Mozart’s vision of life

The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom,  Martha C. Nussbaum, Oxford University Press, £22.99

In an extended essay written in 1997 about the Verdian patriotic chorus and its voicing of ambitions for Italian unification, the eminent musicologist Roger Parker sounded a note of caution. ‘The easy equation between music and politics’, he wrote, ‘[…] seems suspicious by its ubiquity, by the well-nigh ritualistic manner in which it is often dispensed.’ Yet the relationship between opera and politics, broadly defined, has become arguably the most dynamic sphere of musicological investigation of the last 30 years.

Scholarship includes studies of how operas engaged with contemporaneous political debates, of the strictures of censorship and the processes of politicisation. Studies of operatic institutions and the artform’s social status regularly touch on matters political, and opera has, predictably, prompted numerous writings about gender and race. Some scholars ground their analysis in the cultural contexts of the operas’ own time, while others are unable to throw off an anachronistic present-day mindset. Opera’s inherently multidisciplinary nature, combining music, text, movement, direction and design, has attracted scholars from a wide range of fields.

The latest contribution to this extensive body of interdisciplinary work is a study of ‘opera and political freedom’ by the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Nussbaum’s angle is that the operas of Mozart, and additionally those by a number of other composers she sees as his inheritors, provide a template for living well. It is an interesting conceit, symptomatic of our age’s persistent desire to exploit the arts as a form of therapy.

In the first half of her book, Nussbaum explores the relationship between Mozart and the philosophical ideas of his day. The Magic Flute, most notably, is an allegory for the Enlightenment, forever contrasting day and night, knowledge and ignorance, truth and lies, good and evil. Its characters are often understood as not-so-disguised depictions of real historical figures: Prince Tamino representing Joseph II striving for enlightenment; the Queen of the Night Maria Theresa of Austria, epitomising the old order; and Sarastro Ignaz von Born, master of a Viennese masonic lodge. Mozart’s understanding of the Enlightenment project was intertwined with his personal commitment to freemasonry, and the opera is liberally strewn with masonic motifs and initiation rituals. The number three – of special significance to the freemasons – is everywhere: three ladies, three boys, three hammer-blow chords at the beginning of the overture, even three flats in the key signature of E flat major, the most important and symbolic key in the entire work.

Nussbaum has thought-provoking things to say about all this, though her argument is less fleshed out than that of Nicholas Till in Mozart and the Enlightenment, a seminal book oddly not referenced here. Nussbaum contends that Mozart was not only influenced by Enlightenment thinkers but that he was, himself, a leading philosopher, the music itself inherently revolutionary. Specifically, she argues that Mozart offered a model for what she calls a ‘republic of love’: an exemplary society where individuals are free, dignified, merciful and light-hearted, and in which men are willing to learn from the emotional wisdom of women.

Whether Nussbaum’s ‘republic of love’ thesis is convincingly sustained through the second half of the book is more debatable. Here we find case studies on individual operas by Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, Janáček and – in a clear appeal to American readers – John Adams and Jake Heggie. These chapters, the acknowledgements tell us, have their origins in programme essays for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and accompanying lectures, and this may account for the slightly more ‘episodic’ feel to this section of the book.

Taken on its own terms, however, each chapter offers insights into how operas function musically – I particularly enjoyed Nussbaum’s reflections on Britten’s Four Sea Interludes – and muses with a philosopher’s eye on topics such as the death penalty or being a social outsider. Nussbaum writes vividly and movingly about Verdi’s reaction to the deaths of old friends and has thoughtful things to say about the paucity of operas about old age. She contrasts Mozart’s model for an ideal society with that of Wagner, whose life vision she patently detests. (Wagnerians may baulk at her dismissal of Tristan und Isolde  as ‘tedious’ and its conception of love as ‘adolescent and boring’.)

I have questions about who this book is aimed at. Oxford University Press publishes three types of music book: it produces academic studies proper, highly priced to reflect their niche readership and destined mainly for university libraries; and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, trade titles, which are given marketing campaigns and a push into high-street bookshops. Between these sit ‘crossover’ titles: priced as trade in acknowledgement of their broader appeal, but otherwise packaged and treated as academic books. The star academic Nussbaum has been given the full trade treatment, but this decision seems questionable.

Nussbaum writes that ‘this book is aimed at general readers who care about opera’, and the plot summaries and pop-culture asides that pepper the later chapters certainly seem to speak to this audience. The Mozart chapters, on the other hand, demand intimate knowledge of specific arias, casually reference Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, and have subtitles such as ‘Rejecting the “Romantic” interpretation: Nietzsche, Mörike, Dent, Kerman, Allanbrook, Nussbaum’. Nussbaum is in constant dialogue with an old guard of elite musicologists, historians and philosophers, some of them evidently personal friends and mentors, but this sort of elegant intellectual sparring and name-dropping, so natural to an American professor, is likely to bamboozle the operatic neophyte. For a trade book, you need to work a good deal harder at concealing the seams.

Falling between two stools, then, this book will probably find its happiest home on the undergraduate Music reading list, to be dipped into alongside other introductory books on opera and politics. Nevertheless, readers of all types cannot fail to warm to Nussbaum’s cheerful vision of living according to Mozartean principles. We are constantly reminded, reading her arguments, of just how groundbreaking he was in making opera ‘human’. Despite the stock conventions of the opera buffa genre and associated conservative audience expectations, Mozart’s characters seem so very alive. Would any such quintessentially ‘real’ operatic characters walk the stage again until the mid-period works of Verdi, possibly even the operas of Puccini? I would venture to suggest not.