December 19, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

Music: Peter Wyer

Pushkin's Verse Drama: 'Mozart & Salieri'

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

A play called Amadeus, which opened Dec. 12 on Broadway after a successful run in London, revives the story that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was murdered by the Italian operatic composer Antonio Salieri. Peter Shaffer's play proceeds from the viewpoint of the frustrated inferior composer Salieri and portrays Mozart as a frivolous, foul-mouthed rake. This warped view having been introduced to the public, it is appropriate to return to an earlier treatment of the same subject matter by a poet who would have stood on Mozart's side in any quarrel with the banal Salieri. The poet is Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), the greatest ever to write in the Russian language. His poem Mozart and Salieri, a short play in verse, was written in 1830, nearly 40 years after Mozart died and five years past the passing of Salieri.

The rumor that Salieri did in Mozart had circulated in Europe for several years. According to one story, he confessed the crime on his deathbed. Another held that the Italian, earlier on, had stormed from a performance of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, crying that Mozart must be killed. Pushkin was not merely intrigued by the sensational nature of the story. His poem upholding the superiority of Mozart joined a factional battle raging Russia in the 1820s between "European" and "Russian" culture. In music, Pushkin's friend and collaborator Prince V. Odoevsky wrote frequently in favor of the "Germans" Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethovenas opposed to the incipient Russian school that later mushroomed into Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. But Pushkin himself was the greatest figure in the battle at that time. By writing universal poetry in the Russian language he succeeded in being more Russian than the contemporary and future Russophiles: he reshaped and advanced the Russian language for the benefit of every subsequent generation in the country. Children in the Soviet Union today, who learn to read on Pushkin, are returning to a wellspring of the Russian language. Understanding and Reason Mozart and Salieri, one of the four "Little Tragedies" written by Pushkin in the fall of 1830, explores a theme of great poetry, the levels of consciousness of the human mind. Salieri is a "Purgatorian," in the terms of Dante Alighieri's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the Divine Comedy. He has raised himself above the lowest level of consciousness, the infernal state of infantile greed, by systematic schooling. But he knows nothing of Paradise. Salieri has pulled himself up to the level Neoplatonic philosophy called "understanding," but not to the level of "reason." Left to himself, Salieri appears to be advancing in the world of music. But in the dialogue between the two characters of his drama, Pushkin confronts the mere understanding with reason, the "genius" Mozart. At that point, Salieri falters and slides into evil. The poem reveals that anything less than the highest level of mind represented by Mozart's music will tolerate and even foster evil. Because Salieri improves his music only by assimilating externally defined rules and not by striving for the heights of reason where he, like Mozart, would make

new rules, he easily reverts to the infantile emotion of envy. In two soliloquies, one to open the play and one in the middle, Salieri argues with logical rigor that he has to murder Mozart. Salieri's mind is the angry, frustrated child's: he did everything he was supposed to do and still came out only second best. Pushkin has him describe his efforts in words which prefigure the crime his approach will lead to: Craft I made the handmaiden of art; And I became a craftsman: for my hands I found the dry, obedient speed they lacked And for my ear true pitch. Murdering sounds, I then dissected music like a corpse. As the opening soliloquy ends, Salieri's plodding efforts are shown to be foiled by Mozart's brilliance and, in the sorry cast of his mind, the motive is set. The anticipated crime is bared: And who will say Salieri once was proud Or ever a despised envier was, A snake, tread on by people's feet and impotently gnawing sand and dust? No one! . . . But nowI say it myselfI now Am envious. I envy, very deeply, So painfully I envy.Heavens above! Where is the justice when a sacred gift, When such immortal genius is given. Not in reward for sacrifice, devotion, Nor work, nor efforts, nor long nights of prayer But rather shines upon a madman's head, Upon an empty idler?. . . Mozart, Mozart! The words "A snake" and "Am envious" leap from the page. "Zmeyei," "Zavistnik" -- just three lines apart, each precedes a marked break in the line. Salieri's long denials say what he really is. The murderer goes on to argue that as long as Mozart lives "and reaches new heights," then Salieri is ruined. To Pushkin's blocked Salieri, Mozart's creativity and the music Salieri purports to dote upon are unattainable.

What use is he? Like some great cherubim, He brought us down a song or two from heaven, Awoke in us, earth's creatures made of clay, Wingless desireonly to fly away! Well fly then! Better now than later. Mozart's Laughter Pushkin's Mozart comes into the poem on the wings of a practical jokehe has hired a blind fiddler to squeak out an aria from his own opera Don Giovanni. There is a lively back-and-forth, with lines of the poem begun by one character and completed by the other in the manner of Shakespeare, in which Mozart's voice cuts into Salieri's lugubrious ruminations with sparkling "one-liners" such as the irony-laden suggestion late in the play: . . . Genius and evildoing Are incompatible. Is that not true? He also plays the piano. In a stage performance of the poem, the real music of Mozartsections of his Requiem and an unnamed piecewould be overlaid on Pushkin's poetry. Salieri hears him play and fawns: What depth! What daring there, and what a lovely structure! Mozart, you are a god and you don't know it; I know. Mozart: You think so? Ba! Well that may be. . . But now my holiness is getting hungry. The table is set for Mozart's last dinner, ending with Salieri's poison slipped into his cup. When the genius is snuffed out, we know from the inside of the miserable Salieri's mind what evil mediocrity killed Mozart. This is a powerful poem. It is only amplified by reflecting on the fact that in 1837 Alexander Pushkin died in a duel. He became yet another humanist leader murdered by political enemies from the international faction that abhors the development of the human mind to genius. This column was contributed by Rachel Douglas.