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.
