One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household.
David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations are real … his vision embraces the pain and cruelty as well as the compassion — the darkness and the light; but it is the light that prevails’. Even if you feel that the truth about Mozart’s emotional ambiguity at moments like the end of Figaro is that it leaves that balance of light and dark totally open, Cairns’s is a wonderfully sympathetic, convincingly expressed view.
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