MOZART IN MOTION: His Work and His World in Pieces, by Patrick Mackie

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Musicians tend to be wary of ascribing specific meanings to music or making too much of a piece’s extra-musical associations. In one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, turning to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Leonard Bernstein asked the audience to forget all about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures” and instead concentrate on “pure” music. He then demonstrated how every phrase of the entire first movement is derived from little motifs of notes and rhythms in the first four bars of the score.

Still, many music lovers, especially those with scant formal knowledge of music, long for written descriptions that can take them inside a piece, explain how it comports (or not) with the prevailing styles of the time, and account for how the music makes them feel. That’s what music critics try to do, without going too far, indulging in historical generalizations or turning all philosophical.

The British poet Patrick Mackie shows no such trepidations in his erudite, ambitious and elegantly written “Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces.” He presents Mozart as a kinetically restless, socially observant musician constantly in dialogue with his culture and his times — the age of the Enlightenment, in all its idealism, revolutionary fervor and entangled contradictions. Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful, even when overly sweeping and, at times, too speculative.

Mozart was “pulled between historical worlds,” he writes, “suspended between a deep but skeptical attachment” to the existing “patchwork of courts and hierarchies,” and “deep intimations of the versions of freedom and selfhood and power that were on their way.” Still, that Mozart’s music grapples so intensely with its world “has had paradoxical, disabling effects on how we listen to it,” Mackie laments. It can be hard to hear “how volatile, strange, willful or precarious” these familiar, beloved pieces often are.

Was Mozart really so conscious about reflecting the diverse visions of life that jangled through his age? My hunch is that he was much more instinctive. Mackie offers tantalizing support for his take. In some revealing letters from Paris, where Mozart, then 22, was seeking career possibilities, he vented his frustrations with Parisian culture to his father, the imposing Leopold, who was homebound in Salzburg. In one, Mackie writes, Mozart “imagines writing an opera that will finally teach the French to appreciate him, and describes the ‘veritable fire’ that the thought inspires and how his ‘hands and feet tremble with impatience.’” Instead, Mozart channeled his thwarted ambition and anger into a breakthrough composition, the dark, turbulent Piano Sonata in A minor, a work that, as Mackie hears the music, “fills itself with these livid emotions and drives, and charges itself with making sense of them too.”

It’s through detailed, lengthy, wide-ranging descriptions of Mozart’s music that Mackie conveys his ideas, and structures the book. He takes on a sizable number of works, from the pathbreaking operas to deceptively jocular piano pieces. Even when he tries too hard, unabashedly teasing out associations and subtexts in the music, I found myself going along for the adventure. At his best, his writing is fresh and imaginative, showing feeling for the musical character and dramatic narrative of a piece. Mozart’s great Mass in C minor, he writes, “combines surging monumentality with a giddy athletic zip,” adding: “It has the feel of a church whose features lift the eye so high that architecture merges with vertigo.”

Throughout the text he folds in astute readings of Kant, Diderot and Goethe, along with barbed accounts of the fraught politics of the Austrian emperor Joseph II’s court in Vienna, where Mozart lived his last decade (dying in 1791 at 35). But the musical descriptions are central.

Introducing Mozart’s beguiling Sinfonia Concertante in E flat for violin, viola and orchestra, Mackie notes that when the composer’s revered older friend Haydn was in Vienna, they spent informal evenings playing string quartets with colleagues, and Mozart typically claimed the viola part. Right from the start, this unconventional concerto “tilts its meditation on the two instruments towards the more lowly and immersive partner,” Mackie writes. Going further, he asserts that the viola part “ends up reinterpreting what soloistic music is meant to be.” Far from rising above the orchestra as solo violins tend to, the viola’s colors “glint or glare or swim from right within the heart of the sound,” Mackie suggests; it is “like watching sunlight work its way through rich clouds.”

Though eschewing a chronological narrative, Mackie offers perceptive portraits of Mozart’s intimates, colleagues and competitors. Constanze, his wife, showed herself “to be resourceful and ebullient and splendidly solid” during their decade together, he writes. He’s especially perceptive about Leopold, a composer, violinist and renowned violin pedagogue who held a series of musical posts in the Salzburg archbishop’s court that, in truth, he felt constrained by. The stories of Leopold and his wife, Anna Maria, taking the very young Wolfgang and his precociously gifted older sister, Maria Anna, on arduous tours of Europe to showcase the prodigies are often told. Looking deeper, Mackie boldly asks: “Was Leopold lovingly devoted to developing his son’s talent or recklessly determined to exploit its every juice?” For Mozart, who never stopped trying to be a good son, the problem came with his father’s limited vision. “Leopold wanted his son to be the best composer around at doing the sorts of things that everyone else did,” Mackie writes.

With an opera, of course, the meaning of the music is in the words, the characters, the plot — right on the stage. Mackie relishes discussing Mozart’s operas, especially the three milestone works he wrote in succession with the like-minded librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte: “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte.”

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The valet Figaro’s famous aria “Se vuol ballare” goes “far beyond any mere tirade against aristocratic vice and presumptuousness,” Mackie writes. Figaro announces that he will make Count Almaviva “dance to an altogether different music,” and Mozart’s music impishly riffs a courtly minuet. Of course, Figaro can no more confront aristocratic power directly than “music can change the world at a stroke,” Mackie writes. But Figaro can “deflect and undermine it,” as Mozart had to learn to do to advance in his world.

In telling comments about the multilayered, utterly audacious “Don Giovanni,” Mackie suggests that the libertine title character is pursued nonstop, before our eyes, by the consequences of his own hedonism. This self-destructive imperative drives not just Giovanni, but the pulsing pace of the entire opera, and claims all the characters. In effect, Donna Anna, a near-victim of Giovanni’s sexual assault, and Donna Elvira, who harbors delusions of being married to him, “want to stop the opera from happening.” In the end, when the statue of the murdered Commendatore oversees Giovanni’s descent into eternal damnation, their duet becomes “more fiercely impassioned than anything else in this opera devoted to erotic power.” Very true.

For all the allure of Mackie’s writing, he’s sometimes so bent on pressing his points that he turns redundant and strains his language. I lost count of how many times and ways he marvels at Mozart’s ability to balance impetuous freedom and orderliness, “frantic plasticity” and structure.

In discussing the series of six string quartets dedicated to Haydn, Mackie only glints at a crucial way that Mozart embedded coherence into music that comes across as free-spirited. Haydn was an innovative master of the technique known as motivic development, where from a few initial motifs a composer generates an entire work, precisely what Bernstein explained about Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” Mozart could do this motivic development thing: Just listen to the aptly dubbed “Jupiter” Symphony! But it took real effort, as he openly acknowledged. Admittedly, such technical matters are easier to explain with musical illustrations than to describe in words.

In his encompassing, literary approach Mackie sometimes overreaches. But every piece he discusses I know well, and the book gave me much to think about.

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Anthony Tommasini is the former chief classical music critic of The Times.

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MOZART IN MOTION: His Work and His World in Pieces | By Patrick Mackie | 360 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $30