Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)

It's tempting to read this odd little farrago (in the strict sense of the word) as a pendant to Burgess's This Man And Music (1983). But actually, for all its 148-page slimness and light-hearted silliness this is a more substantial and lasting intervention into 'thinking about music' than the earlier work. We get five different strands, varying not only in content but in form from one another, interleaved. First, in music heaven, we get a playscript dialogue of Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Wagner and a couple of other famous composers chatting about music, and God, and Mozart. This breaks off at p.16 to segue to 'Act 1' of an opera bouffe about Mozart's life, of which (this being a book) we only get the libretto. Some of the versifying for this sprightly enough, although some strikes a clangier note: rhyming 'piano', 'plan, oh' and 'soprano' [22] for instance (sopranno?), or several times pairing 'Mozart' and 'eternal art' [eg 57] which just doesn't work.

Act 1 ends on p.33 and we're back to heaven: Rossini, Stendhal and Berlioz in heaven's bar, ordering drinks from an unnamed 'Barman' ('forgive the deference. I've only just arrived' [34]—it's not spelled out, but I assume this minor character, with his solitary short speech, is Enderby). Act 2 of the musical starts up on p.40: Mozart married now to Constanze, composing for the cloddish Emperor, bickering with Salieri. All very Amadeusian. Back (p.59) to heaven, where Schoenberg shares a Martini with Gershwin. Act 3 (64-76) follows, although the musical is really starting to feel like it has outstayed its welcome. Then Henry James appears, to spar ponderously with Da Ponte ('really ... I am appalled') and we turn to a ten-page short story entitled 'K.550 (1788)'.

Let's pause here for a moment. This story revisits Napoleon Symphony territory, only more so: an experimental attempt to capture in prose the music of Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor. That's the one that begins:

This is a 'purer' experiment than the much more capacious, macaronic Napoleon Symphony, and it seemed to me to work less well. Its opening paragraph gives you a flavour:

The squarecut pattern of the carpet. Squarecut the carpet's pattern. Pattern the cut square carpet. Stretching from open door to windows. Soon, if not burned, ripped, merely purloined, as was all too likely, other feet would, other feet would tread. He himself, he himself, he himself trod in the glum morning. From shut casement to open door and back to and to and back. Wig fresh powdered, brocade unspotted. patch on cheek new pimple in decorum and decency hiding, stockings silk most lustrous, hands behind folded, unfolded, refolded as he trod on squarecut pattern's softness. Russet the hue, the hue russet. Past bust of Plato, of Aristotle bust, Thucydides, Xenophon. Foreign voices trapped in print (he himself, he himself read) and print in leather, behind glass new polished, ranged ranged ranged, the silent army spoke in silence of certain truths, of above all the truth of the eternal stasis. Stasis stasis stasis. The squarecut pattern of the carpet. He trod. [81]

And so on, and on, tedious-repetitively. Repetitively. Repetitively. The repetition of musical notes accretes richness and depth; the repetition of words is merely monotonous, except where it is designedly comic (which it is not, here). There some sort of story, or at least the putting before us of a late eighteenth-century man and woman, but the whole interlude (let's call it a 'repetitative') makes tiresome reading. When it deviates from the 'purely' musical template it puts in question the need for the template in the first place, and when it adheres closely it produces banality. Are we, in effect, to sing He himself, he himself, he himself trod to the opening movement A1 theme?

If so I think we can agree: that's a rubbish lyric.

I'm not sure Burgess would disagree. The ten-page experimental short story is followed by a ten page dialogue between 'Anthony' and 'Burgess' that immediately concedes the point:

ANTHONY

Gibberish.

BURGESS

Yes, a good deal of it. There's a musical structure underneath, filched from Mozart, but one art cannot do the work of another. Music is all verbs. Well, there are occasional nouns, as in the opening of the Overture to The Magic Flute. There are phones but no phonemes. That gibberish is part of my programme of evasion. [92]

That paragraph contains more stimulating and thought-provoking observation on music than all eleven essays of This Man and Music combined.

Is music 'all verbs'? I wonder. At any rate this book doesn't sit still. 'Anthony' and 'Burgess' discuss music rather brilliantly; then we chop away to an abortive film-script of Mozartian biography, and the book finishes with the author addressing us in propria persona: 'I address the reader as an integrated, not one whimsically split into two. I have tried to dramatise; now I must try to be lyrical' [139].

I think one reason why this book is more effective than This Man and Music is that its dialogism is a genuine attempt to argue two different points of view. In the earlier book, Burgess was more or less dismissive of the idea that music is 'about' emotion, stressing instead its formal structures. Here he looks at the same question from both sides.

ANTHONY

Music is essentially an emotional experience. It makes one feel, not think.

BURGESS

True, if it doesn't move it's nothing. And yet it must, at its most authentic, make an intellectual appeal.

ANTHONY

The intellect is concerned with ideas. There are no ideas in music.

BURGESS

But what is an idea? A constraint upon emotion. A formulation, a formalisation, a form. The intellectual element in music is its form.  [95]

This is a genuinely interesting notion, although not one (I think) with which I agree. There is surely more to ideation than pure form, and surely ideas are more than just constraints upon emotion—I'm minded to object that opposing 'form' and 'emotion' in this manner ignores the form of emotion, which may even be its most important aspect. It may explain why Burgess was so hostile to pop, and youth culture as a whole. A Mozart symphony may indeed be predominantly the impression of a highly refined form upon music. On the other hand, rock and roll is (begging Eliot's pardon) surely not an escape from emotion but precisely the turning loose of emotion. In the book's most startling apothegm, Burgess solus dismisses the capacity for emotional life of a whole generation of people who happen to be younger than he: 'Romantic music, reaching its apogee in Tristran und Isolde, depended upon its capacity to rend the heart,' he says. 'Young people distrust emotion, indeed are hardly capable of it unless it takes the form of self-pity' [141]. Say what? (Earlier the 'Burgess' identity sternly tells the 'Anthony' one that 'Anarchic art is an impossibility' [99]. Let us, I suggest, never mind that bollocks.)

And actually Burgess's little book is far wiser than this. One of Mozart and the Wolf Gang's most fascinating insights is that music articulates the unconscious structures of subjectivity. One reason it is so hard to talk rationally or intellectually about the core intelligibility of music is surely that it shapes the unconscious rather than strokes the ego or bolsters the superego. Burgess phrases this rather differently, but to the same purpose:

If Mozart seemed to stand for a kind of imperial stasis, yet it ought to have been clear to the close listener that a chromatic restlessness was at work and that, within accepted frameworks, the situation of an individual soul, not an abstract citizen, was being delineated. Mozart was as Viennese as Freud. [144]

Wonderful. It's this version of Burgess alive to what he rather brilliantly calls the irony of form [130] that writes the best novels, and it's a genuine insight into the matter at hand. The notion that a non-referential, non-semantic mode of art can be ironic unpacks a deep truth about how music works, and also about how irony works. Quite the double whammy, conceptually speaking. It's almost a disappointment when Burgess reverts to the point he worries over so unprofitably in This Man And Music: the 'wolf gang' of the title, the homo homini lupus sense of humankind.

CONSTANZE

The window is wide open, Wolferl. See all those people coming in to pay their respects.

A JEW

It was the stink of sweating nakedness that nauseated. And then there was no time for that luxury. The gas appeared, sinuous angel of death. But at the moment of expiry I caught the strain. A bar or so of the Quartet in B flat. We praise thee that thy music did certify a heaven when hell began. 

AN SS CAMP COMMANDANT

The daily stench. One heaved over one's breakfast. It was not fair to little Anna Maria. She vomited in the garden. Killing is hard labour. But at the end of a laborious day of murder she played the little Sonata in C and sent our souls skywards. We praise thee that music did ease the strain of our pious duty

A GERMAN STATESMAN

We praise thee that thou didst testify to the world the Teutonic gift of order

CHORUS

The wolves are ganging up.
The Baptist shares your cup,
The golden speaker too.
Love of the numen you
Exemplified, exemplified.
Your music never lied. [74]

What Burgess doesn't say here (perhaps it's to be taken as implicit?) is that Mozart's music only doesn't lie because it doesn't tell the truth either. Veracity in this sense is a category error when applied to music. Burgess's elision of political order with the formal order of music adds two and two to make 666. Flaubert's witty definition of music from his Dictionary of Received Ideas—that music makes a people's disposition more gentle, e.g. 'The Marseillaise'—is pretty funny. But it doesn't bear very much actual analysis. The French Revolution hardly happened because the Marseillaise is so stirring, after all.

Of course, then we're entitled to ask: if music doesn't work in the world according to this semantic-impulsive logic, if it doesn't, as it were, say 'Go,' and we go, or 'Come,' and we come, they how can it be 'ironic'? The answer, though not explicitly laid out by Burgess in this volume, has to do with the way music bodies forth a deeper logic of reality. Were Burgess a conventionally religious writer we might call it God; or at least mumble something about Schopenhauer and the fabric of existence. My sense is that there's something less categorical, and less theological, at work here. Something of the 'no semantic content in music except the irony of all semantic content' kind. There's a Clive James essay about Polanski's The Piano, where (though he calls the movie a masterpiece) he ridicules the notion that there is power for good or redemption in music. 'The chamber music in the Warsaw ghetto would undoubtedly have delighted Mengele and Heydrich,' James says, 'both of them serious music lovers. But it would not have changed their minds. That was the power of music: spiritually great but practically zero' [James, The Meaning of Recognition: New Essays 2001-2005 (Picador 2005), 28]. James is usually more cogent than this: hard to credit he really thinks the spiritual and the practical exist in completely separate states, zero-sum in relation to one another. And, indeed, when I say above that there's nothing theological about Burgess's musings, I'm certainly overstating it. He was not an orthodox Catholic but neither was he a materialist atheist.

The dialogue portion of the book ends with Mozart giving a harpsichord recital to the assembled musicians: appearing as a five year old ('climbing on to the stool as if it were a hillock'). 'Ach mein Gott,' grumbles Beethoven. 'The infant prodigy.' Then his father steps up to turn the pages.

MENDELSSOHN

His father appears ... strange. It does not seem to be Leopold Mozart

BEETHOVEN

Oh God.

MENDELSSOHN

Precisely. [138]

The real test of the success of this strange little novel is that we tap this final flourish and it doesn't ring false, or merely hyperbolic. It works.