Before you read it, ask yourself if you care, and why.
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Who Cares What Mozart Looked Like?
You and I Do, for Starters -- but What Drives Our Curiosity?
By TERRY TEACHOUT
All that most people know about the life and personality of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is what they saw in the film version of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus," which was -- to put it mildly -- a little less than true to life. (Yes, he liked to talk dirty, and no, F. Murray Abraham didn't poison him.) So last month's announcement that a hitherto-unknown portrait of Mozart that was painted from life had been authenticated by a London musicologist kicked up a fuss in classical-music circles. In fact, a fair number of authentic Mozart portraits have long been known to exist and can be viewed at www.mozartportraits.com. This one, painted by Joseph Hickel in 1783, looks very much like the familiar unfinished portrait by Joseph Lange, the composer's brother-in-law, that now hangs in the Salzburg Mozarteum. Both show a fine-featured young man with sensitive eyes and a prominent nose.
So what?
Knowing what Mozart looked like tells us nothing of value about the only reason why he matters to us today, which is his music. The G Minor Symphony would be every bit as profound if Mozart had been bald, cross-eyed or six feet tall, or if he had died at 75 instead of 35. Yet most of us, myself included, really do care about such things, unimportant though they are in the long run. I sat up and took notice when Cliff Eisen declared Hickel's not-very-good painting to be "arguably the most important Mozart portrait to be discovered since the composer's death," just as I was fascinated to learn that Scottish scholars have now created an "authentic" portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by feeding a laser scan of his skull (which was exhumed in 1894) into a computer. To be sure, it looks a lot like the existing paintings of Bach, but I'm still glad to have seen it.
Why do I care? Why do any of us long to know about the private lives of the artists whose work moves us most? The answer to this question is at once obvious and elusive: We want to know whether we have anything in common with them. Samuel Johnson, a great biographer who was himself the subject of a great biography, summed up that near-irresistible urge when he told James Boswell that "I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use."
But what if we knew nothing of the lives of the artists we love best? That's not an entirely hypothetical question, for it happens that we know next to nothing about the offstage life of the best-loved playwright of all time. "More than for any other writer, Shakespeare's words stand separate from his life," Bill Bryson points out in "Shakespeare: The World as Stage," his excellent brief life of the man whose words have done more to shape Western culture than those of any other creative artist. "This was a man so good at disguising his feelings that we can't ever be sure that he had any. We know that Shakespeare used words to powerful effect, and we may reasonably presume that he had feelings. What we don't know, and can barely even guess at, is where the two intersected."
The fact that we know so little about Shakespeare has done nothing to diminish his enduring popularity -- but it bothers us just the same, like an itch in a place that you can't quite scratch. Was he Catholic? Was he gay? Was he someone else, someone richer or better educated or higher born than the shadowy man from Stratford? The answer to the last question is almost certainly a resounding no, but beyond that lies impenetrable puzzlement.
The paradoxical possibility has occurred to me that one reason why Shakespeare is so central to Western culture is because we know so little about him. In the absence of biographical data, we are forced to fill in the blanks with speculation -- and the Shakespeare of our imagination often bears a definite resemblance to the person we see in the bathroom mirror. Who has not at one time or another heard one of Shakespeare's characters speak lines that sum up our own lives with eerie exactitude? Might the near-anonymity of the genius who wrote those lines make it easier for us to apply them to ourselves?
Alas, that doesn't work so well with Mozart. Not only do we have a pretty good idea of what he looked like, but we can read hundreds of his letters, and it is hard to square their youthful naïveté with the uncanny power of his music. One of Mozart's friends described him as a man "in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests." Yet that same man was to music what Shakespeare was to theater.
How can we turn this mysterious and unsettling fact to use? What lesson can it teach us? One thing comes to mind at once: humility. You don't need a portrait of the composer of "The Marriage of Figaro" to know that next to him, nobody looks smart.
- Re: Who Cares What Mozart Looked Likeposted on 04/13/2008
人文的人和社会的人,差异就在于此,所以对天才不可强求啊。
又把《Amadeus》翻来看了,社交圈中的莫扎特,就是一名弄臣,或者小丑。莎士比亚本人更是一个谜,一具无所不在却让我们一无所知的影子。
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