Experiencing Mozart: A Listener's Companion. By David Schroeder

David Schroeder’s Experiencing Mozart: A Listener’s Companion begins with a startling question: ‘Why should we care about Mozart? He lived two and a half centuries ago, and since then we have gone from the Industrial Revolution to the Spice Girls, with world wars and Elvis in between—how can someone in the eighteenth century have anything to say of relevance to us?’ (p. xi). Fortunately, his question is a rhetorical one (sadly, there are those who would pose it in all seriousness), and he amply demonstrates that Mozart was neither ‘wanabee’ nor ‘has been’. That his life and work treats issues as relevant to our understanding of the human condition now as they were in his own day shines through loud and clear. Schroeder is actually writing to a specific brief to embed Mozart and his music in a cultural, social, and political setting that will resonate with the reader in the twenty-first century. Experiencing Mozart is the latest in a series edited by Gregg Akkerman who explains its aim as being ‘to give readers a deeper understanding of pivotal musical genres and the creative work of its iconic practitioners . . . [supplying readers with] a broad understanding of major musical genres and the achievements of composers and artists within those genres as lived musical experience’ (p. ix). Inclusivity is the stylistic watchword, and one way in which Schroeder succeeds in bridging the perceived gap that the Explaining series aims to fill is by introducing in each chapter a section in which one of Mozart’s compositions is presented to the reader as if he/she were actually there experiencing it in real time. So, for instance, as you read through the book you variously assume the persona of a recent graduate of Salzburg University participating in a graduation Finalmusik one warm summer evening in August 1776 (graced by a performance of the D major Serenade, K. 239), which vividly describes the comic practicalities of how to march with a bass or violone strapped to your graduation outfit; a member of the audience at a performance of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony in the Lincoln Center in New York on 21 August 2012; a curious filmgoer attending the screening of a new film called Amadeus in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in September 1984 (introducing the Gran’ Partita, K. 361); a would-be suitor of a young female pianist called Barbara Ployer (a pupil of Mozart) who is performing her teacher’s variations on Ah vous dirai-je Maman at a Viennese salon in 1785 (you quite fancy her, and her coquettish glances in your direction during her performance leave you wondering if the feeling may be mutual); an opera fan who opts to stay in one evening and watch a made-for-TV production of Figaro on Wednesday, 5 October 1977; and so on. These tableaux do indeed place the reader in a ‘first-person’ setting, and if this helps to make the experience of Mozart’s music more meaningful for readers coming to his work for the first time, then that is all to the good. (So fascinated is he by Mozart’s music and what he sees in it that, once or twice, Schroeder gets completely carried away and eventually has to remind himself that he’s supposed to be writing from the perspective of, say, a 1970s TV viewer rather than himself—but who cares when the writing is so clear and insightful, stemming from genuine immersion in the Mozart repertory over many years?) His imaginative recreations of situations are never merely gratuitous or artificial ploys. Each one has a purpose, for instance showing how musical codes may have been read by the initiated (including successions of ‘topics’—the opening page of the F major Sonata, K. 332 is the inevitable example). Indeed, Schroeder’s writing is so engaging that it will teach hardened Mozartians a thing or two about experiencing these and other works from fresh perspectives.

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