Friday, April 11, 2008

What's in a likeness ...

... Who cares what Mozart looked like?

I think we care because we are composite beings, made up of body and soul.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:56 PM

    There's quite a bit more to the Mozart story, which I discovered when I was writing an essay on Viennese anatomist Josef Hyrtl. Hyrtl lived in the era of "head-hunters" -- guys like the inventor of phrenology, Franz Gall, also a Viennese -- who liked to collect the skulls of famous dead guys.

    Hyrtl had several skulls, including that of Haydn (his dad played in Prince Esterhazy's orchestra, which Haydn directed) and he also had Mozart's (Hyrtl's younger brother got it from the sexton of the graveyard).

    However, after Hyrtl's death, the skull could not be found in his possessions. Then the Mozart Museum in Salzburg said *they* had the skull. Some years ago they created a mock-up of Mozart's head based on this skull, but several physical anthropologists said it wasn't necessarily M's skull at all (records of teeth he'd had pulled did not correspond to the skull in their possession, etc.).

    So, the claims of the Salzburg museum notwithstanding, we still don't know what Mozart looks like! And I, for one, would like to know, for the reasons you cite Frank.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:45 PM

    Composite beings? What do you mean? All kidding aside, I think it's important to recognize the importance of physiology among musicians. Namely, how did the size, strength, agility and idiosyncrasies of Mozart's hands inform his piano playing? How did his instrumental virtuoso inform his compositions? Take Chopin, a figure we are fortunate enough to have a photograph of. My impression of him is of a small sickly man with tremendously large and dexterous hands; a piano player first, who's compositions were directly related to his abilities as a piano player.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Brian,
    My point about composite beings (remember, I was trained in Scholastic philosophy - and it stuck) is that we can't quite know someone as a person unless we have some idea of what that person looked like. The body is not just a container for the soul. Soul and body are intimately connected to one another. A physician friend of mine was talking to a patient who suddenly died right in the middle of the conversation. They were looking right at each other when this happened. I asked my friend what his impression of that was and he said that "the only way I could describe it that would get across what it was like would be to say that his soul left hos body."
    Your impression of Chopin, I suspect. There's that last scary daguerrotype of him.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, and yes, Brian what you say about the physical characteristics of musicians is of course correct. Rachmaninoff's huge hands for instance - or Brahms, a short guy with big hands. If you have ever seen films of the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, it is interesting to see how he used his whole body - he was tall - to conduct with. Hence, the extraordinarily fluid line of his Parsifal.

    ReplyDelete