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“Ah, All Will Now Be Happy”: Mozart & the Sacredness of Solitude

“Ah, All Will Now Be Happy”: Mozart & the Sacredness of Solitude

Last updated on: June 29, 2015 at 10:37 pm by Tod Worner

“Ah, All Will Now Be Happy”: Mozart & the Sacredness of Solitude 2015-06-29T22:37:39-06:00 Tod Worner

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His door was shut. As he wanted it to be.

As he needed it to be.

His hair was amiss. Why wouldn’t it be? Countless times his nervous hands unconsciously and obsessively thrust themselves through his shaggy mane as if to wring the notes from his fevered mind. And his billiard table? By serving as his composition table it was, quite simply, a mess – littered with perfect fragments of his unfolding masterpiece. .

In Peter Shaffer’s brilliant story (and film adaptation), Amadeus, there is a particular scene has maintained a particularly strong grip on me. Mozart, we find, is a young man. Dreamily lost in the solitude of his backroom, he is earnestly hunched over the billiard table, pressing one glorious note after another onto paper with his well-worn quill. “Everything’s composed – but not written yet,” he once wrote to his father and mentor, Leopold. So now, he would write. And the music would soar. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was writing an opera. The words (from librettist Lorenzo da Ponte) to come gave glory to the utter perfection of the notes they accompanied. Lilting. Dancing. They came. From The Marriage of Figaro (translated),

Ah, all will now
be happy.
This day of torments,
of caprice, of folly,
in content and happiness
only love can end it.
Friends, lovers, to dance, to play,
set off the fireworks!
And to the sound of gay music
let us all run to celebrate!

And between the inking of several notes, Mozart would absently roll the cue ball so that it coursed perfectly against three edges of his table only to arrive obediently in his hand again and again. The ball seemed a metaphor for Order and Perfection accompanying an unparalleled musical Beauty.

Until.

Until the door opened. And life barged in.

With the opening door and his wife’s insistent voice, the heavenly music stopped abruptly. Soon, crowded demands lodged their impatient petitions. A visitor at the door. A disheveled house. An impatient father. An exasperated wife. Testy creditors. Instantly, Mozart was pressed.

Decide, Wolfgang. Decide. Choose, Wolfgang. Choose. Pick a side. Engage in a quarrel.
Come down from your ethereal peaks into the trenches of real life. Because the conflicts, the frustrations, the muck and slime of this world are the reality, not your world of frivolous notes. Don’t be fooled, Wolfgang. This is where you belong.

And as the voices of visitor and wife and father blended and rose to increasingly indignant tones and volumes, Mozart slowly backed away. Ever so quietly. Almost unnoticed by the querulous drama erupting around him, Mozart softly backpedaled and closed the backroom door behind him, leaned over his work and the heavenly strains resumed.

It was beautiful.

And so honest.

And yet, I’ve come to think of this scene a bit differently as I’ve grown older. Perhaps the impatient, agitated, officious demands of our everyday lives are, in fact, not reality, but, in a diabolical bait-and-switch, are trying to convince us otherwise. Perhaps the incessant reminder that we belong knee-deep in the muck, slime and rubbish of everyday life – that the rubbish is all we are worthy of – is a devilish attempt to claim us for the profane when in fact we belong to the sacred.

Yes, yes. We need to answer the door and pay bills and flesh out disagreements with family members. But perhaps our greatest call is to thoughtfully address these demands without losing our peace. Perhaps we are charged to quickly find our way from the blackened, filth-ridden trenches to the majestic mountaintop for the clearest view and the freshest perspective. Perhaps we simply need to back away from needless turmoil, close the door, roll the cue ball and begin to hear the music again.

In my life, I hear the music in the celebration of the Mass, a decade of the Rosary, a votive candle lit or morning prayers on the car ride with my daughters. I hear it in a letter written by Flannery O’Connor, a painting by Caravaggio or the vaulted glory of the Cathedral of St. Paul. And, yes, I so truly hear it when I listen to the magnificent music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

And when I hear the music, my soul exults,

Ah, all will now
be happy.
This day of torments,
of caprice, of folly,
in content and happiness
only love can end it.
Friends, lovers, to dance, to play,
set off the fireworks!
And to the sound of gay music
let us all run to celebrate!

Indeed.

In the midst of life’s trenches, perhaps we would do well to sometimes – many times slowly shut the door, hunch over the billiard table, listen and make music.

Ah, all will now be happy.

Yes, I think so.

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