Remarking on the critical commentary during the centenary of Mozart’s death, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Bless me! What nonsense!” Now, with the bicentenary upon us, the critics are repeating history. Some have discovered a “demonic” Mozart; others the disturbed and crude adolescent of Amadeus and its distorted dramatics; whereas still others find a musical revolutionary, throwing a Romantic Molotov cocktail at classicism. Yet it in no way minimizes Mozart’s astonishing and inexplicable genius that he was the last in a progression to which Haydn had made the greatest contributions, with the modest and inaccurate disclaimer, “I am not the best of my school, though I was the first.”
The outpouring of Mozartiana this year—New York’s Lincoln Center is stupefyingly running the gamut of all Mozart’s known works—has fortunately also focused on “Papa” Haydn. Hadyn’s steady residence in the concert halls goes back to the mid 1940s, in part through the dedicated efforts of the conductor Bruno Walter. It is only recently, however, that the easy affirmation of Mozart’s superiority over a composer who was writing maturely at the time of Mozart’s birth and continued to do so after his death in 1791 has been challenged. Haydn’s earlier symphonies, written when Mozart was seven or eight, were truly innovative and pioneering—harmonically, structurally, and in their casual disregard of the sonata form which is presumed to be the key to the classical tradition of his time. The young Mozart accepted these innovations, but never achieved the power and depth of Haydn’s style. The core emotion of the older man gave way to Mozart’s poignancies, which lacked the dynamic and thematic dialectics embedded in Haydn’s music.
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