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Mozart

A bemused Papageno leans on the windowsill in Maurice Sendak's clever jacket illustration for Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart. The birdcatcher is taking a break to watch his creator -- who possesses a slight double chin and whose fine hair is carefully brushed -- perform on the clavier.

Sendak has gotten it just right: According to Hildesheimer, Mozart's world is self-contained. The composer, "perhaps the greatest genius in recorded human history," could relate only to his music and his dramatic creations. Papageno may be able to see Mozart, hear Mozart, understand Mozart. But we can't, and neither could his Viennese contemporaries.

Because they were entertained by his skill at the keyboard, those contemporaries at first tolerated Mozart. But as his career progressed, his eccentricities became more pronounced. He became unpopular, more isolated, less likable. Finally, there remained only the few men with whom he rehearsed on his death bed the Lacrymosa from his Requiem, "while Constanze and her sister Sophie cut out a nightshirt for him."

At least, so writes Hildesheimer in this brilliant, frustrating book.

Mozart has been called an "unstructured meditation." And so it is: 400-plus pages of stream-of-conciousness discourse. But Hildesheimer doesn't ramble. Aside from brief digressions on Leopold Mozart, Lorenzo Da Ponte and (of course) Constanze Mozart, he remains focused exclusively on his main subject.

His pointed criticisms of other biographers have caused something of a stir among the Mozart community. Joachim Kaiser disparages him for his "violent" attacks on Bernard Paumgartner. Volkmar Braunbehrens takes him to task for his ungenerous attitude toward Constanze Mozart. Maynard Solomon writes that Mozart is "written with sensitivity and insight, but reckless of historical constraints," and asserts that it partly inspired Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus.

Hildesheimer questions other writers' subjectivity, and accuses them of confusing conviction with fact. "For the reader is interested in the information, not the informant." To his credit, Hildesheimer acknowledges that he has his "own concept of Mozart." Less to his credit is the fact that his concept ignores much recent scholarship.

For example, a letter allegedly written by Mozart to Lorenzo da Ponte in September, 1791, is considered by most modern writers to be a forgery. Hildesheimer accepts it at face value, as he does the "pa pa pa" letter supposedly written by Emanuel Schikaneder to Mozart in 1790, a full year before Mozart composed his famous duet for Die Zauberflöte.

And while Hildesheimer disparages others for drawing unwarranted conclusions from scant evidence, he too falls into the same trap. Like many others, he concludes that Mozart's "musical joke," Ein musikalischer Spass (K. 522), must have been an unconscious response to the death of his father, Leopold. In fact, careful research by Alan Tyson shows that the composition of K. 522 was spread over many months, and that much of it was written before Leopold's final illness. (To be fair, Tyson's work was published after Hildesheimer's. But this only proves how tempting -- and dangerous -- it is to leap to conclusions when writing about Mozart.) Other examples abound. At one point, Hildesheimer describes Mozart's behavior as "often violently disorderly." On what documentation is he basing this conclusion?

The most telling of Hildesheimer's "convictions" is his reliance on the 19th-century concept of "genius." When applied to Mozart, he believes it explains a lot:

"The true genius is not helpfully communicative, which is not to say that he could not be sociable, sometimes to excess. But this sociability is autistic; in reality, he lacks the key to verbal communication of his inner motivations, except within his art. ... He does not seek self-knoweldge, gives no account of himself, neglects and consumes himself ... He burns up, but does not defy the burning; rather, he ignores it. He does not see himself in relation to the world. He doesn't see himself at all."

But Hildesheimer is at pains to define "genius," and his dependence on the notion weakens his criticism of writers who romanticize Mozart's life.

Mozart should be required reading, if for no other reason than to be exposed to the thoughtful questions that Hildesheimer asks. But approach it only after reading one or two more conventional biographies. And approach it with a grain of salt.