Winter 2011
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Punctuating Mozart
...continued from previous page.
A Creative and Inspired Writer"Of course, we have to keep in mind that correctness and standardized writing is not an ideal in itself," Dr. Perl explains "but the freedom that Mozart took in his writing made for creative, inventive and inspired writing."Perl focuses on Mozart's letters from the age of 19, when he first began integrating dashes into his regular correspondence, until 15 years later when he passed away. In fact, Perl actually fixes the moment when dashes became a permanent, pervasive element in his letter writing: at the time of the illness and death of Mozart's mother in Paris during the summer of 1778. "It is during this time," Perl says, "that his inner determination to walk his own path seems to have originated." Dashes were a perfectly common punctuation mark in Mozart's time. Their main purpose (as today) was to isolate the phrase contained between two dashes from the rest of the sentence, representing an incidental thought intruding into the main discourse. Yet, in example after example, Mozart's letters show that he made use of this punctuation mark for "expressive, even dramatic purposes... perfectly alien to its common usage." He used them in uncommon and common contexts, first sporadically and then with greater frequency, until they became as Dr. Perl calls them "the most natural platform for Mozart." That's not to say that Mozart did not use other forms of punctuation – he did – but the frequency of his use of dashes outstripped anything else. Perl uncovers numerous instances where Mozart used dashes "for dramatic purposes, representing pauses in actual speech a unique way of preserving the flavor of live speech." (Consider Papageno's aria in "The Magic Flute" and Leporello's arias in "Don Giovanni.") Also, for Mozart the dash represented a kind of "emancipation from the rules of punctuation." The dash became the anti-hero of a well-ordered society, blurring distinctions and breaking down rank and order. (Consider "The Marriage of Figaro.") Symbolically, we can understand what the dash may have represented to Mozart, but musically is there a parallelism? A kind of equivalence in expression and thought? Parallelism Between Letters and Music"At first glance, there seems to be the greatest divergence between the two: Mozart's musical style is a model of orderliness and thoughtful organization... a kind of Classicism."How far this seems from the haphazard style of his letter writing. Yet, Mozart's letters and his music do, in fact, resemble each other. "Being absorbed for long periods in listening to Mozart's works in all genres, and at the same time reading his letters, one feels that, in a way, it is the same voice speaking to us in both," Perl reflects. For Mozart, language itself was a musical phenomenon, an assemblage of sounds. "Mozart’s letters," Perl continues "actually became musical compositions." To such a degree, that Mozart's inner essence seemed to burst through in his letter writing as much as it did in his musical composition. Mozart so internalized music that it became spontaneous for him. Amazing, but while Mozart did leave behind some sketches, they are relatively few and many works seem to have been written directly in their final form. What was on his mind he transferred directly to the page, so that his final version was, very often, the first draft. Just as he dashed off his letters. |