Mozart

A deep-seated resistance to Mozart would not seem to augur well for a career having anything to do with classical music. Then again, as a latecomer to classical music in my college years during the 1960s, I had no reason to envision such a career in the first place.

Here, in any case, was this idiot professor, smugly proclaiming to a music appreciation class, “Mozart is perfect.” Although the times were still relatively credulous at theUniversity of Wisconsin — compared, at least, with what would follow in a few years — I bristled and set out to prove the man wrong.

Evidence of Mozart’s greatness (and occasional lack of it) was sparser in those pre-Mostly Mozart Festival, pre-“Amadeus,” pre-CD-boom days. Still, my resistance to the composer gradually eroded in the face of discoveries like “Le Nozze di Figaro,” especially the spine-tingling harmonies in the Act II finale; the “Gran Partita” for winds, especially the otherworldly first Adagio; “Ave Verum Corpus”; the Clarinet Concerto; the “little” G minor Symphony, No. 25; and more.

Yet resistance still resurges at times, particularly during endlessly rattling Alberti bass figurations in the pianist’s left hand in certain of the major-key concertos. And it rushed back with a vengeance as I read “The Mostly Mozart Guide to Mozart,” a new book by Carl Vigeland, published by John Wiley & Sons in collaboration with Lincoln Center.

A sort of expanded program book full of anecdotal asides; extended quotations from performers, composers and others; and recommendations of recordings, confusingly and repetitively assembled, it stirred only vague curiosity. Just enough, alas, that as I was preparing to review the opening program of the current Mostly Mozart season, which included Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C (“Jupiter”), I thought to sample the appropriate entry.

“Make of it what you will,” Mr. Vigeland writes, ending his discussion of the “great” G minor Symphony, No. 40, “there had until its composition never been anything like this symphony in the history of music.”

“They had to rewrite the textbooks again after the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony,” he continues, as if textbooks had flooded out in the 16 days of 1788 between the premieres of the 40th and the 41st.

“Stupendous,” he adds of the “Jupiter.” “Unbelievable. Beyond superlatives. Maybe simply: miraculous. This perfect piece,” and so on.

I have no wish to denigrate the “Jupiter” Symphony. I would almost grant Mr. Vigeland “stupendous” if he hadn’t used the word so often elsewhere. But the rest of it raised the old hackles again.

Now I was trapped. Feeling the need to sound a caveat, I thought it would be unfair to do so without reading the whole book.

Having done so, I can report that what I had originally stumbled on was one of the most egregious examples of strained puffery, but there are plenty more. When you have already called the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat “hugely, profoundly, astoundingly — what superlative can be sufficient? — moving,” what can be left to say of the transcendent minor-key Concertos Nos. 20 and 24? (In fact, Mr. Vigeland has relatively little to say about them.) “How many ways are there to shout ‘Bravo!’?” he shouts of the Concerto No. 23 in A.

And with regard to Mozart’s piano concertos in particular, the caveat must extend to matters of fact. On Page 32 Mr. Vigeland refers to “his 26 piano concertos.” On Page 108 he writes, “All told, he wrote 27 or, some say, 28 piano concertos.”

Of the 27 concertos in the conventional numbering, Nos. 1 through 4 (K. 37, 39-41), Mr. Vigeland explains, are “arrangements of music by other people.” But shouldn’t any overall accounting that includes those also include the three concerto arrangements of sonatas by Johann Christian Bach (K. 107, Nos. 1-3), bringing the total of concertos to 30?

Mr. Vigeland wrongly attributes the original sonatas to Johann Sebastian Bach and seems to think that the three arrangements together somehow make up the Concerto No. 5, which is, in fact, a brilliant original work in D by Mozart. So, final answer, Mr. Vigeland’s total would be, uh, anyone’s guess.

Ah, details. “Realistically, however,” Mr. Vigeland writes elsewhere, “can the experience of an artist of Mozart’s caliber and range be reduced to a quantum of fact and detail? Is there not something inherently absurd about the basis of such a proposition? We might just as well try to ‘explain’ the meaning of a spring morning, a howling wind, a mother’s embrace, a child’s cry, a robin’s flight ... the beauty of a man or a woman.”

Better then, or at least easier, to mythologize, to mystify. Let facts dissolve in an impressionistic haze of admiration, adulation if not adoration, like the one leading up to the “Jupiter” passage cited above: “musical nirvana” and “paradise” (of the Symphony No. 38); “paradise again” and “a work to take with you to that proverbial desert isle,” “heaven,” “Champagne for everyone!” (No. 39); “quite simply, music to die for” (No. 40).

Mindless, clichéd, indiscriminate cheerleading is the last thing classical music needs just now, as it finds itself increasingly challenged to prove its relevance in the multicultural, anti-elitist, pop-saturated arts climate of the 21st century. The Mostly Mozart Festival itself — not so long ago, a fresh idea gone hopelessly stale — has faced this challenge squarely over the last decade, subjecting its hero to the rough and tumble of modern life and global culture. Among the big events this summer is a production of “A Flowering Tree,” John Adams’s 2006 opera, opening on Thursday and involving South Indian folklore and an earthy chorus from Venezuela.

In all, the festival — now involving dance, film, 17th-to-21st-century repertory, period performance, late-night club experiences and a temporary makeover of Avery Fisher Hall — has shown numerous ways in which classical music can grow, stimulate thought and free the imagination while expanding audiences along the way. This new book, to put it mildly, is unworthy of what the Mostly Mozart Festival has in recent years become.