Mozart: Portraits of a Genius

Mozart, as a toddler, watched his sister gain her father's favour by playing the piano. Due to some innate feeling of not being loved, he tries to garner daddy's attention by doing the same and fate has it that Mozart turns out to be exceptional. Leopold, like most, seeks fulfilment in life and now sees the boy as his opportunity. Due to his unusual childhood and his ever-increasing sense of being unloved, Wolfgang finds it hard to deal with the real world and lives in various fantasy worlds. Elias then uses tools from Freudian psychology to neatly explain how Mozart's strong imagination, musical sophistication and 'social consciousness' combine to produce works of genius. Elias claims to be keeping the mystery of genius intact, but he seems also to be saying that Mozart's genius (or at the very least our ability to recognise it) lay in being able to keep his imagination sufficiently in check to capture the imagination of others before leading them on sublime journeys. Mozart's social awareness is what seemingly makes this possible. And so the book goes on. Snapshots of Mozart's life are treated like a jigsaw puzzle and pieced together in the Elias/Freud paradigm. In my opinion, the unsatisfactory description of Mozart's decision to break away from his father shows that perhaps there are failings in making simplified, sweeping statements about one of history's most profound geniuses. This book reads like a series of lecture notes that occasionally repeat themselves and lacks a sense of completeness. However, the beauty of the book is the evident love that the author has for Mozart. Indeed, one of its premises is that Mozart felt that his life had lost all meaning, gave up on life and wrote the Requiem for himself. Unusual for an intellectual such as Norbert Elias to subscribe to this famous idea, and also unusual that he noticeably underestimates Mozart's finances. But there's no doubt that Mozart's work resonated in Elias the pragmatist just as deeply as it resonates in all of us. His love of 'Mozart the man as well as Mozart the artist' shines like a beacon and makes the book an immensely enjoyable read.

This small volume might be the perfect gift for the aficionado who owns all the other important biographies on Mozart. Norbert Elias was a sociologist by profession. Looking at the life of Mozart, he asked what influence did the society in which Mozart grew up have on his development as an artist. Elias did not try to explain the nature of genius in terms of sociology, as the subtitle of the US translation implies. Rather, he tried to put Mozart's genius in perspective. The German title of the book made this quite clear: "Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies", which translates roughly as "Mozart: Sociological aspects of a genius". The charm of the book really lies in the fact that Elias did not try to explain away the mystery of genius. As a small extra for anyone who has ever wondered why so many important composers came from German speaking countries (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, etc.), whereas France and England produced few composers of the same stature during this period, Elias's essay has a neat, little theory which provides some answers. It also warms the hearts of economists, by the way.