Today we will talk about one of the most important books dedicated to Mozart. Of course, one can argue with me that this is the main book about Mozart of all times and peoples. In the case of Bach, for example, the work of Albert Schweitzer is considered the most fundamental, in the case of Mozart - this is the book of Alfred Einstein. Of course, I join the opinion of much more knowledgeable and educated people with this statement, but in principle I agree with them. If there is some main book, in addition to the catalog of Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter von Köchel, with which it is necessary to begin acquaintance with the work of the composer, then this is the book of Alfred Einstein.
"Mozart: His Character, His Work" so says the subtitle of this book, because it has sections devoted separately to the biography and separately to creativity. But here it is "separately", a very conditional concept and I will say more about it.
First about who the author is. Alfred Einstein is a historian, musicologist of the 20th century and a cousin (some sources claim that their relationship is not established) by Albert Einstein. Strictly speaking, the Einsteins have brought much to humanity, at the time to put a monument to the whole family. He studied musicology all his conscious life. He devoted a lot of work not only to Mozart, but also to other epochs, to other styles and, in fact, his biography is a separate topic, one can talk for a very long time. I want to say only that he worked in recent years in the US and there he spent the years of the Second World War. The only time in the whole book he bursts out of a feeling of colossal protest before the evil and cruelty, the senseless killing and destruction of all that is accumulated by the German culture and what fascism did in the 20th century. Otherwise, this book is for all time, it is not tied in any way to the history of the 20th century.
This book is dedicated to the composer and was born from other works of Einstein, in particular, from his work on the catalog of Köchel.
The huge of the catalog of Köchel, can decorate any shelf devoted to musicology, dedicated to Mozart and with it the work on biography must begin, on the study of Mozart's creativity is Alpha and Omega.
In the form in which we now have the catalog Köchel, it came out of print after many years of painstaking and completely unique, unprecedented in the complexity of research, the writings of Alfred Einstein.
Einstein for decades studied the Köchel catalog and identified in it those works whose dating was incorrect. Therefore, the sequence of numbers that was in Köchel in the 19th century and in Einstein, in the 20th century, it is completely different and the numbers are not in order. And when now we write "KV" - the number according to the pointer Köchel, sometimes add "KE" - Köchel-Einstein, because this is a new edition of the catalog and there the dating of very many works has changed. It was removed a lot of works that were attributed to the composer, especially the little Mozart. And vice versa, the catalog was replenished with some names of compositions, which were not there.
So, here are the five hundred and more numbers that make up the main body of the Köchel catalog, completely, each of them was processed by Einstein. That is, all the information, all the dating, work with the manuscript, the history of the creation of each work, some textological things, all questions to the slightest, the finest details, have been clarified. This is a colossal work and as a result we have a completely different catalog, not the same as it was in the 19th century. That is, not just a worthy continuer of the works of the great cataloger, but also a scientist who significantly changed our whole idea of Mozart's work.
And in the process of this incredible work, Einstein received a certain knowledge that no Mozartovist of that time had and now probably does not possess. Here it is not even on the scale of the individual, but in that he could look around Mozart's entire work at the same time. With all its branches, minor, unfinished things that were left without instrumentation, without arrangement, things that were attributed to other composers for a long time and fell out of the circle of research work. And he sees such thematic rolls, which no one else sees, he sees such imaginative ranks that go through all of Mozart's works, which no one sees. He sees this according to the material itself, the melody, the various reminiscences of that era.
Alfred Einstein
And Einstein wrote the book "Mozart: His Character, His Work", where he consistently expounds his view on the composer's work. The person of Mozart in the book is devoted to much less text than his work, which is divided, and the composition of performers, and genres (church music, aria, opera, etc.).
What can be said about the concept of Mozart's creativity, which sets forth Einstein. The concept is very interesting. He adheres to the view of Mozart's creativity in the sense that everyday problems, tasks, life peripeteias, are not decisive, decisive in the writing of a certain symphony. When you know all the details of the composer's biography and when you see all of his work as a whole, it's very easy to slide into a simple binding to some life moments. "The teeth hurt - such a symphony was written, the teeth did not hurt, and the liver hurt - another symphony was written." We knew it and saw it in many other books.
Einstein has a fundamentally different concept. The work of the great composer is subject to the laws of the material itself. The very music architecture demanded the completion of such and such or other forms, required and logically went to write this or that piece of music. The very laws of creativity, the laws of harmony, the laws of genres that existed and historically evolved, they demanded work in new forms. Mozart, as is known, and this not only Einstein claims, remained completely faithful to the forms that had developed in the classical music of his time. That is, all of its innovation, it is within these forms, he was able to write in the already well-known genre, formal design, he was able to write such a thing that no one except him, of course, could come up with and express.
And here Einstein asserts that it is not necessary to deduce Mozart's biographical details, all his ups and downs of creativity. Do not engage in the fact that we suck from the biographical details and occasions, his musical creativity. And he builds his whole monograph on this concept.
Einstein in his book does not adhere to the myth of Mozart's poisoning, he refutes it. He is very bad about Constance. Einstein sees Mozart's wife as a philistine, who got into her hands a gold vein - the legacy of her husband. And she gradually developed this vein.
Einstein can be understood, the tragedy of the researcher is that Constanze destroyed some of her husband's drafts. We have reached only a few pages of Mozart's drafts, where we see that he was not dictated by the "holy spirit", and his works were born in agony and daily, hard work. They are visible in them, and strikeouts, blots, and any insertion, the change of some basic things, he did not get anything ready.
So Constanze acted with the legacy of her husband is very strange. On the one hand, she carefully preserved everything she considered valuable, thank God, she almost all considered valuable. We have reached, and correspondence, and personal papers, and a catalog of several pages, which Mozart did not have time to finish by the end of his life, and manuscripts. But the letters carefully scraped out the individual places, and so extinct so carefully that even the X-ray does not allow you to read now what exactly was written there. Although, something and managed to recover. Several letters, very personal, apparently, were destroyed. The same thing happened with the drafts.
You can imagine how the researcher, who painstakingly analyzed one sheet after another of Mozart's immense music heritage, can imagine what it meant to mean the loss of these drafts.
Einstein also has several accents on Mozart's well-known relationship with the archbishop and his last years of life in Vienna. He earned there with the help of academies, concerts, when he received paid orders and existed as an independent, free artist.
"The Last Hours of Mozart" Henry Nelson O'Neil
Einstein, after reading about the biography of Mozart, we can not make a complete and objective presentation about it. I can be challenged, but it seems to me that Einstein here is largely unfair.
On the analysis of creativity, nothing more valuable and nothing more objective can not be imagined. There are sections devoted to such roll-calls, which only Einstein could know. In this work, the foundation of all subsequent dissertations, studies, which have been introduced for many years, is laid.
In Einstein's book a separate section is devoted to piano concertos. Another feature of this monograph is that Mozart's greatest achievement, ahead of him in his incredible genius and simplicity, is that Einstein considers his clavier concerts. Concerts for pianos are Mozart's favorite genre, 27 numbers, each of which is in some way a masterpiece. Mozart was terribly fond of this genre. It was a genre where it was most fully revealed, even more fully than in brilliant operas and well-known symphonies.