Black Ship to Glyndebourne

MOZART THE DRAMATIST by Brigid Brophy. 328 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World. $5.95.

The British intelligentsia's newest high priestess is Brigid Brophy, and it is easy to see why. She picks only top-chop idols, and her devotional fires resemble a Bessemer converter. Brophy's incisive critical essays have revealed her pantheon: Freud, Shakespeare, Mozart and Jane Austen. To Great God Freud she has already devoted a book, Black Ship to Hell; now the 18th century composer gets his. In Mozart, her scholarship is firm, and the writing is good Brophy, but it is sheer gusto and freshness of thought that make the book a joy to read.

No musicologist, Brophy concentrates on the characters in Mozart's operas, believing that they "deserve the serious and searching affection--passion, even --we give to Shakespeare's, because they are total human creations." She regards this as no mean feat in the Age of Enlightenment (plainly a very dark age to Freudian Brophy), when erotic fantasy and intuitive humanity were exorcised from one Voltairean hero after another. But Mozart was a composer rather than a writer, thus suffered less harassment from the wild-eyed rationalists around him; after all, music was not to be taken seriously.

In celebrating Mozart's vibrant characters, Brophy, as always, goes full blast. Conventional worshipers of Mozart's "classicism" will be badly singed. Don Giovanni, she insists, is Mozart's Hamlet, written in profound relief and guilt shortly after his father's death. Indeed, Papa Mozart had trained his genius son from babyhood in every musical skill known to his cramped, parochial mind, then hovered over the outcome as possessively as a mother hen. On his final release from father, Mozart wrote his own saga of the father-murderer to whom seduction is a duty, and who is eventually condemned.

Brophy's analysis of The Magic Flute lands her in a tangle of psychology and Masonic symbolism that even she has trouble resolving. (Mozart got into pretty deep water too.) But she is brilliant on Cosi Fan Tutti, the opera in which Mozart, like Jane Austen a century later, worked through the conventional comedy of mistaken identity to write daringly of two sisters competing fiercely in love.

Brophy has no time for the standard academic quibbles: who was who in real life, whether the scenes should be played in a different order. Her concern is with interpretation. She presents her bold views with the disarming intellectual idiosyncrasy of a fine English travel book. And that, in a way, is what she has written: a trip on a Black Ship to Hell through the middle of Glyndebourne.

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