Customer Reviews

Mozart the Dramatist

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When most books become dated it is the kiss of death for their usefulness. One can surely feel the 60's zeitgeist in this book, the ready feminist explanation and the tendency to unearth the heretofore unknown sources of power behind the establishment. But Brophy's book, is dated and incredibly useful. Add to that wildly well-written and you've got a book worth having around. Her researches about the Magic Flute are what the book is most famous for, and accounts for why people of a certain class, or aspiring to that class and its education used to have this book around a lot. How many actually read it is a different. Having read it when I was very young, it piqued my interest in things mystagogic, as well a in the snooty prose of which, I later learned Brophy was a famous( some say famously shrewish) avatar. Her contention that the Magic Flute is based on a contemporaneous novel called the Life of Sethos is a little hard to evaluate even though she makes a good case for it. She is troubled, naturally, by the variable character of the Queen of the Night. Having re-read it recently I felt her argument could have benefitted from a closer reading of Masonic literature. Mozart's Freemasonry was not just a cultural phenomenon for him;rather it is clear from his letters that it was quite existencial. Brophy might have avoided some dead-ends by familiarity with later Masonic writings. For instance, the great philosopher Albert Pike's insight that the distinction between exoteric and esoteric is peculiar to Freemasonry.(in Pike's well-known Morals and Dogma) One thinks Pike had in mind that the exoteric-esoteric polarities could be used, purposefully, for instruction and edification. Thus, that elements of the Magic Flute may have had their origen in other texts does not alter the fact that they were original to Masonry in their use. For as a matter a ideengeschichte Freemasonry has used a variety of sources. Albert Pike explicitly endorses such use as a historical matter in the development of ritual. Brigid Brophy may be quite right about some things, but wrong about the impetus for Mozart's work. Certainly I find it hard to credit misogyny, which she asserts, as an inspiration for such music. I can't think of many examples of hate being an inspiration for great art. Perhaps Beethoven delightful Rage over a lost Penny might count, but then that is about hating to lose money which is easier to identify. Be all this as it may, Brophy's book brings you right into the creative process of Mozart's greatest works, and from that perspective it is one of the most successful works on the composer.