“Mozart: Portrait of a Genius” by Norbert Elias, translated by Edmund Jephcott

152 pages, University of California Press, ISBN-13: 978-0520084759

Be warned: Mozart: Portrait of a Genius by Norbert Elias is a load of Marxist/Freudian bullshit. You see, Elias has produced a collection of interpretative essays and notes, some very fragmentary and incipient, that are the product of the interdisciplinary approach, developed via the Frankfurt School, the interwar German school of thought founded by Western Marxist dissidents who were uncomfortable with the existing capitalist, fascist or communist systems then all the vogue (the original, German subtitle of the book was Soziologie eines Genies – Sociology of a Genius rather than Portrait, a more accurate title as this is not a biography as usual with many facts about the subject’s life and milieu told in a novel-like form). Using this crap, Elias attempts a 20^th Century interpretation of the life of a 18^th Century middle-class hanger-on to the aristocracy. This “class struggle” (was Mozart struggling? Or was he composing?) ‘twixt the bourgeoisie and aristocracy is supposed to show that Mozart was trapped in the disparity ‘tween his class position and his ambitions and abilities, which far exceeded the former. Did he lack the social tools and personal force, or was the social structure not yet ready to accommodate fully ambitions already nurtured by the culture?

As told by Elias, Mozart had the force and more amenable circumstances to blaze a path for the artistic composer to a heroic, socially-strong status, as the Romantic conception of Genius, before which even the most arrogant obtuse old-regime aristocrats had to feel some prick of respect and awe, was all the rage during and after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Elias’ synthesis of Marxist and Freudian approaches to understanding life is so much nonsense it was a chore to get through this dreck (is this likely due to insufficient time? Elias died while this book was in preparation. Dang). I thought I had learned everything about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – or should I say Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart – after reading Mozart: A Cultural Biography by Robert W. Gutman (reviewed by me on July 6, 2012). I was right: read Gutman and ignore Elias.