Joseph Solman - Mozartiana: Two Centuries of Notes, Quotes, and Anecdotes about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

MOZARTIANA

COLLECTED AND ILLUSTRATED BY

JOSEPH SOLMAN

MOZARTIANA

Sometime in the winter of 1930, a roommate who shared a studio apartment with my brother and me bought a recording of Mozart's Piano Concerto in G, K. 453. From the moment we put it on the battered, rickety Victrola, we all became entranced with its fluid beauty. It quickly replaced the well-worn Appassionata sonata of Beethoven as our daily religious service.

A great and growing passion for the instrumental music of Mozart ultimately led me to his operas. In the years following 1934, when John Christie began the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, recordings of Mozart's operatic works became popular with music lovers and radio stationsso much so that I found I could paint all afternoon listening to the sounds of The Magic Flute and Figaro, the music from the radio filling the room as the broad brush strokes of my street scenes filled the canvas.

As I became thus absorbed in his music, I decided to try a modern portrait of my idol. I checked the complete iconography of Mozart but soon discovered that the public craving for idealization of its great men had caused innumerable hacks to transform Mozart into a fair-haired Greek god. There were twenty-six portraits in all, most of them spurious, and no two seemed to give the same impression of what Wolfgang Mozart actually looked like. I did find a drawing from life done in 1789 by one Dora Stock that impressed me with its veracity and honesty. The jutting profile, the prominent nose, a soft, sensuous mouth with a hint of irony wrinkling it, a slightness of statureall were there, a visual replica of the contemporary descriptions of Mozart that I'd read.

Using this portrait as my point of departure, I began making a number of sketches in pencil and watercolor. These, presented here in black-and-white, I offer as a kind of visual commentary on the many statements and stories about Mozart that I have collected over the years. In assembling them for this book I have discovered that reactions to Mozart are as abundant and unexpected as the rich variety found in the music itself. And the volume and fervor of these reactions are (at least to this surveyor) absolutely unparalleled in Western music and, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, in Western art.

For me, Mozart's music represents neither the prolonged sigh of faith that characterizes so much of the music written before his time, nor the stormy idealism which cloaks most music after him. Rather, he is that mercurial balance of the skeptic and the humane. Like him, and in him, we can always discover new worlds.

JOSEPH SOLMAN

New York City