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Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart's Operas

Since Mozart's death, each generation has remade the composer in its own image. Early on he was seen as a pre-Romantic figure, a genius endowed with supernatural powers who worked with one foot in this world and one in the next. At other times (including ours) his popular image has more closely resembled that of an idiot savant, perpetrating what author Maynard Solomon calls "the myth of the eternal child."

Happily, increased interest in Mozart's life has spurred research. Biographers have begun to put Mozart where he belongs, in his own time and place. The resulting picture is becoming increasingly clear: No longer a cosmic being, Mozart instead is viewed as an extraordinarily gifted, bourgeois artist, devoted to his wife and children, who worked hard in order to make ends meet.

He worked hard, but not in his own, isolated world. Instead he participated fully in the social experiment of Josephine Vienna. He kept abreast of the latest news; he owned and read books. He was a member of an intellectually stimulating organization, the Freemasons. The music he composed, especially his operas, was pertinent.

The upshot, writes author Nicholas Till, was that Mozart became an active participant in the most progressive philosophical movement of his age, a literate hodgepodge of new ideas known as the Enlightenment. Indeed Mozart, along with Kant, Goethe and Schiller, should be considered one of the movement's leading lights.

Till, a graduate of Cambridge University, has directed Mozart's operas at the Glyndebourne Festival. His understanding of this subject is deep, and he has broadened it through systematic research into contemporary literature.

In a series of carefully documented chapters, Till explains the intellectual and social climate that influenced Mozart's operas from La finta giardiniera (K. 196) to Die Zauberflöte (K. 620). He clearly demonstrates how each, in turn, reflects the Enlightenment's evolving philosophy. Along the way, he shows how that philosophy accounts for many of the operas' apparent "problems," including those of that most troublesome opera of all, Die Zauberflöte.

Be warned: Familiarity with the operas is essential. Some familiarity with Enlightenment thought is helpful, but less esssential. Till, a thoughtful guide for most of this journey, provides substantial background information where it is most needed. The result is a fascinating eye-opener. There will be times -- for me, it was the chapter on Don Giovanni (K. 527) -- when you won't be able to put the book down.

Understanding why Mozart's operas were so important for 18th-century Vienna makes them no less interesting today. The result, of course, is just the opposite.