MOZART AND ROUSSEAU
(That's Rousseau, not Mozart, by the way.)

Nicholas Till's book Mozart and the Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1992, reprinted with author's permission for use at the NEH seminar) opens with a conundrum: what is that chorus of peasants doing in The Marriage of Figaro, traipsing in and out of the Count's chateau, at one point even entering the apartments next to the Countess' bedroom? No genuine 18th century peasants would be allowed anywhere near the chateau.

I was particularly interested in this question since I myself played a peasant gal in that very chorus during a bizarre English production of The Marriage of Figaro at Bryn Mawr College in 1984. I didn't realize at the time that my character (an anonymous soprano maiden whom I had secretly named Esmerelda and for whom I had, naturally, invented an elaborate romantic subplot involving the count's long-lost-ne'er-do-well brother) had no business romping through the Countess' flowerbed singing about how wonderful the Count was for abandoning the droigt de signeur.

Till hasn't bothered to answer this question yet, which of course has kept me in suspense, riveted to the text during the entire flight from Seattle to Toronto (where I am currently sitting in a bar watching the World Cup). What he has told me is that Mozart, born into the crazy world of progressive "enlightened despots" (your first vocabulary word, 10th graders) Maria Theresa and Joseph II, felt a tension between the medieval past of stability and the great economic changes caused by the rising bourgeoisie, making tons o' money (the bourgeoisie, not Mozart, who was always broke), needing free trade and free governments. These absolute monarchs like Maria Theresa and her son-in-law's (great?) grandfather Louis XIV, offered a kind of stability to the bourgeoisie.

Austria in the 18th century was rushing headlong into the "modern" age, leading to a big psychic shakeup, a rejection of the past while still somehow yearning for security and morality. Mozart expresses this tug-of-war perfectly, according to Till, in both his music with its tension, resolution,and symmetry, and through the dramatic choices he makes in his operas.

So what does all this have to do with Rousseau? La Finta Giardiniera (The Fake Gardenerette) (I just made up the word "gardenerette" as a translation for the diminutive feminine Italian word for gardener), Mozart's first "mature" operatic work, whose complete manuscript just turned up for the first time in its original version in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, has a plot which reflects the suffering and ultimate triumph of a virtuous heroine, like the popular "Pamela" books of that era. Mozart uses his heroine, Sandrina, to evoke in the audience a "moral sentiment" something like Hume's "ethics of feeling" which 18th century moral philosophers were always harping on about. This was the beginning of Romanticism, as these folks distrusted Descartes and all that "reason is the sole guide to truth" ridiculous stuff we teach you as the first principle of the Enlightenment.

Rousseau went even further with this idea, and said that society corrupts us. How can we focus on our inner feelings, our moral sentiment, the "nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being" (as Wordsworth said in Tintern Abbey) when we are too busy learning Emily Post's rules of ettiquette so we can be bourgeois gentilhommes and impress people at the Tennis Club? This anti-establishment idea was soon followed by the good old sob story The Sorrows of the Young Werther, Sturm und Drang, and the "cult of Rousseau" where a bunch of 18th century proto-La Leche League breastfeeding hippies let down their hair. During the second act of The Phony Gardeneress, the two main characters run off into the forest and go temporarily insane. I am not joking. Who knew Mozart even wrote this opera? I never heard of it before. Anyway, so they flip out and go crazy, turning into loony neo-classical noble savages who think they are prancing around in some sort of Greek myth and God knows what kind of arias they sing at that point.

Fortunately, by the end of the opera they return to the English-style garden, cultivated but not too cultivated, a little wild and a little restrained, a marriage of Nature and Society, which of course Rousseau was advocating all along. Remember the Social Contract? He didn't want us to just rip off our clothes and run around having nude picnics in the forest, did he? No! He wanted Civil Liberty and Moral Liberty, not just Natural Liberty. (11th graders, tell your parents the difference between those three if you can)

Mozart, according to Till, not only understands and agrees with Rousseau, but is using this crazy gardening opera to advocate that lovely balance between the wild uncultivated hippie wilderness and the overly controlled Linnean Versaillesque gardens with those creepy topiaries. My question for the day is: do you think there can be a balance between these two? Can we continue to cultivate our gardens of courtesy and common sense while remaining true to our noble, wild and crazy inner savages? Post me a comment and let me know what you think.

Till's writing style is wonderfully inspiring and I will keep you updated on what else he says about why the peasants shouldn't be there.