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On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang

British writer Anthony Burgess is perhaps best known in this country as the author of A Clockwork Orange, later made into a movie by the same name. It may come as some surprise that early on he aspired to be a composer and gave up a career in music only when he discovered his true calling as a writer.

Burgess' two interests come together in this odd little book, certainly one of the more unique commemorations of the 1991 bicentennial of Mozart's death. He sums up the book's purpose in a brief introduction:

This is, in fact, a bewildered book, in which an attempt to understand Mozart is made through celestial dialogue, a Stendhalian effort at turning Symphony No. 40 into fiction, an opera libretto, and fragments of a film script; these various forms join with the author's own schizophrenia to answer the unanswerable: in effect, the meaning of music.

The following 160 pages of literary/musical experimentation begin with the aforementioned "celestial dialogue," in which lesser composers such as Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Prokofiev and Wagner meet in heaven and engage in conversation. But Mozart never appears: He is busy giving harpsichord lessons to God, who has grown hands for the occasion.

Of the remainder of the book two sections stand out. One is the opera libretto, a brief treatment of Mozart's life in buffa form. Between acts other composers (Rossini, Schoenberg and Gershwin among them) provide criticism. All of the important figures of Mozart's life -- Archbishop Colloredo, Aloysia and Constanze Weber, Lorenzo da Ponte -- make an appearance, and in the third act the doctors gather:

Streptococcal throat infection,
Chronic inflammation.
Schönlein-Henhoch syndrome
Adds a complication.
There's glomerulonephritis,
Hard pneumonic coughing.
We predict that renal failure
is in the offing.
A mercurial overdose?
Quite out of the question.
Salieric poisoning?
An absurd suggestion.

The other remarkable section is the book's epilogue, in which Burgess abandons his experiments and in a simple essay explains just why Mozart's music is so important. No other writer, at least that I know of, has done this so well. After reading these few, final pages, the reader should be willing to forgive Burgess all the eccentricities that came before.