Paging Soho the Dog...

These two newlyweds need a cartoon epithalamion, stat!

Ah, the Personal Touch

Great opening move in the search for coverage:

Hope all is well, [TK]. I wanted to reach out to follow up on...

From the Files

I wrote this about a dozen years ago for The Chronicle. It never ran.

Music by Mozart — or Goethe?

By Joshua Kosman

Chronicle Music Critic

Even for his many idolaters, the career of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can sometimes seem to stretch the limits of credibility, from his years as a child prodigy to the prolific mature period in which he turned out one perfect masterpiece after another.

If the story sounds too good to be true, that might be because it is.

In a discovery that promises to shake the world of classical music to its very foundations, a German musicologist has unearthed a trove of historical documents that cast doubt on long-held assumptions about the authorship of such works as "Don Giovanni," the "Jupiter" Symphony and "Eine kleine Nachtmusik."

That music may not be the work of Mozart at all, it turns out, but of his era's most versatile creative force: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the writer, painter, philosopher and scholar best known as the poet of "Faust."

This argument will be laid out in detail by Professor Hans-Joachim Schulfuchs in the next issue of Acta Musicologica, the journal of the International Musicological Society. And assuming his evidence withstands the intensive critical scrutiny that is sure to come, the revelation could prompt the biggest shakeup the musical realm has seen in a century or more.

"There is an entire worldwide apparatus — what I call the 'Amadeus Industry' — dedicated to furthering the preposterous notion that Mozart could have been the composer of these sublime scores," Schulfuchs said by phone recently from his office at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft at the University of Tübingen near Stuttgart.

"But in fact the evidence of Goethe's authorship is overwhelming. When this comes out, we will be looking at these familiar works in an entirely new light, I promise you.

"The 'Mostly Mozart' Festival," he added with a dry chuckle, "will have to be renamed 'Greatly Goethe.' "

If this sounds like one of those fringe notions that have Sir Francis Bacon penning the complete works of Shakespeare, think again. In place of the shadowy and fiercely disputed internal evidence so beloved of Baconians — anagrams, acrostics, tricky double meanings and so on — Schulfuchs' theory rests on a solid documentary foundation.

He says he always harbored doubts about the claims made for Mozart's prodigious musical abilities. "When you think about these stories with an open mind, they are absurd. An eight-year-old child writing symphonies? Who could believe such a thing?"

But the confirmation he needed surfaced only last year, when he stumbled across a long-lost cache of Goethe's papers — including letters, diaries and a sheaf of musical manuscripts — in the library of a small monastery near Linz, Austria.

"This was the site of another of those implausible Mozart legends — the one that has him writing the 'Linz' Symphony in four days. Ridiculous! The manuscripts show that Goethe labored over that symphony for several weeks. It was all Mozart could do to copy it in four days."

Goethe's tremendous abilities as a polymath were legendary even during his own lifetime. In addition to his literary works — including "Faust," "Wilhelm Meister" and "The Sorrows of Young Werther" — he also wrote voluminously on philosophy, history, aesthetics, literary theory and science (including botany and optics). He did stints as a theater manager, statesman, journalist and painter.

But although his interest in music was profound, scholars have always believed his technical abilities were minimal. Not so. The Schulfuchs papers reveal Goethe to have been a musician of enormous skill and extensive training — as he would have to be to write such masterpieces as "The Marriage of Figaro" or the G-Minor String Quintet.

Among the documents Schulfuchs unearthed are final copies in Goethe's hand of the "Prague" and "Haffner" Symphonies, the Clarinet Quintet and the D-Minor Piano Concerto, as well as working drafts — full of corrections, revisions and false starts — of several string quartets, the C-Minor Mass and Act 2 of "Idomeneo."

"The idea that Mozart composed these pieces in his head and then wrote them down in a single flawless draft is another myth that is impossible to take seriously," says Schulfuchs. "In fact, the reason his manuscripts are so clean is that he was merely copying over what Goethe had given him."

Are none of the canonical works actually by Mozart, then? Just one, says Schulfuchs: the serenade for strings and horns known as "A Musical Joke."

With its dull themes, grinding dissonances and maladroit counterpoint, this has always been regarded as Mozart's parody of incompetent musicians. But Schulfuchs' research shows that the piece is no parody at all.

"The title was added after his death, by those concerned for his reputation. But Mozart simply called it 'Serenade.' No one wants to admit that this was merely the best that the poor man could do."

Schulfuchs' research raises a number of questions about how and why the lifelong charade was attempted, and he admits that many of these have yet to be answered. On the other hand, other matters that have long bedeviled musicologists can now be put aside.

"People worry a lot about biographical questions, such as whether Mozart was poisoned by Salieri and so forth. Perhaps he was — but what of it? It is the composer who interests us, not the man, and the fact remains that the composer of that music lived on until 1832.

"I'm sure he was perfectly happy to put aside the 'Requiem,' even unfinished as it was, and get back to work on 'Faust.' "

This does, however, prompt the question of motivation: Why would an artist acclaimed in other fields go to such lengths to conceal his musical achievements? Schulfuchs isn't sure, but thinks it probably grew out of the pleasure of fooling other people.

"Goethe showed an enormous fondness for jests and pranks throughout his life. Among his intellectual and artistic circles, he was known for staging elaborate, straight-faced hoaxes — especially on or around the first of April every year."

It's a tradition that continues to this very day. Right here.

Because We So Rarely Get the Chance

Take the opportunity today to celebrate the effusive genius of Gioachino Rossini, who would be marking his 53rd birthday* had he lived. It's amazing that after all this time, the full scope and nature of his achievement is still seeping its way into the general consciousness — the extraordinary grandeur and depth of his serious operas (Guillaume Tell above all), the inventive pizzazz of his comedies, and the way he established a template for Italian opera that stood as a formal reference point for nearly a century.



Still, for all its familiarity, the Act 2 trio from Barbiere remains one of my favorite moments in all of Rossinidom, because of the ingenious way Rossini uses operatic practice itself as an element of comedy. The laughs in this scene come from the tugging of musical form — i.e., the requirement that melodic phrases be repeated and musical paragraphs be rounded off in full — against the characters' need to make a quick escape fer chrissake. Mozart does something a little similar in the Act 3 sextet of Figaro, but the workings there are so subtle that it takes the brilliance of Charles Rosen to explicate them.

Rossini's jape is much more straightforward, and when it's well staged (almost but not quite in this clip, unfortunately) this can have you doubled over in laughter. It's also, parenthetically, a clear precursor to the "Yes but you don't go!" joke near the end of The Pirates of Penzance — a work that is equally appropriate for today.

* Yes, 53rd. If you see anyone telling you 55, know that they're doing the math ((2012 — 1792)/4) without accounting for externalities. Tell them to say hello to your little friend Pope Gregory XIII, whose namesake invention denied Rossini a birthday in 1800 (during his lifetime, no less!) and again in 1900.

Crisis and Charisma

Lisa Hirsch thoughtfully points us to Matthew Guerrieri's post today on the succession issues at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As ever, I'm both dazzled by and envious of Matthew's combination of erudition (Max Weber! Garry Wills!) and splendid prose style, and I love his optokinetic test for conductorial efficacy.

Where he loses me is in the actual analysis of the situation, which strikes me as, well, completely wrong. The moment he pivots from politics to music we get "music directors rarely depart except under circumstances of crisis" — which is simply not true. Levine's departure is a crisis; Philadelphia's struggle to find a music director is, as Matthew quite rightly points out, part of a larger institutional crisis; and, let's see, André Previn's precipitous departure from Los Angeles was, oh, a small crisis. There are others.

But much more common, surely, is the orderly succession of music directors such as we've seen in Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Baltimore, Minnesota, San Francisco and so on. One conductor announces that he'll step down at the end of next season or the one after that, and at that point, or soon thereafter, the next guy (or, in Baltimore, gal) takes over. Note that by "orderly" I don't mean "entirely without bad feeling, controversy or turmoil." But "crisis"? As in, "the Cuban Missile Crisis"? I don't see it.

Nor do I believe Matthew's suggestion that a crisis is essential — or even particularly beneficial — in the establishing of conductorial charisma. Quick, where's the biggest known deposit of such charisma in the United States at the moment? And a follow-up: Where was the most serene, least crisis-driven transfer of podium power in the last five years? Right both times — Los Angeles, where Esa-Pekka Salonen's angst-free departure has not detracted in the slightest from the extraordinary charisma of his Venezuelan successor.

Now, it's possible the successful resolution of a crisis — once it's safely past — can contribute to a general sense of elation and vitality among an orchestra, its new music director and its public, in just the same way that a narrow escape from being hit by an oncoming semi will give you a renewed sense of the value of life. But it's no goddam way to run a railroad. A well-run orchestra, or organization of any kind, doesn't so much resolve crises as keep them from arising in the first place.

Nelsons' Ninth

I was all set to begin this post with a little paean to serendipity. With one free night during my weekend pleasure jaunt to New York, I surveyed the field a couple of months ago and decided to spend the evening at Carnegie Hall, hearing James Levine lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's Ninth. Then the whole Levine thing happened, and there was the unknown (to me) Andris Nelsons taking over; and after that he swiftly went from unknown to the next hot new thing, and I couldn't believe my luck at being in the right place at the right time.

Yeah, well. I'm not in a position to tease out what was Nelsons, and what was the BSO, and what was presumably a shortage of rehearsal time, but Thursday's was not what I'd call a good performance of the Ninth. Others felt differently (there was tumultuous applause, and Big Marc Geelhoed, for one, nigh about wet his pants in delight) but to these ears the whole thing was a struggle and a disappointment. Nelsons often didn't do much to delineate the formal outlines of the piece (without which the first movement in particular can easily sound like just one damn thing after another); and when he did decide to mark a formal juncture, it was generally with an exaggerated ritard followed by a muddy entrance.

On no evidence at all, I'm going to chalk up some of the tentative Alphonse-and-Gaston footwork between Nelsons and the string players in the outer movements to lack of rehearsal, and give a pass to the technical infelicities elsewhere. But I'd still like to think that a conductor so extravagantly lauded could bring out the ironic wit of the Ländler a little more deftly, and make the finale sound really tragic rather than simply becalmed. Maybe next time.

Breaking from Boston

As predicted elsewhere by those with their ears to the ground and their noses in the wind, the official word just came in that James Levine is stepping down as music director in Boston as of Sept. 1. This isn't exactly a surprise — Levine's been in poor health and missing appearances for a while now — but it does bring a premature close to what sounded by all reports like a fairly exciting chapter in the history of an orchestra that has badly needed same. (I was on the list to hear Levine and the BSO do the Mahler Ninth in Carnegie later this month — no word yet on who or what will replace that.)

For me, the interesting tell now will be how quickly and how skillfully the BSO management finds a successor for Levine. I know I tend to harp on this, but the business of lining up and landing music directors is one of those areas that really do separate the orchestra managers who know what they're doing from those that operate at Lincoln Center. I don't have a good sense of where Mark Volpe falls on that spectrum, but this could be the make-or-break moment for him. Levine's health issues have been obvious for so long that there's no excuse for not having someone ready to step in on short notice. If that happens, then bravo for Volpe and the BSO; if this is their cue to start forming committees and launching a search, then they're hopelessly behind the curve.