The Danger in Making Amadeus Almighty

What's the biggest challenge facing classical music?

The decline of arts education? The rise of Celine Dion?

No, as troubling as those things are, there is a larger and more insidious threat out there. It's the Mozart Industry.

The Mozart Industry, not to be confused with the composer himself, is a sprawling multinational concern, with no identifiable headquarters. It manufactures not only merchandise but opinion. It traffics not only in concerts and festivals but also attitudes, quasi-scientific claims and even tones of voice.

And like many multinationals, it's out of control.

In truth, I can live with the Mozart sweatshirts and coffee mugs, the watches and wall calendars, the hand-dipped chocolates, the greeting cards that play "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" when you open them, the ribbed all-cotton socks with Wolfgang's countenance in profile, the cocktail napkins featuring a reproduction of the manuscript to the "Elvira Madigan" Piano Concerto.

It's the way the music itself is being peddled that worries me.

Music, at least for the time being, is still at the heart of the Mozart Industry. But Mozart's music is becoming over-exalted on the one hand and trivialized on the other.

On the over-exalted side, people are now required to talk about Mozart in a hushed, reverential tone formerly reserved for the major deities.

It has become obligatory to say, when mentioning Mozart, that he was the "greatest composer who ever lived," or better yet, the "greatest genius the world has ever known."

A few weeks ago, as I was driving near Boston, the announcer on the local public radio station, who had previously been talking more or less normally, said, "We turn now to the music of Wolf . . . gang . . . Am . . . a . . . de . . . us . . . Moz . . . art." There was such gravitas in the voice that I instinctively slowed down. My thoughts raced. It must be the Requiem. Maybe somebody has died.

When the music started up, it turned out to be one of his little divertimentos. A pleasant trifle. But the idea that Mozart can sometimes be merely diverting, much less trifling, is blasphemy to the senior management of the Mozart Industry.

The problem with over-exalting Mozart is that ordinary people, trying mightily to form some kind of relationship with classical music, get confused. If they hear a piece of Mozart--a crisp little early symphony, say, or modest chamber piece--and they do not find themselves immediately prostrated by a sense of divine otherness, they feel secretly ashamed and inadequate. There's a hidden message to this music, they fear, and they don't get it.