Anthony Burgess Centre (Symposium Paper)

Anthony Levings, ‘Incongruous Voices: Musical Philosophies in Mozart and the Wolf Gang’, paper presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Anthony Burgess, ‘Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music’, University of Angers, France, 8–9 December 2006. Programme

Bringing together Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Prokofiev, Bliss, Rossini, Stendhal, Berlioz, Gershwin, Schoenberg, Henry James and Lorenzo Da Ponte in colloquy would appear to be the perfect way of coming to understand the place of Mozart among the great composers, or at the very least the position of Mozart within Burgess’s own personal ‘sonic universe’. Heaven in Mozart and the Wolf Gang, however, is a place where everyone talks and no one listens. As such, although there are many arguments, in particular concerning the cerebral and the bodily in relation to musical counterpoint, no dialectic can be established to arrive at any meaningful conclusion. The novel instead starts and ends with unanswerable questions. It begins with the question: what is the relationship between Mozart’s bicentennial and the Gulf War? It ends with the question: what is the relationship between Mozart’s work and non-Western forms of music? Answers to these questions can be nothing more than speculative and often worryingly naive. The paper explains why this is by demonstrating how each of the composers is very much of their own time and place in terms of their musical philosophy and that in consequence the characters are not a collection of timeless and universal beings but a collection of anachronisms - not necessarily inseparable from their own time but incomplete without acknowledgement of it. The perspective is part of a much wider appreciation of the way in which the discussions that have taken place in the realm of music, and which are echoed throughout Mozart and the Wolf Gang, have influenced Burgess’s attitude towards not only music but also the individual.

University of Angers Press (Book Chapter)

Anthony Levings, 'Biographical Perspectives on Anthony Burgess (from Geoffrey Aggeler, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Roger Lewis and David Lodge)’, in Graham Woodroffe (ed.) Anthony Burgess, Autobiographer (Angers: Presses de l’Université d’Angers, 2006), pp. 55-66. Angers Press

While the writers discussed in the paper do not encompass all of the writing on Anthony Burgess they do capture some very distinctive differences in approach. Geoffrey Aggeler in The Artist as Novelist, for example, provides at the beginning of his work an Enderby-esque portrait filled with a humour appropriate to consideration of a novelist often labelled as comic, whereas Roger Lewis is so humourless that he fails to see why Burgess should be allowed any extravagance whatsoever in his autobiographies or his fiction. A. S. Byatt meanwhile is shown to have reasons for her depictions of Burgess in fiction that go beyond a mere liking for the writer, and Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis are discussed with regard to their congruence and divergence on the man in question. Finally the paper addresses David Lodge’s criticism that has labelled Burgess as an author who is pursuing ‘the Ideal’ (a conclusion that arises from a very narrow section of the author’s work, but is surprisingly more valid than it at first appears). Additional to the writers named in the title, the paper also draws into its theoretical discussion Umberto Eco and Hayden White in order to demonstrate that the imaginary is an important element in biography.