Mozart as Novelist?
WEN JENSEN’S Mozart Bicentenary programmes (1YC on Fridays), which are just drawing to an end after some months’ run, have given me the most consistently enjoyable listening of any 1956 session. As complete a revelation of the diversity and depth of Mozart’s genius as possible, they have gained immensely from Mr, Jensen’s lively, unaffected and thoroughly wellinformed presentation, Last week, as a prelude to the ending, we heard the first of three talks by Antony Alpers on "Mozart as Novelist." My curiosity was aroused by the title, but not satisfied by the first talk. It is impossible to judge Mr. Alpers’s thesis on what was really a broad introduction, but I felt that he did not justify his use of the term "novelist." His case, that in Mozart's operas we find an embodiment of the new man-centred humanism, and a shedding of the impersonality of earlier music, seemed somewhat over-simplified. Surely a theocentric humanism is no less a humanism than an anthropocentric one-as so much of medieval art demonstrates. But, even granting his premise that in Mozart’s operas there occurs for the first time a presentation of. pro-foundly-conceived individual human
traits, who not "Mozart the dramatist"? It is that word "novelist" that worries me; I hope Mr. Alpers will substantiate his terms more convincingly in the remainder of what promises to be a most
provocative series.
J.C.
R.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 900, 2 November 1956, Page 18
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231Mozart as Novelist? New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 900, 2 November 1956, Page 18
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