I’d show him Picasso’s cubism, how it distorted reality while remaining true to it, and how those distortions could be expressive, human, even as the works bent and folded matter like a sheet of paper. He was interested in using the status quo for his own purposes.īut let’s imagine that in the middle of my explaining the art of the early 20 th century that Mozart hadn’t run off screaming, that he remained, skeptical but ready to hear more.

So Mozart might never be prepared to understand modernism in art, because he was not interested in revolution. What he did was to go through convention and come out the other side, wielding it as part of his singular voice. He made use of conventions-musical, dramatic, operatic-to the end of his life. I don’t think he ever put musical and operatic conventions aside. He was so tied to his time, to convention, to the social world his music was part of. Art could distort reality at will, or depart from it entirely and treat painting as an abstraction like instrumental music, or use it to portray dream or nightmare images, or pure states of mind and emotion.Īlready I might have lost Mozart.

In other words, painting could explore things that only painting can do. Now painting could take off on its own–including, if it wanted, creating images free of representation. I’d tell him that when photography appeared, painting was no longer required to represent reality. I’d begin by showing Mozart a photograph. He ordained, in other words, the mass murder of his own people, most of them women and children because the men were off fighting in the civil war. There are so many issues at play in that soul-searing painting, done soon after the atrocity that inspired it: the fire-bombing of a Basque village by Nazi warplanes in support of General Francisco Franco. I wasn’t sure he could ever get his sensibility around it. Talking to Mozart about Guernica was a dicier business. After all, he loved gypsy music and was fascinated the time he heard an American girl playing ragtime on banjo at a party. I felt sure he would catch on and like it. A while back I spent some time imagining playing Louis Armstrong recordings for Brahms. I often speak to my biographical subjects while I’m writing about them. Recently in Madrid I stood for a while in front of Picasso’s Guernica, trying to explain it to Mozart.

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