Translated material
He's a genius...
Sergey Gandlevsky
These are not so much letters as unsubscribes from a secondary external life, for some reason taking place outside of music
These are not so much letters as unsubscribes from a secondary external life, for some reason taking place outside of music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Letters. M.: Agraf, 2000
Marina Tsvetaeva noticed how Pushkin’s image of Pugachev was double. The disgusting murderer in "The History of the Pugachev Rebellion", in "The Captain's Daughter" he is also a man not devoid of generosity and charm, to whom the heroes of the story owe much of their deliverance. Aesthetic intuition forced Pushkin the fiction writer to neglect the facts. Therefore, one could expect that after “Little Tragedies” the real Mozart - the author and character of the letters - would, in turn, disappoint, or at least puzzle... It didn’t happen at all. “The Idle Reveler” from Pushkin’s play, one of the best positive heroes of Russian literature, seems to have been copied from life. Mozart's Mozartianism turns out to be not fiction, but truth. It’s no different that Pushkin guessed his soul mate, and the reincarnation was reduced to a minimum: “He’s a genius, like you and me.” The parallels suggest themselves. Attitude to creativity. Mozart: "...this is my only joy and passion." Pushkin: "... only then did he know true happiness." Approach to criticism. Mozart: "... I rely solely on my own feelings." Pushkin: “You are your own highest court.” Self-esteem. Mozart: “I consider myself capable of doing honor to any court.” Pushkin: predicting posthumous glory for himself, eclipsing reverence for official shrines. Without violence, more prosaic matters are also harmonized - from the suspicious dignity of the “philistine” who feeds on his own labor and the reverently serious attitude towards marriage to the desire to “change places” and live in debt. In both artists, genuine pathos easily coexists with Rabelaisian-style gaiety, forcing the censor to be on alert. If the real Mozart wrote: “to play such a Prima vista is like taking a shit for me,” the fictional Mozart, of course, could make fun of his own compositions performed by a blind violinist. (Pushkin’s “Tatyana crumples a piece of paper in her hand, / Zane - her stomach hurts” comes to mind naturally - this is about a sweet ideal!)
Well, the Austrian composer and the Russian poet are similar - so what now? And the fact that the remarkable similarity of the two geniuses is explained, first of all, by the presence in each of them of an identical quality - genius. Let's remember the school curriculum: when two quantities are separately equal to a third, they are equal to each other - this is the secret of the generality noted above. It would be amusing simplicity and arrogance to casually take on the definition of the concept of “genius,” but one circumstance seems unconditional: the overwhelming majority of artistic abilities, even enormous ones, are distinguished, among other things, by a certain shift in the “center of gravity” - these are “just” talents. And one can count on one hand the talents of genius, balanced by that unearthly balance that is characteristic of the alternations of seasons, sunrises and sunsets - celestial mechanics. So the words of Mozart, dazzling in their pride - “... only an atheist can deny me talent” - from a certain angle, they are ready to reveal something more than just passionate eloquence. The rarest, relict, most likely, forever lost sense of well-being... Rare, almost lost aesthetics: “Something will bring satisfaction only to connoisseurs, however, non-connoisseurs, although not understanding why, will also be satisfied. <...> Now [ "They don't know this and no longer appreciate it. To win applause, you must either write things so simple that any driver can sing them, or so incomprehensible that you like it only because no normal person understands it." Should we be happy or saddened by the absolute relevance today of words spoken more than two hundred years ago?
Mozart's letters, unlike Pushkin's, are rather monotonous reading; it is understandable: literature was Pushkin’s element - if Mozart had happened to write to his father or wife not in letters, but in notes... These are not so much letters as unsubscribes from a secondary external life, for some reason taking place outside of music. The child prodigy, about whom his enthusiastic father seriously spoke to those of little faith as a miracle revealed, grew up and lived a short and very concentrated life. Everyday years and years of work, travel, need, worries, career and ambition - and again work. A hostage to his own genius, Mozart did not know female love until he was twenty-six. I didn’t notice the French Revolution behind the composition, although Western Europe was cramped and full of rumors. Like a squirrel in a wheel, he circled around the great cities, essentially not seeing them. The serial numbers of the compositions, the names of national currencies, the names of patrons of the arts and monarchs - that’s almost all that has been preserved in the composer’s letters from his visits to Milan, London, Paris, Munich, and Prague. In the meantime, and the matter was exclusively music, I felt the cold of age: “If people could look into my soul, then I would almost be ashamed. Everything in me grew cold - just ice.” (Having reached approximately the same age, Pushkin compared himself to a tired slave.) Six months before his death, Mozart writes to his wife in a completely new epistolary tone: “I can’t explain to you my feeling. Some kind of emptiness that torments me. continuous languor, which not only does not subside, but, on the contrary, grows day by day." Why, we, the “children of the dust,” would not understand what we are talking about! But until the very end, Mozart looked for a harmonious way out of our common, completely hopeless situation. Mozart's reactions to life and everyday complications are generally unpredictable and outlandish. Here he is, as usual, on tour, living in a hotel, working tirelessly, rushing to meet the deadline with the order. “There is a violinist above us, another one below us, next to us is a singing teacher who gives lessons, in the last room opposite us is an oboist.” Let it all go to waste, we say, create it yourself in such conditions. But Mozart has a different opinion: “It’s fun when you compose! It gives you a lot of ideas.” He's a genius.