Mozart’s Ghosts: Haunting the Halls of Musical Culture by Mark Everist (review)

Mark Everist’s engaging new book addresses Mozart’s remarkable status as musical and cultural icon through an examination of the composer’s reception from his death in 1791 through to the present day. Everist identifies problems with existing approaches to this huge topic, including the impulse to record data but not to analyse it, the ‘study of tiny instances of Mozart reception, frequently treated in a rather short-winded fashion’creating ‘an atomic view of the field’, a‘largely uncritical retreading of tropes developed since 1800’, and a warming up of ideas from important nineteenth-century texts in modern-day contexts (pp. 13–14). His intention ‘to explore the idea that modern reverence for the composer—his renown—is conditioned by earlier responses to his music—its reception’ (p. 18) is fairly conventional, but his approach is not. Analysing Mozart hagiography rather than dismissing it, he aims to steer a course between general survey and narrowly focused study, on the whole successfully achieving his objective. Although Everist somewhat overstates the geographical breadth of his study since five of the eight main chapters focus on reception in France, his wide-ranging coverage of fiction, arrangements of Mozart’s music, written criticism, film, and veneration of a Mozart autograph is most welcome.

After a clear description of ‘sites’ of Mozart reception in the Introduction, Everist undertakes a series of case studies. The initial chapter ‘Phantoms of the Opera’, also the title of three chapters together as Part I, exposes the intertextual sophistication of Gaston Leroux’s novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910), culminating in references to Mozart via the protagonist Erik in its second half. ‘Mozart and L’impresario’ accounts for Jacques Offenbach’s 1856 adaptation of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor for the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens through an existing German adaptation, Mozart und Schikaneder (1845), as well as Offenbach’s quest to establish a distinct identity for his newly created theatre. ‘The Commendatore and the Clavier (Quadrille)’ discusses the numerous transcriptions of Don Giovanni published in 1866, situating them against the backdrop of three very different new productions of the opera in Paris that same year. The two chapters comprising Part II (Holy Spirits) each take an audacious turn. ‘Mozart’s “Twelfth Mass”: Case Closed?’ examines a work not actually by Mozart through the lens of primarily nineteenth-century Anglo-American criticism, addressing the popularity of the work and critical reactions to evidence of misattribution. And ‘Enshrining Mozart: Don Giovanni and the Viardot Circle’ looks at the great French singer Pauline Viardot’s relationship with Don Giovanni, especially her sanctification of the autograph, which she owned for nearly forty years, kept and displayed in a reliquary and allowed to be exhibited publicly in reverential fashion in 1878 and 1887. Part III, ‘Specters at the Feast’, begins with a familiar site of Mozart reception, press criticism, but focuses on an important nineteenth-century author unfamiliar to many non-Francophone musicologists. ‘Mozart in Two Worlds: The Writings on Music of Blaze de Bury’ examines views of Mozart across fifty years of articles by one author in a single journal, the Revue des deux mondes. Consistently and enthusiastically venerated by Blaze de Bury, Mozart provided a yardstick against which composers of earlier and modern eras could be judged, poised perfectly between contrasting Italian and German musical traditions and working his magic in an analogous fashion to Raphael. ‘Speaking with the Supernatural: E.T. A. Hoffmann, George Bernard Shaw, and Die Oper aller Opern’ reads Shaw’s ‘Don Giovanni Explains’ (1887) primarily as a satirical response to Hoffmann’s ‘Don Juan: Eine fabelhafte Begebenheit, die sich mit einem reisendem Enthusiasten zugetragen’ (1813). ‘Specters at the Feast: Elvira Madigan and its Legacy’ provides a light finale, tracing the popularity of the middle movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C, K. 467, through its appearance first in the Swedish film Elvira Madigan (1967) and...