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.

Bulletin to the uninitiated: There’s no secret message. It’s OK to listen to Mozart and remain standing. It’s even OK to find some of Mozart’s music--steady, now--uninteresting.

Meanwhile, things are even weirder on the flip side of the Mozart Industry, the trivializing side.

In brief, Mozart is now increasingly being sold as an aid to a more efficient and productive life, like St. John’s wort or the Ab-Flex. He makes us (and especially our children) smarter. He gives us, according to our needs, more serenity, more energy, deepened powers of concentration, better sleep.

The CDs in the bins tell the story:

* “Mozart for Mothers to Be.” This is intended for pregnant moms. The tone here is quiet and comforting, like a Lamaze class: “Studies show your baby will love this soothing serenade.”

* “Baby Needs Mozart.” This is a more aggressive approach to the same theme, designed to create a sense of shame among mothers-to-be who would deny their progeny the full range of Mozart benefits. “Give your little one a head start--in life and at school,” it says, daring you to gamble with your child’s future by playing him the wrong music.

* Grown-ups can get in on this action. “Tune Your Brain With Mozart,” adapted from the book by Elizabeth Miles, promises that all of us, even “busy professionals,” can use Mozart to “prepare for peak performance.”

There is a Mozart disc to massage a loved one by.

Another to have a dinner party by.

Another just to wake up to.

Hovering behind these discs is the 1997 book (three accompanying CDs are available) called “The Mozart Effect.” This breezy piece of New Age demi-science, written by Don Campbell, has become one of the main texts of the Mozart Industry.

To be fair, the book makes a good case for the power of music. Music, Campbell shows, may indeed be able to heal and uplift and even “warm up your brain” in ways that conventional science and medicine are only starting to understand. But there isn’t much here to support the proposition that Mozart is uniquely capable of producing these results. It may well be, as Campbell suggests, that a rich mixture of counterpoint and harmony and melody and organizational architecture may be required to achieve maximum benefits. But can Mozart really have been the only composer in all of history to have successfully blended these elements?

The thing is, there is some emerging research out there that really does make a case for music as a stimulant to certain kinds of mental activity.

The widely publicized (though hysterically over-interpreted) study done in the early 1990s at UC Irvine, in which student test scores went up after listening to Mozart, is an intriguing door-opener to further research.

And only last month, at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers suggested that listening to and performing music may enlarge certain areas of the brain, which is evidently desirable.

But again, the idea that Mozart is uniquely associated with these properties is like saying that reading is good for the imagination, but only if it’s Proust.

It’s worth mentioning that the deification of Mozart is a relatively recent development.

Even well into this century, many composers and critics placed him in the second or third tier of composers, well behind, say, Bach or Beethoven.

And some Mozart works that today are regarded as sacred texts were virtually ignored for more than a century.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Mozart was indeed, for lack of any better way to understand it, a divine phenomenon. Many of the works he crammed into his 35 years do have an unearthly perfectness to them.

But among Mozart’s 600-odd pieces there are many specimens that are merely pleasant. And a few more that are, let’s admit, tedious.

And it’s no disservice to Mozart to acknowledge that other composers, too, have been fortunate enough over the years to knock out the occasional piece of uplifting or mentally stimulating music.

In short, by chronically overselling its man, the Mozart Industry actually sells him out.