‘Take it generally’

Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love is the earliest work in English we are sure is by a woman. It is also one of the most ambitious Middle English texts we have, straining the resources of the vernacular in which it was written, as it strains the understanding of readers today. The work grew out of a visionary episode it dates to 1373, when Julian was thirty, and was completed over a period that may have reached into the fifteenth century. It exists in two versions which I call here by their manuscript titles: A Vision schewed [. . .] to a devoute woman (the Short Text) and A Revelacion of Love (the Long Text). Powerful though they are, neither was widely read in the Middle Ages. A Vision survives in one fifteenth-century manuscript in a northern dialect (London, BL Additional 37790), while the earliest copies of A Revelation are a pair of manuscripts written by English nuns in France between 1600 and 1650: one in Norfolk English, the other in an East Midlands dialect (London, BL Sloane 2499 and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale fonds anglais 41).

Mozart was keenly aware of and interested in the views of his contemporaries on matters of aesthetics, but curiously it has taken almost two centuries for us to recognize this fact and to realize how critical some of this thinking may have been in influencing him as a composer. The reasons for this hiatus are not entirely straightforward, but emerge in part in the vast literature on Mozart prior to the final decades of the twentieth century. One of the simpler possibilities appears to be that writers on music in general or Mozart in particular rarely had much interest in fields other than music, and in any event often preferred to treat music as a self-contained entity, relatively free from the influence of other disciplines. The prevailing view of Mozart emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the focus lay on his genius – a peculiar notion of genius shaped by early nineteenth-century Romanticism and fostered by giants of German philosophy later in the century, including Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For some, Mozart's genius had to be demonically inspired, while for others that genius placed him as an eternal child figure, living in a childlike dream realm detached from reality and, of course, blissfully devoid of education. Writing in the middle of the twentieth century, Alfred Einstein believed Mozart was ‘a child and always remained one’, and even as late as 1971 Michael Levey continued to support a modification of the Mozart-as-child phenomenon, suggesting that ‘what has often been described as the childlike quality which he retained into adulthood was in fact a retention of energy: pure, unhindered and of almost explosive force’.

In a famous passage concerning an aria he was composing for the singer Anton Raaff, Mozart wrote:

A few years later when he was composing Idomeneo, Mozart again expressed his readiness to accommodate Raaff's wishes, but on this occasion the singer was so pleased with what had been written for him that he did not want a single note to be changed. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the flexibility of Mozart's attitude; it was widely accepted that a singer had the right to influence the musical character of an aria.

In 1402, Christine de Pizan, one of the first and most illustrious women of letters in the French tradition, was gradually establishing a reputation as a serious writer. Her talents up to that point had been devoted predominantly to the composition of conventional courtly lyric for the enjoyment of her royal and noble patrons, who were already sufficiently impressed by her poetic skills to acquire and exchange manuscripts of her work. On 1 February of that year, Christine put the finishing touches on a small collection of documents which she addressed to Isabeau de Bavière, Queen of France, and Guillaume de Tignonville, Provost of Paris, for their scrutiny and, it was hoped, favourable judgment. This dossier, labelled as the 'Epistles of the Debate over the Romance of the Rose between certain persons of note', represented a brief exchange of letters that, the previous year, had grown out of a discussion between Christine and Jean de Montreuil, Provost of Lille, concerning the dubious merits of the famous allegorical poem.

That delivery of the household keys marks Margery Kempe's recovery from the madness which had kept her confined to her bed for eight months following the birth of her first child. The keys embody the circumscribed, but real, authority over her household, its resources and its servants which, as a married woman of the urban elite, she might normally expect. Her servants, perhaps aware of the sometimes inconvenient consequences of religious conversion, fear that Margery, like other urban holy women, will engage in excessive charity, but at this stage her vocation takes less dramatic forms, and she is content to resume her former role in the household. Margery does not tell us what she did with the keys once she had regained them. Her Book is interested in housewifery only when it can be shown to have spiritual significance, as when Margery undertakes the nursing of her aged husband as a penance for her earlier sins (p. 181). Margery and her amanuenses assume that she is of interest only insofar as she is not a housewife, and her later spiritual career demands that she leave the house and her duties there. This chapter is about the life she refused, and about everything symbolized by her keys.

When trying to recreate an image of Mozart as a performer, we must remember that the word ‘performer’ conveys a quite different meaning today from what it would have conveyed in the eighteenth century. A knowledge of the craft of music and outstanding musical abilities made a performer exceptional at that time, rather than an ability to play the most technically complex pieces in the fastest possible tempo, after enormous amounts of practice on an instrument. Like so many other modern thoughts about the art of music, the later conception of the ‘performer’ originated in the first third of the nineteenth century. The Czerny-type of drill and relentless daily practice have brought about a fundamental change in music making.

This is not to say, of course, that Mozart was not a virtuoso performer of the first order. Especially in his last decade, he became the celebrated star of Viennese concert life. He had found the ideal medium for his artistry in the eighteenth-century fortepiano and was, in fact, the first great exponent of that instrument.

Childhood and youth

The versatility of Mozart the Wunderkind was so disconcerting that it would have been impossible during his early years as a performer to predict how his future career would develop. Besides composing, he played not only the harpsichord and the clavichord, but also the organ and the violin; he also sang in public. Although the well-known stories connected with the early travels of the Mozart family often remind us of the productions of entertaining troupes, the unique gifts of Wolfgang shine through right from the outset.

Salieri's description of Mozart's Serenade for Winds in B flat major, K. 361 (example 8.1), does the work – as well as some commonly held beliefs concerning both Mozart and chamber music – surprising justice on a number of counts: it describes a sophisticated interplay of instruments (oboe and clarinet), an enveloping intimacy of expression (‘around and through me’) and a self-conscious manipulation of artifice and affect (‘it would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity’). But is the serenade, composed for thirteen wind instruments with double bass and performed publicly at the Burgtheater on 23 March 1784, a piece of chamber music?

At the end of his novel Lucia in London, E. F. Benson's heroine, the energetic socialite Emmeline Lucas – Lucia to her friends – suggests to her piano-duet partner, Georgie Pilson, that they have half an hour's practice of ‘celestial Mozartino’. In Lucia's cosmology of composers Bach is ‘glorious’, Scarlatti ‘dainty’ and Beethoven ‘noble’, but only Mozart achieves divine, if diminutive, status. Lucia's Mozart is the infant prodigy beloved of the nineteenth century, when, at various stages, England's cultured classes were hot on the trail of successors to the Salzburg genius. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the biographies to which Benson would have had access made much of the infant: for example, Lady Wallace's 1877 translation of Ludwig Nohl's The Life of Mozart, which has the child Mozart in Austrian court dress as a frontispiece, or Pauline Townsend's translation of Otto Jahn's monumental Life of Mozart published by Novello in 1891, which uses an engraving of Mozart derived from the Verona portrait of 1770.

Nearly twenty years after Benson published Lucia in London, van Loon Invited Mozart, along with St Francis of Assisi and Hans Andersen, to dinner in his volume of fantasy encounters, Van Loon's Lives. His account of Mozart is a flight of fancy based on conventional popular images; Constanze, for example, is described as ‘flighty’ and ‘rather worthless’. There is an emphasis on the purity of the composer's inspiration and the ability of his music to connect the listener with childhood: ‘a source of everlasting inspiration and joy for those who have not yet forgotten the laughter and the simple pleasures of their childhood days’.

On his own in Vienna for the first time, the twenty-five-year-old Mozart wrote to his father on 4 April 1781: ‘I can assure you that this here is a Magnificent place – and for my Métier the best place in the world.’ He had decided to stay, although the famous kick in the arse from the agent of Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg did not take place until 9 June. And while his father would never be persuaded that any city was the right city if one did not have a fixed appointment, Mozart was not naive about his prospects in Vienna. Had death not cut him off just as he was emerging from four financially difficult years, he would have been proven right. In the ten years since his arrival he had obtained the coveted court appointment, he had secured the reversion of the post of Kapellmeister at St Stephen's Cathedral, he had enjoyed notable, often lucrative, successes as a performer and as a composer, and he was patronized by the nobility. The present essay will examine these sources of employment and the extent to which Mozart was able to realize them.

The court

In 1781 the court was still the best employer in Vienna. Although Joseph II led an austere and conspicuously frugal court life, he did not dissolve the court's established musical institutions, the Hofkapelle (court chapel) and the theatre. The Hofkapelle provided music for the court's church services. In addition to the musicians, the Hofkapelle in 1781 consisted of the Hofkapellmeister Giuseppe Bonno and the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Mozart is treasured today for his opera buffa and Singspiel, the foundation of the modern repertory. His serious Italian operas belong to the most abundant operatic genre of the eighteenth century, and share its modern neglect. Yet there is no reason to suppose that Mozart despised the rhetorical grandeur of opera seria, with its cast of tyrants, suffering princesses, courtiers and soldiers, and its plots of treachery overcome and magnanimity in suffering. It played a larger role in his pre-Vienna works than any other type of opera, and was by no means neglected thereafter. Mozart was brought up on opera seria, and an opera seria was his last stage work.

The majority of Mozart's serious operas were composed for specific occasions connected to the Austrian ruling house of Habsburg, yet none was written for its capital, Vienna. What today we loosely call ‘opera seria’ comprised a number of sub-genres, selected according to the circumstances of a commission. For Milan, Mozart composed two traditional opere serie, Mitridate, re di Ponto, and Lucio Silla. Such operas acted as a mirror to the upper echelon of society, and an enlightened monarchy is directly reflected, or indirectly admonished, when the tyrant sees the light and forgives his enemies. Although concerned almost entirely with aristocratic characters, this kind of opera seria, whose form was established by the librettist and Imperial poet Pietro Metastasio, was designed for public theatres; yet in a city such as Milan, governed by the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, the court certainly attended the premiere.

Joan of Arc, or Joan the Maid (Jeanne la Pucelle), as she called herself, exemplifies three powerful female types for the Middle Ages – prophet, virgin martyr, and androgyne – all culminating in one persona, as expressed in her writings: her letters and trial testimony. Given the form and context of her writings, her ‘readers’ almost inevitably began as her doubters, and often adversaries, in some way. A cult figure even during her brief lifetime, she understood early on, with uncanny insight for a minimally educated person, the essential reciprocity between myth and truth while formulating her mission. For each and every extraordinary attribute she claimed to possess, she could provide some kind of authentication. Such was the recurrent cycle of dialogue between past and present, prophecy and proof, governing her career as controversial saviour of France.

Whether one perceives her as cipher or seer, Joan’s entire life (1412–31) was shaped by the Hundred Years’War between France and England, begun in 1337 and eventually ending, partly thanks to her achievements, in 1453. By Joan’s time, and despite such hopeful interludes as the reign of Charles V (1368–80), this inter-dynastic struggle between violently self-determining national identities had resulted in two crushing English military victories over the French: Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415. Strife from within, among the French noble families, also weakened the kingdom, the gravest being the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orleans, by men of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. Suffering repeated bouts of insanity, Charles VI could do little to avenge his brother’s murder and maintain unity within his kingdom.

In the 1160s, an author who identifies herself as 'Marie' dedicated a collection of Breton stories or lais to a 'noble reis', most likely Henry II Plantagenet. Some time later, a 'Marie' who announces that she is 'de France' penned the Fables, which she says she translates from King Alfred's English translation of Aesopic tales; these she dedicated to 'le cunte Willame'. Finally, the Espurgatoire seint Patriz, an account of an Irish knight's voyage to the underworld, was translated from a religious text of monastic origin into the vernacular for the benefit of a lay audience by one 'Marie', probably around 1190. During the course of her career, 'Marie de France' thus produced works in three different genres - Breton tale, animal fable, spiritual voyage - each of which blends literary traditions and linguistic registers and whose topics progress from a tapestry of marvellous love stories, to a shrewd observation of animal and human social behaviour, and finally, to a vision of sin and redemption.

Writing in haste to his father, Leopold, shortly before a musical soirée on 28 December 1782, Mozart described three new piano concertos he was composing, K.413 in F major, K.414 in A major and K.415 in C major:

One of the most frequently quoted passages in Mozart's entire body of correspondence, these words have been taken to signify many different things: that Mozart was capable of thinking through ‘the problem of the interaction between composer and listener’ in an extremely lucid and erudite fashion, believing ‘an audience could be simultaneously charmed and challenged’; that Mozart's compositional philosophy is ‘fragmentary … [enshrining] a duality, some might say a dialectic, between whole and part’; and that each of the three works exhibits ‘events of an unusual nature such as … sallies into invertible counterpoint’, while also demonstrating ‘a string of connections and progressions … that serve to coalesce the three concertos into one splendidly integrated larger work’.

Since the risk of overinterpreting Mozart's passage is considerable given the simultaneously broad and incisive nature of his prose, it is as well to remember what the passage is not. Above all, it is certainly not an original assessment and articulation of widespread appeal. The idea that a musical piece or set of pieces would be attractive to connoisseurs and amateurs (Kenner und Liebhaber) alike was voiced with great regularity in eighteenth-century critical and commercial circles, often with a view to a composer or publisher enhancing the marketing potential of the work (or works) in question.

INTRODUCTION: THE SCOPE OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Moral psychology addresses itself to the interface between ethics and psychology. One of the basic principles of moral psychology is the apparently trivial one, that all ethically correct actions are, to begin with, actions: inasmuch as they are the deliberate or at least intentional actions of human beings, ethical actions will share features with the class to which they belong, and fall under whatever constraints belong to the larger kind.

This of course raises an immediate question about the coherence of the topic so described. Psychology is clearly a descriptive field, and ethics is the normative field par excellence; the one tells us how the human mind does function, the other tells us how human agents ought to act. Given this fundamental difference, we may not assume, without further argument, that the first discussion can place any constraints whatsoever on the second. The mere fact that psychology places limits on what is humanly possible does not show, without further argument, that ethics must keep its demands within those limits.

The further argument tends to come, nowadays, in terms of a sort of mixing axiom of morality and modality, that the agent cannot be obligated to do anything it is not possible for the agent to do. This is usually abbreviated to the slogan that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, though its teeth are more often bared in the contrapositive formulation, that ‘not possible’ implies ‘not obligatory’.

INTRODUCTION

Is there a Stoic metaphysics? The answer obviously depends on what we mean by 'metaphysics', a word which no classical philosopher would have understood, despite its two Greek components and its familiarity as the title of the most famous of Aristotle's works. No matter what we might mean by 'meta-', in more than one sense the Stoics have no metaphysics: for them, no science comes 'after' physics (again, in whatever sense of 'after' you like); neither is there any science studying entities which, in some sense, are 'over and above' physics or 'beyond' physics - that is, 'metaphysical' (literally, 'super-natural') entities. For them, 'nature' (phusis) encompasses everything, including things, phenomena, and events which in other worldviews might seem to be 'super-natural' in some way. They had a firm conception of how philosophy (more exactly, its discursive exposition or logos) is and should be divided; and their primary division (into logic, ethics, physics) did not provide any place for anything like 'metaphysics'.

In another sense, however, one might suggest that the Stoics had not only one but two ‘metaphysics’. One is merely a part of physics; the other is a study over and above their standard tripartition of philosophy.

Stoicism has its roots in the philosophical activity of Socrates. But its historical journey began in the enrichment of that tradition with other influences by Zeno of Citium almost a century after Socrates' death, and it continued in the rise and decline of the school he founded. An apparently long pause followed during the Middle Ages, although it seems clear that its philosophical influence continued to be felt through a variety of channels, many of which are difficult to chart. In the early modern period, Stoicism again became a significant part of the philosophical scene and has remained an influential intellectual force ever since.

In the middle of the last century, Max Pohlenz, in a book whose value was always limited by the cultural forces of its time and place (Pohlenz 1948), described the school as an ‘intellectual movement.’ ‘Intellectual movement’ captured something of the longevity and protean variability of Stoicism. The dynamic connotations of that metaphor are apt, but I prefer the metaphor of a special kind of journey. An intellectual engagement with Stoicism is an odyssey in three ways. First, the historical trajectory of the school itself and its influence is replete with digressions, narrative ornament, and improbable connections, yet moving ultimately toward an intelligible conclusion. Second, the task of recovering the history of Stoic thought is an adventure in the history of philosophy. It can be a perilous journey for the novice, one requiring guides as varied in their skills and temperaments as was Odysseus, whose epithet polutropos (‘man of many talents’) indicates what is called for. And third, for those readers who find the central ideas of Stoicism appealing either in a purely intellectual way or in the moral imagination, the ongoing confrontation with Stoicism is one which refines philosophical intuitions, challenges both imagination and analytical talents, and leads ultimately to hard philosophical choices which, if taken seriously, define the kind of life one chooses to lead.

DIFFUSION AND DIMINUTION

Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On Duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as 'life in accordance with nature', and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet, despite the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.