Mozart Quotes

“The peculiarity of innovative fantasies in the form of works of art is that they are fantasies kindled by material which is accessible to many people. In a word, they are de-privatised fantasies. That sounds simple, but the whole difficulty of artistic creation shows itself when someone tries to cross this bridge — the bridge of de-privatisation. It could also be called the bridge of sublimation.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“In other words, the more differentiated, relatively developed societies have cultivated a comparatively high tolerance for highly individualised ways of further developing the existing art canon; this facilitates experimentation and the breaching of stale conventions and can thus help to enrich the artistic pleasures available through seeing and hearing.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The libidinal fantasy-stream only becomes significant for other people, i.e. capable of mediation, if it is socialised through fusion with the canon, while at the same time energizing and individualizing the canon or the conscience.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“In giving latitude to his individual fantasy, and especially to his ability to synthesise previously separate elements in a way which breaches the existing canon of taste, he initially reduces his chance of finding resonance in the public. [...] In this respect, too, without realizing it, Mozart had inaugurated another shift in the balance of power.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The split in his social existence made itself felt in his personality structure as well. Mozart's entire musical activity, his whole training as a virtuoso performer and composer, were shaped by the music canon of the hegemonic court societies of Europe. [...] At the same time, in his personality structure, especially as far as his social relations were concerned, he remained a man of the petty bourgeois ...”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[W]e must add at once that a judgement on Mozart's verbal coprophilia would necessarily miss the mark if it applied present-day standards of civilization, thus implicitly regarding our own canon of sensibility as universal, a canon for the whole mankind, and not as one that has developed. To do justice to Mozart's tendency, we need to have a clear idea of the civilizing process in the course of which the social canon of behavior and feeling changes in a specific way.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[A] person is not an artist in one compartment and a human being in another.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Many standard comments on Mozart that we meet in this context, assertions such as "Mozart simply did not understand himself", reinforce the idea that artistic conscience is one of the inborn functions of a person, and therefore of Mozart. But conscience, whatever its specific form, is innate to no one. At most the potential for forming a conscience is a natural human endowment. This potential is activated and shaped into a specific structure through a person's life with others. The individual conscience is society-specific.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Unlike dream ideas, those of the artist are attuned both to the material and to society. They are a specific form of communication, intended to elicit applause, resonance of a positive or negative kind, to arouse jor or anger, clapping or booing, love or hate.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The pinnacle of artistic creation is achieved when the spontaneity and inventiveness of fantasy-stream are so fused with knowledge of the regularities of the material and the judgement of the artist's conscience that the innovative fantasies emerge as if by themselves in a way that matches the demands of both material and conscience. This is one of the most socially fruitful types of sublimation process.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The acquired knowledge, which includes acquired thinking or, in Freudian terms, the "ego", opposes the more animal energy-impulses when they try to take control of the skeletal muscles and thus of action. That these libidinal impulses also flow through the chambers of memory in their effort to control human action, kindling the fire of dream fantasies in them — that in the work of the artist they are purified by a stream of knowledge until they finally merge with it — therefore represents a reconciliation between originally antagonistic tendencies of the personality.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“[T]he social canons and methods by which people build up instinct controls in their communal life are not brought into being deliberately; they evolve over long periods, blindly and without plan. Irregularities and contradictions in drive-controls, huge fluctuations in their severity or leniency, are therefore among the recurrent structural features of the civilizing process.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“In the course of the changing relationship between those who produce art and those who need and buy it, the structure of art changes, not its value.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Moreover, the change hinted at in this statement does not concern merely the social position of the artist. With it, the canon of artistic creation, or expressed differently, the structure of art, also changed. But such connections do not emerge very clearly if the transition from art production for a personally known employer or patron to art production for a paying public, from patronage to the free, more or less anonymous market, is considered merely as an economic event. To take this view is to overlook an essential point: that this was a structural change in the relation of people to each other, which can be precisely defined. In particular, it involved a power-gain by the artist in relation to his public. This human change, this change in the balance of power — not simply between individuals as such but between them as representatives of different social functions and positions, between people in their capacity as artists and as public — remains incomprehensible as long as the pattern of our thinking aims solely at spinning out dehumanised abstractions.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“But the significance of this experience for Mozart's personal development — and so for his development as a musician or, to put it differently, for that of his music — cannot be convincingly and realistically assessed if one merely describes the fate of the individual person, without also offering a model of the social structures of his time, especially where they led to differences of power. Only within the framework of such a model can one discern what a person like Mozart enmeshed in this society was able to do as an individual, and what — no matter how strong, great or unique he may have been — he was not able to do.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“The trouble is that such categories do not take us much further. They are academic abstractions that do not do justice to the process-character of the observable social data to which they refer. Underlying them is the idea that the tidy division into epochs we usually find in history books best fits the actual course of social development. Each figure who is known through the magnitude of his or her achievement is then allocated to one epoch or the other as its high point. On closer examination, however, it not uncommonly emerges that outstanding achievements occur most frequently at times which could at most be called transitional phases if static concepts of epochs are used. In other words, such achievements arise from the dynamics of the conflict between the canons of older declining classes and newer rising ones.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“People who hold the position of outsiders in relation to certain established groups, but who feel equal or even superior to them on grounds of their personal achievements or sometimes even their wealth, may bitterly resist the humiliations to which they are exposed; they may also be fully aware of the human frailties of the established group. But as long as the power of the establishment remains intact it and its canon of behavior and feeling and exert a strong attraction on outsiders. It is often the latters' greatest wish to be recognised as equals by those who treat them so openly as their inferiors. The curious fixation of the wishes of people in outsider positions on recognition and acceptance by their establishment causes this goal to become the focus of all their acts and desires, their source of meaning. No other esteem, no other success carries so much weight for them as the esteem of one circle in which they are regarded as inferior outsiders, as success in their local establishment.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“What is decisive is that, in his personal goals and wishes, in his sense of what had meaning and what did not, he anticipated the attitudes and feelings of a later type of artist. [...] In other words, Mozart represented the free artists who places his trust largely in individual inspiration.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“However, the ready-made formula about the bourgeoisie rising as a result of an inner necessity of social development in the second half of the eighteenth century, defeating a feudal nobility undermined by economic change in the French Revolution, tends to be applied in such a routine, mechanical way today that one loses sight of the complex course of actual events. The observable problems of human beings are categorized by class concepts debased to clichés, such as "nobility" and "bourgeoisie", "feudalism" and "capitalism". Categories like these block access to a better understanding of the development of music and art in general. Such understanding is only possible if the discussion is not restricted either to economic processes or to developments in music, and if an attempt is made at the same time to illuminate the changing fate of the people who produce music and other works of art within the developing structure of society.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“We certainly get a more complete and well-rounded picture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — at court and in the church — if we bear in mind that music still had much of the character of a craft, and that especially in the court sphere it was marked by a very sharp social inequality between the art producer and the patron.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“Mozart experienced the fundamental ambivalence of the bourgeois artist in court society, which can be summed up by the following dichotomy: identification with the court nobility and its taste; resentment of his humiliation by it.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“However, the power difference between economic establishments and outsiders in societies where there is a fairly free market for supply and demand and even, in some areas, for professional appointments, is much less than that between absolute rulers or their councillors and their court musicians — even though artists who were famous and à la mode could take some liberties.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius

“To understand a person, one needs to know the primordial wishes he or she longs to fulfill. Whether or not people's lives make sense to them depends on whether or how far they are able to realise these wishes. But they are not embedded in advance of all experience. They evolve from early childhood in life with other people, and are fixed gradually, over the years, in the form that will determine the course of life; sometimes, however, this will happen suddenly, in conjunction with an especially momentous experience.”
― Norbert Elias, Mozart: Portrait of a Genius