Alfred Schütz, Mozart and the Philosophers

Alfred Schütz’s essay, first published in 1956 and republished in 1964, examines philosophical interpretations of Mozart before developing an account of operatic intersubjectivity. Moving from Schopenhauer and Enlightenment aesthetics to Hermann Cohen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Wilhelm Dilthey, Schütz asks whether philosophy illuminates Mozart’s music or incorporates it into pre-existing systems. His alternative locates Mozart’s philosophical significance in the musical presentation of human encounters, not primarily in doctrines extracted from libretti.

Schopenhauer supplies an initial framework: music expresses a reality that philosophy seeks to articulate conceptually. Mozart’s limited philosophical reading therefore need not exclude philosophical insight. Schütz then reconstructs Enlightenment demands for naturalness and dramatic plausibility, particularly Rousseau’s emphasis on melody and suspicion of simultaneous singing and orchestral independence. Such demands make musical drama answerable to speech:

Hence the recitativo secco, without any orchestral accompaniment, has to imitate the spoken language carefully in its declamatory style.

This constraint contrasts with Mozart’s achievement. Resources that appear unnatural when judged by ordinary conversation—ensembles and an independently expressive orchestra—can disclose relations inaccessible to sequential dialogue.

Schütz’s treatment of the later philosophers turns on their tendency to seek conceptual meanings in dramatic material:

This explains their tendency to pay exaggerated attention to the plots of his operas and the characters involved in them.

For Cohen, love unifies musical drama by connecting aesthetic feeling with ethical action. Schütz questions interpretations that attribute philosophical intentions to Mozart through plots shaped by librettists, performers, and theatrical circumstances. The composer’s significance cannot be established simply by assigning him responsibility for every idea in an operatic text.

Kierkegaard requires a differentiated reading. The discussion of Mozart in Either-Or belongs to the pseudonymous aesthete A and participates in an indirect confrontation between aesthetic and ethical existence. Cherubino, Papageno, and Don Giovanni represent desire as dreaming, exploring, and victorious. Schütz treats these as mythified musical figures serving a philosophical argument, rather than straightforward descriptions of stage personalities. Their symbolic unity nevertheless raises a question central to his own interpretation: does Mozart’s music depend on stable, consistent characters?

Dilthey comes closest to explaining the music itself. His account emphasizes Mozart’s transformation of Italian opera through contrapuntal and orchestral resources, especially the ensemble’s ability to present different responses simultaneously. Yet Dilthey still presupposes enduring characters whose attitudes undergo modulation. Schütz instead gives priority to the situation that the music brings into being.

Susanna’s “Deh vieni, non tardar” exemplifies this shift. The aria temporarily suspends the intrigue and her established characterization, disclosing a young woman awaiting her lover. Comparable discontinuities suggest that musical numbers need not be stages in a continuous psychological portrait. Each can articulate a relatively self-contained situation whose meaning differs for its participants. Each person experiences the others’ conduct from a distinct position; their coexistence forms the texture of a shared social world.

The argument distinguishes music’s powers from those of conceptual drama:

The dramatic poet deals with the great questions of fate and freedom, and he can do so because he uses the medium of language, which, by reason of its conceptual structure, is an instrument fit to deal with dialectical and casuistic problems.

Mozart’s distinctive achievement lies elsewhere: music makes differentiated experiences unfold together. Schütz distinguishes stage events in external space and time from music experienced in inner duration, or durée. Recitative communicates conversational inflections and emotional implications; orchestral accompaniment and arioso intensify the transition toward fully musical experience. The orchestra separates the stage world from everyday reality while connecting the listener’s inner duration with that of the figures onstage.

Ensembles extend this connection among the characters. Different and even antagonistic responses become audible as participation in one situation. Their unity does not require agreement or identical feeling. Schütz thus replaces Cohen’s primacy of love with the broader problem of sociality: how human beings encounter and understand one another. Returning to Schopenhauer, he presents Mozart’s philosophical insight as an achievement of musical form. The essay shows how shared time can sustain divergent perspectives, making intersubjective life available to musical experience.