What Sounds Greater?
BEGINNER’S EAR | 5.16.21
Like any pro bono lawyer, I had no say in the matter. When the Munk Debates approached me with an invitation to take part in a debate on who was the greater composer, Beethoven or Mozart, they already had someone in Beethoven’s corner. I was to argue in Mozart’s defense.
I love Mozart, and can talk about his music until the cows come home. But the challenge here was to argue for his greatness. More than that: his greaterness. What’s especially tricky in this fight is that the rules have been set by the other guy. Because the paradigm we still whip out to measure artistic value – a mix of innovation, individuality, struggle and scope – was calibrated to Beethoven.
Then there’s the legacy of the declared greatness of particular Western artists fueling the presumed superiority of Western culture in general. In truth, the whole premise of the debate feels more 1921 than 2021.
But debates are sport, and I was game.
In prepping for the fight, I spoke to the Mozart scholar Robert Levin. I asked him how he would tackle the question of innovation, hoping that he would give me a musicologist’s catalogue of Mozartian firsts.
Instead, he offered an observation:
The history of art is absolutely filled with figures who fall into one of two paradigms. There are those who perfect and those who innovate.
The point, he explained, was not to confuse innovation for greatness. The brilliance of a composer like Claude Debussy was pure innovation. But Johann Sebastian Bach was a perfecter: he worked almost exclusively with inherited traditions. That didn’t stop Bach from taking the number one spot on the list of the ten “greatest” composers compiled by my colleague Tony Tommasini in the New York Times.
Mozart, Professor Levin argued, was like a “magic mirror, that reflected all the best of what there was to do – he traveled all of Europe and everything that was good and useful he assimilated into his way of composing.”
Mozart minimizers — and there are many — bring up the predictable nature of many phrases and patterns in his works. I don’t think there’s another composer so admired and loved who gets tarred with the word “cliché” quite as often, or as justifiably, as Mozart.
But even the British composer Thomas Adès, who has choice words to say about Mozart’s “Requiem,” points out that “two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.”
And that to me is the mystery of Mozart: that music so seemingly simple and natural can feel so profound.
In “The Art of Is” the violinist and improviser Stephen Nachmanovitch looks at research that suggests that Homer’s “Iliad” was an improvised epic made up of formulaic phrases and recycled story fragments that were already in circulation.
Our modern ears hear improvising as creating something all new and of this moment. It might seem contradictory to improvise with prefabricated materials: epithets, formulas, well-known story lines. We like to think of creativity as fresh and new. But it is possible to be fresh and old. Artists like Homer were called rhapsodes, from the Greek words for stitching and singing: to rhapsodize means to stitch a song together.
Whether you cast your vote for Mozart or Beethoven — for perfection or revolution — the deciding factor for what sounds great should be not whether the thing was new in its time, but whether it feels fresh today.
Corinna
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If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about Mozart, follow my debate with the pianist Andrew Burashko on the podcast here. And if you enjoy it, leave a comment — you’ll be the first non-curmudgeon to do so.
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