The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius (review)

The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius. By Peter Kivy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. [xiv, 287 p. ISBN 0-300-08758-6. $35.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Peter Kivy's latest book is a departure for the author, who has earned a reputation for carefully argued, often controversial views on musical aesthetics. Kivy returns here to one of his earliest interests: the way by which musical genius is perceived and understood. This is not to say that aesthetics play no role in the book; Kivy's exegeses of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and a variety of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers on the subject are among its most valuable contents. Strictly speaking, though, this is a book about genius, and Kivy's first subject is not music, but genius and its attendant mythology:

To resort to a myth is, no doubt, an admission of ignorance. But the myth is a way of presenting facts. . . . We cannot 're-allocate' the facts of genius, because we do not know what genius is. Until we do, the myths are all we have. (p. 219)

With these very sensible statements toward the end of The Possessor and the Possessed, Kivy explains why he has turned for his central argument to two ancient myths, one ("The Possessed") stemming from Plato and the other ("The Possessor") from a tradition long associated with Longinus. These myths, Kivy argues, along with a third one, which he labels the "workaholic" myth, are necessary to explain the otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon of artistic genius. If they were successfully rationalized or explained away (a possibility that Kivy is careful not to dismiss), the result "could no more leave untouched the wonder we now experience over the mystery of artistic creation and its works, at the highest level, than could the discovery that comets are 'merely' dirty ice leave untouched the wonder and awe our ancestors experienced in contemplating these (for them) majestic and ominous portents" (p. 253).

Kivy maintains that the recognition of genius as something inexplicable in human nature (hence neither supernatural nor divine) fills an important and irreplaceable role. Although admitting that they might succeed, he warns those who would seek to explain genius through reductionist theories to tread with caution. Toward the end of the book, he devotes a long chapter to a step-by-step rebuttal of one such theory—that of Tia DeNora (cited below)—and another to a similar critique of Christine Battersby's Gender and Genius (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

The overall theme of this book, then, is a forceful vindication of the concept of genius and of its fundamental necessity in the midst of growing academic revisionism. On these terms, it is a qualified success. Kivy's carefully constructed arguments, however, are at times undermined by questionable assumptions and procedures .

Many readers will have difficulty with one of the central ideas of The Possessor and the Possessed: that philosophers and their writings play the central role in determining how society, in the broadest sense, understands and values genius. Kivy argues that since the mid-eighteenth century there has been a pendulum swing in public perception between the two views represented by his title. The platonic myth of the demon-possessed, and hence passive, creator (Mozart) battles for ascendancy with the Longinian one of the self-possessed genius (Handel, Beethoven) who sets his or her own rules. Those who, like Bach or Haydn, appear mainly as hardworking craftsmen producing work of extraordinary quality are "odd men out."

The myth of Mozart as the eternal, inspired child, which has intrigued Kivy for over thirty years, represents for him the high noon of the platonic view of musical genius. It can be traced, he suggests, to the publication of the second edition of Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in 1844, by which time Mozart had achieved iconic status for the author. The complicated uses...