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Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 7.2 (2004) 189-212



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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Dietrich von Hildebrand

translated by John Henry Crosby

On his deathbed, Chopin said to his friends, "Play something for me together and think of me while I listen to you." When his friend Franchomme then said, "Yes, we will play your sonatas," Chopin exclaimed, "Oh no, not mine. Play for me the true music—that of Mozart."

Our hearts are filled with great joy when we think of the words of love and admiration that have been spoken about Mozart—from Goethe to Hofmannsthal,1 from Søren Kierkegaard to Theodor Haecker,2 from Beethoven to Walter Braunfels.3 Few great geniuses have been venerated and loved as much as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And yet it seems to me that not everything that has been said in praise of him has been said with true understanding. Along with wonderful expressions of the deepest insight, the praise is sometimes even painful because it is not really praise but a celebration of things that would not make Mozart greater if he possessed them, and which, thank God, he does not possess. This error is above all true of some contemporary "admirers," who are caught up in the fashionable trends of the day or are infected by historical relativism. [End Page 189] Many music critics choose for themselves certain great artists whom they make into heroes of their "fashion" ideals and into whom they arbitrarily interpret, more or less consciously, things with which these artists have nothing to do. And so, in the age of "new functionalism,"4 of neutralism and antipersonalism, in an age that scorns every "ethos" as "subjective" and romantic, one tries to brand Mozart as a kind of "ironist" and to pit him against the earnest and solemn Beethoven. There are quite a few critics who praise Mozart at the expense of Wagner and even of Beethoven.

Instead of seeing that the individual differences between the great artistic geniuses in no way carry an antithetical but rather a complementary character (for example, between Michelangelo and Raphael, Titian and Giotto, Brueghel and da Vinci—or between Bach and Haydn, Handel and Schubert), these critics try to pit Mozart against Beethoven. Whoever does this can never see the height, breadth, and depth of Mozart's spirit. Alexander Ulibishev is quite right when he says, "To love Mozart in all his masterworks means not to belong to any musical faction. It means to declare oneself for the beautiful and good in every category."5

There is only one real antithesis in the artistic realm, namely that between true art and bad pseudoart; between powerful, inspired works of an inner necessity [innere Notwendigkeit] and tedious emptiness; between noble, authentic poetry and trivial kitsch. He who does not understand the ultimate greatness and depth of Beethoven's music, who approaches him with slogans such as "subjective," "romantic," and "emotionally overwrought," who does not grasp the extraordinary objectivity and classical balance of his symphonies and quartets or the unique artistic depth—full of mystery—of his late quartets, who has no inkling of the breathtaking inner necessity of the Ninth Symphony, who does not perceive the ultimate artistic word it contains, who is not profoundly moved by the transfigured sacred depth of his Missa Solemnis—to him also will remain hidden the mystery of Mozart's world, the soul of his art. [End Page 190] Such a one would necessarily misunderstand Mozart, even if he were the greatest connoisseur of Mozart's works. Our hope is that every music critic misguided by fashionable trends and by the "Zeitgeist" might be affected by the spirit of Mozart as was the great Søren Kierkegaard who said, "You immortal one, to whom I owe everything, to whom I owe the loss of my understanding—that my soul was stirred up and my innermost being was shaken—to whom I owe my not having to walk through life as one who is incapable of being deeply moved...

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