was part of a youthful kick to read the lives of great composers. At that time it was called the definitive biography. Further, a few years ago I made that assertion on another discussion list only to be told how out of date I was. Now I have been introduced to the more definitive works of Maynard Solomon's psychobiography and Robert W. Gutman's cultural biography. What impresses me is the objectivity of it all whereby Mozart is revealed not only as the genius we know and love but also as part of the 18th century salons qua coffee houses brewing enlightenment. Despite the drama of theatrical bombast demonizing Saleri and other Mozart myths, an Ayn Rand hero was there all the time. (Were I to believe in ghosts I'd forever damn her remark in defense of Tiddlywink Music, which cited Mozart as premusic!) Professor Robert Greenberg's taped course on Mozart points out from the get-go that Mozart's "compositions were not the product of Divine inspiration, but the creations of an intelligent, hard-working, and talented man." I capitalized divine. Mozart reveals the Age of Reason (Will Durant's term, I believe) in The Magic Flute when the hero Tamino is called a prince by a priest. The high priest Sarastro counters with "Noch mehr! Er ist Mensch!" What's more, "he is a man" translates into the benevolent universe of Rand and the romantic life as it could, and ought to be. Romantic realism best encapsulates Rand's aesthetics and the conceptual truss here is hero-worship. If ever there were a precursor to Rand's "man qua man" Solomon cites a Swiss philosopher and educator Tissot who had contemporary witness of the ten year old prodigy. Auguste Tissot wrote the young Mozart exemplified the "harmonious union between moral man and physical man." That spells objective integration to me and presages the thrill of an Apollonian light of reason. Tissot complimented Mozart's parents (think Leopold) for nurturing the moral and natural. The biographies reveal the entrepreneuring Papa guiding his son through to independence. Leopold emerges his son's hero, not the usual "bete noir" theatrically depicted for the angst of it all. The angst of it all takes up the realism of Mozart coming of age to do his own untutored composing. The effect on Leopold was the more devastating and led to his son's estrangement and disinheritance. Vienna must have been for Wolfgang what America was for young Alisa Rosenbaum. He would write "A Musical Joke" in a bitter logic of laughter after his father's death while Rand had left behind her own father in the death camp of Soviet Russia. Yet Leopold had been the home schooler as well as impresario as Tissot observed. Rand's Russian education was schooling from a home and college. Both geniuses became autodidacts once they left home and attained independence. I became quite nostalgic in reading Davenport's biography, more for the author than her subject it turns out. Her own biography is entitled Too Strong for Fantasy. The book jacket tells of the author's hero loves: her mother, Alma Gluck, THE Maestro¸ and Jan Masaryk whose lives and locales span my own. I only heard of Alma Gluck growing up when the Old Met and Carnegie Hall spelled Kultur for parents struggling out of Hell's Kitchen in NYC. Gluck was revered and now I know she was not only Davenport's mother but also her hero, genetically attached to an old produce wholesaler in Romania. That gentleman produced five daughters and peddled his wares (farm produce, not daughters) in the city. Peasants too poor to get to market trusted the old man to sell for them as well as himself. Actually the city was but a drab backwater village, which at most, attracted traveling troupes of opera-players. He would stay each time he could and upon arrival home with an empty wagon and stomach, first had to eat. Then, with his admiring females as audience he would sing the entire opera from memory and undoubtedly improvise for the orchestra and libretto. (There is a skeptics conjecture as to what Mozart would have been had not Leopold undertaken his education. Here might be an instance.) Life spans were short in those days and so the grandpapa did not survive to immigrate to America. The women did - even with a hunchedback grandma. There is a noticeable lack of discourse about Davenport's father who sort of disappeared from the view of an arranged marriage. The obvious contribution from this shadowy figure was Marcia herself and the gratuity of having a music maven friend who visited. Said friend heard Alma just singing around the house and urged voice lessons. She not only obliged but reveled in the opportunity. She met Toscanini who became a lifelong friend of both mother and daughter. She pursued a career as diva, and Marcia traveled right along with Alma, imbibing music and learning languages. But Alma Gluck (empowered with a mighty work ethic) considered family life an imperative. Marcia became a boarder with a Philadelphia family and the story was of work, work -- work never to be resisted. But family life itself was always a problem. Even though excellence still united Alma Gluck's second marriage and there was much family love among the stepsiblings, the reality of lost voice accompanied the diva's nurture of her two children by "Papuchka" Ephrem Zimbalist. Marcia Davenport's own marriage was both childless and many times one of physical separation due to career claims on each partner. Russell Davenport is best known for his work in establishing Fortune magazine. Marcia's work took her to Prague in her research on Mozart. Pride of place seems an important value so that her own tale of two cities is that of New York and Prague. New York is where she wrote her books and Prague was where she loved -- whether it be a love of Mozart, of Toscanini and later would be both of and with Jan Masaryk. Maestro Hero is poignant these days as Marcia described her visit to Milan during the closing days of WWII. She approached the façade of La Scala, the wreckage of bombing cringing behind it. Someone had placed a banner that literally yelled "We Want Toscanini". I'll leave unspoken a sign saying "We Want Roark". In New York Davenport met Jan Masaryk, the playboy turned diplomat. Their encounter blossomed into an affair, both of them realizing the union of hero worship - his was for his father, T. G. Masaryk, the founder and first President of the Czech Republic. Hero worship explains Jan Masaryk's role in the Benes government too feeble to withstand the Red takeover. Jan had vowed to hold Benes up as T. G. commanded. And there was no help from the West. The tale is dramatic in both a Homeric and Ian Fleming guise. As Davenport said, the tale was not one of fantasy. It's an aside, here, that I cannot resist. During an IOS (Institute of Objectivist Studies now incorporated as The Objectivist Center) I heard Dr. Susan McCloskey's paper on "Odysseus, Jesus and Dagny" wherein the playboy of Atlas Shrugged (Francisco d'Anconia) was described as "Odysseus in a Tux". Of course that is worth a smile. However, I did a Google search on Jan Masaryk and there he was, a broadcast photo by Radio Prague top hat and all. Operatically Mozart is the genius sculpting the classically heroic out from opera seria into the Romantic. Father Owen Lee eloquently presents the heroic case in his Metropolitan Opera essay on Idomeneo, calling it a new kind of opera. Just as the heroes departing Troy molded Western Civilization by striding forth into their futures, so too does Mozart. Dr. Lee points out that Idomeneo changes music, not by looking backward to the baroque but forward to the romantic. That romantic future was, sadly, La Belle Epoch, which empowered Alisa's soul and forever wrapped her in the sounds of gaiety, yearning, swollen rhapsody on stage and screen. Just why she called it Tiddlywink is perhaps the very aesthetic of her soul. The metaphysical value judgment that man be joyous and free goes along with her manifesto. But tiddlywinks is a childhood game, superfluous and rather useless. She wrote of rhapsodic life's possibilities and her books are still selling. Mozart introduced subscription concerts and launched performance of concertos, sonatas, operas and fantasies that still sell. I bought a CD of piano concerti 19 and 20 (K 459 & K 466) just yesterday. Musically there is a tale told in keys whereby Mozart encoded a Rand manuscript - despite my pun. There's a tiddlywink in Concerto 19. Written in the key of F it abounds with clear crystal tinkles and repeating refrains of sweeping melody. The logical structure is as precise as petit point tapestries, woven beauty in sound. It's an enhanced progression of lively and cheerful tunes, slowing tempo only to reassert a dancing game in "allegro assai". It just begs for Lanza to sing The Tiddlywink - With a Song in My Heart. The movie Amadeus showcases D minor music for the voices of impending and final doom. Piano Concerto No. 20 (K466) sweeps the streets of Vienna as Saleri trots home with the famous black two faced costume with which to stalk our hero. D minor. As Mozart opens the door to the menacing subscriber, it's the D minor chord that opens Don Giovanni that unhinges our composer as well. But the Requiem would be written, of course in D minor. Swelling with the mood of doom, somehow a thread of memory (nostalgia) prompted me to leaf through my book of Mozart piano sonatas. At its end, the publisher appended three fantasies, the third of which is in D minor. Having played this piece I knew what happens towards the final third of notation. From its opening andante tempo in D minor it changes to an allegretto tempo in D major. The window has opened, the sun shines, the cool breezes caress and play; this is the music to accompany a first view of Galt's Gulch. Fantasy in D? Mozart is not "too strong for fantasy" but makes a fantasy strong enough to inspire. Inspire it does and if we may peak into Franz Schubert's diary, it is reported he said: As from afar the magic notes of Mozart's music still gently haunt me . . . They show us in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which we hope with confidence.To keep Schubert's prayer going, it can I think, be invoked to both Rand and Mozart in the name of La Belle Musique: O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, oh how endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life thou brought to our souls!
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