Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Karl Barth

       Foreword

      Karl Barth’s insistence upon the otherness of God seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand. His humor and love of combat, his capacity for friendship even with his ideological opponents, his fondness for his tobacco and other physical comforts, his tastes in art and entertainment were heartily worldly, worldly not in the fashion of those who accept this life as a way-station and testing-ground but of those who embrace it as a piece of Creation. The night of his death he was composing a lecture in which he wrote, in a tremulous but even hand, that “God is not a God of the dead but of the living”; not long before this Barth made notes foreseeing his death and the manifestation before “the judgment seat of Christ” of his “whole ‘being,’ ” his being “with all the real good and the real evil that I have thought, said and done, with all the bitterness that I have suffered and all the beauty that I have enjoyed.” Foremost for him in the ranks of beauty stood the music of Mozart, music which he placed, famously and almost notoriously, above the music of Bach and all others as a sounding-out of God’s glory. He began each day with the playing of a Mozart record, partook of Mozart celebrations and festivals, and conscientiously served as a member of the Swiss Mozart Committee, which included the government minister Carl Burkhardt and the conductor Paul Sacher. “If I ever get to heaven,” he said in the first tribute printed here, “I would first of all seek out Mozart.”

      It is good to have together, in this slim volume, Barth’s formal pronouncements upon his—so to speak—idol, not only for the charm and ardor with which he addresses the subject but for what light his praise sheds upon that question which, despite all the voluminous Dogmatics and the superabundance of lectures, sermons, and incidental utterances that Barth’s long and industrious life produced, remains a bit obscure in his version of Christianity: the question What are we to do? Granted that the situation of the world and of the individual life is as desperate as Barth paints it, and granted that the message of the Bible, and of the Pauline epistles in particular, is just as he explicates it, amid these radical truths how shall we conduct our daily and dim-sighted lives? Does not God’s absolute otherness diminish to zero the significance of our petty activity and relative morality? Yet Mozart’s activity, his playing, are regarded by Barth as exemplary, and the intensity and the freedom of Mozart’s playing exonerate his narrowness, his ignorance of his era’s science, politics, and philosophy, and the disastrous naïveté with which he conducted his practical affairs. Barth’s attitude toward Mozart puts me in mind, incongruously, of Walt Whitman’s praise, in “Song of Myself,” of animals:

      They do not sweat and whine about their condition

      They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

      They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.

      Like those beautiful and guiltless animals, Mozart’s music says Yea; hearing it, Barth tells us, “one can live.” By focusing so purely, so simply, upon the making of music, Mozart, like Whitman’s panther who “walks to and fro on a limb overhead,” gives us an example of tending to business, of channelling and reflecting, within the specialized talent, divine energy. Mozart, superb creature, “never knew doubt.” His “ever-present lightness” exalts him above all other composers; Barth marvels at “how this man, while truly mastering his craft and always striving toward greater refinement, nevertheless manages never to burden his listeners—especially not with his creative labors!”

      And yet a Yea, to have weight and significance for us, must contain and overpower a Nay, and so in Mozart’s limpid outpouring Barth also hears “something very demanding, disturbing, almost provocative, even in the most radiant, most childlike, most joyful movements.” “What he translated into music was real life in all its discord.” His music reflects the conflicts and passions of his time as fully as the omnivorous mind of Goethe. A tireless absorber of the musical currents around him, Mozart “moved freely within the limits of the musical laws of his time, and then later ever more freely. But he did not revolt against these laws; he did not break them.” It is in his consideration of Mozart’s freedom that Barth becomes most theological, most instructive, and even most musicological: this ideal man, Mozart, carrying the full baggage of human woe and of temporal convention and restraint, possesses his freedom through a “triumphant turn” out of Nay into Yea. This turn is construed as more admirable than Goethe’s sovereign humanism or Schleiermacher’s location of a neutral center whereupon balance can be achieved: “What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it, in which the Yea rings louder than the ever-present Nay.”