I recently saw A Complete Unknown. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite artists, and I actually got to meet and work with Pete Seeger (in fact I visited his log cabin that Dylan spends the night in early in the film, and I can attest that they got those details right) so I was excited to see those two icons acknowledged in our current popular culture and introduced to a new generation. Judging from reactions to the film on social media, the movie was a resounding success on that front (though Joan Baez seems to be the artist depicted in the film who's really resonating with the younger generation.)
There is no such thing as a perfect biopic that will satisfy both the people who know the history going in and those for whom the film acts as an introduction to the subject. I knew the film would take liberties, and that my reaction would be colored by my own feeling of connection to the period and milieu it depicts. The movie opens in 1961, the year Dylan arrived in New York at age 19, and also the year I was born on Long Island approximately 35 miles east of Greenwich Village. 31 years later I moved to New York and I played at some of the same clubs Dylan played in and got to meet icons like Pete, and Alan Lomax, and Theodore Bikel. I figured that's the world I would be obsessed with upon exiting the film.
But instead I left the film thinking about another artist I am obsessed with but had never previously associated with this universe: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Actually I thought about TWO Mozarts: the real one and the one dreamed up by the demented Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer's play and screenplay Amadeus.
Both Amadeus and A Complete Unknown are about immature genius savants who produce art that contains a deep well of wisdom and humanity completely lacking in their social personalities. The main characters are almost supporting players in their own stories, because what they're really about are the people who try to connect with them but just can't make sense of the profound disconnect between the sublime music and the selfish brats that produced it.
Bob Dylan's journey from provincial Minnesota to exciting New York is remarkably similar to Mozart's escaping Salzburg for Vienna. They were both young, hungry, probably on the neurodivergent spectrum, had a justified confidence in their own abilities that made them both impatient with those who didn't "get" them and distrustful of those who did, craving attention but unwilling to follow the established protocols necessary to cultivate their reputation and status within the industry – though they intuited that their rebelliousness actually helped their celebrity status even as it aggravated those managing their careers.
1780s Vienna, like 1960s New York, really was “where it's at”. It was the place to go for those who wanted to expand beyond the conventions and expectations of the places they came from, and to invent careers and personas for those who didn’t fit into the available paradigms. This was largely due to the influence of Joseph II, whose depiction in Amadeus was misleading. He was as central to Mozart’s story as Pete Seeger was to Dylan’s.
Joseph was the brother of Marie Antoinette. During his ten-year reign as the sole ruler of the Habsburg Empire he eliminated censorship of the press; enacted criminal justice reform and severely curtailed use of the death penalty; abolished serfdom and paid laborers in cash; instituted universal elementary education and literacy programs for all regardless of economic status or religious affiliation, ordered that classes be conducted in German instead of Latin, which had been the norm, and provided scholarships to poor students to pursue higher education. He was a Catholic who gave autonomy to Protestants, Jews and Muslims and protected them from discrimination and persecution. He attempted to create something like universal health care by building a large hospital in Vienna that was free to all.
But while he seemingly embodied Enlightenment values, Joseph wasn’t as enlightened as all this makes him sound. His insistence on German education was a way to suppress Hungarian cultural autonomy under Austrian rule. He ignored the advice of the scientists he hired to consult in the design of that hospital, resulting in its spreading more disease than it healed. His imperialistic wars of choice achieved nothing but increased isolation for the Habsburgs. Most of his reforms were resisted by the nobility, never fully enacted, and were soon watered down or reversed. His ruling style was despotic, with little patience for nuanced discussion.
Joseph’s most enduring legacy, then, wasn’t what he actually accomplished as a monarch, but the attitudes and atmosphere he fostered in the culture. Joseph’s Vienna was a place where intellectuals gathered in cafes to discuss politics and philosophy, where the streets were filled with music from wind octets to hurdy-gurdy players, where Freemasonry was allowed to flourish and spread its ideas of universal brotherhood. Every night one could choose among a wide variety of cultural events to attend, from theater to marionettes to orchestra concerts, and, thanks to Joseph, there was a thriving opera house. If not for him Mozart would not have composed The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Impresario, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte; and since the commissions from Prague for Don Giovanni and La Clemenza di Tito were the direct result of the success of Figaro, Joseph can justifiably claim some credit for them as well. And the culture Joseph fostered also contributed to the success of Mozart’s self-produced “academies” for which he composed most of his remarkable piano concertos.
Joseph’s mixed legacy reminds me of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who also imperfectly balanced idealism with Realpolitik, dealt with institutions unable and unwilling to enact their visions, and gamely tried to move civilization forward at home while engaging in brutal warfare abroad. And, just like the Vienna of the 1780s, New York in the 1960s giddily enjoyed its newfound cultural openness, able to criticize its own government while expanding the palette and possibilities of artistic expression. In that same year of 1961, Kennedy brought Pablo Casals to the White House, at a time when Casals was as famous for his humanitarianism and stance against Franco’s fascist regime as he was for his music. Casals not only gave the expected concert for luminaries and dignitaries, but had an hour-long private meeting with Kennedy to discuss politics and policy. This conferred a sense of legitimacy to the notion of protest music, which was further confirmed by the appearances of Dylan, Baez and Seeger at the March on Washington two years later.
The movie is not wrong that the folk music scene in 1960s New York was rife with gatekeepers who zealously guarded “authentic” folk music the way Joseph’s advisers tried to guard “authentic” Italian opera (even when Joseph himself was pushing for German opera.) The irony is that there was nothing particularly “authentic” about any of it. There is nothing “folk” about playing a guitar and singing into a microphone on a stage, performing a song cut and pasted together from multiple sources that may have originated on different continents. It’s a process that resembles classical music more than it does some ancient Bardic tradition.
The folk gatekeepers of Greenwich Village recognized Dylan had a quality that felt authentic at the same time that they saw how contrived it all was. But Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie was also contrived – he was educated and well-read from a middle-class background (albeit with a troubled childhood), and felt free to change material as he saw fit. Guthrie’s rough life and train-hopping gave him a pass, but these gatekeepers were painfully aware that their criteria were inconsistent.
This isn’t made explicit in the movie, but it’s become clear that Dylan’s interest in protest music was piqued by his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie), though it was another brilliant woman, Joan Baez, who recognized the force of Dylan’s political material and helped him develop it and use his voice for social justice.
Baez never married Dylan and their romantic entanglement was short-lived, but they were professionally linked for years. She reminds me a bit of yet another brilliant woman: Constanze Weber, who married Mozart as an intellectual equal. Constanze was a great singer able to negotiate the difficult music Mozart wrote for her (such as the florid solos in the Mass in C minor) and shared her husband’s passion for complex counterpoint, encouraging him to write more fugues (hardly what one would expect of the character who bears her name in Amadeus.) But we do know their relationship was stormy: Constanze was smart and strong and, like Joan Baez, in no mood to be a mother to their romantic partner.
(Fun fact: Mozart was originally attracted to Constanze’s sister Aloysia, while Dylan was initially attracted to Baez’s sister Mimi.)
But the central conflict in the movie is not the Sylvie/Joan/Bob triangle (though perhaps it should have been, given that these three roles were perfectly cast and they barely scratched the surface of that fascinating story) but the somewhat overblown controversy surrounding Dylan’s choice to play with a rock band using electric instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The way this was presented seem to cast Seeger in the role of Salieri, the jealous rival threatened by Dylan’s success, and the depiction of the event itself echoed another classical composer: Igor Stravinsky. The film made the premiere of “Like a Rolling Stone” look like the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, including fistfights and booing and backstage chaos and drama.
In real life, Seeger’s main concern was that the festival’s sound system, designed for voices and acoustic guitars, couldn’t handle the volume of Dylan’s band – which did indeed to make him so frustrated he was tempted to cut the cables with an ax. But while that was a tempestuous night, Dylan’s song turned out to be a hit, and no one except a few diehard folkies questioned his right to grow and change as an artist.
It made me ponder what was Mozart’s “going electric” moment. One candidate is his Piano Concerto in E flat K. 271, which Mozart wrote when he was 21, which was groundbreaking in the way it changed the relationship of soloist to orchestra and helped pave the way for Beethoven, Brahms and Liszt. Another candidate is his opera Idomeneo, written when he was 24 (the same age Dylan was when he went electric), a work that dusted the cobwebs off of opera seria and infused it with 3-dimensional characters and brilliant orchestration.
But I’m afraid my choice actually aligns with Amadeus as the real turning point in his place in history: Le nozze di Figaro. Listen to that part in the finale to Act II, when the Count, the Countess, Figaro and Susanna are all singing at once, really not being their best selves, each one wondering how they're going to get away with their respective deceptions. The music Mozart gives them at this moment is a piece of counterpoint worthy of a Bach motet. Compared to Bach and Beethoven - who seem to be constantly going tsk tsk at humanity while they strive for some higher plane - Mozart seems to think we're worthy of great art just the way we are, divine even in our messy human-ness. You can think of it as Mozart’s “How does it feeeel?”, or an illustration of the greatest line in Amadeus, when Mozart says that it’s the way God listens to the world.
To the extent that there’s any validity to Amadeus, it’s that the myth is as old as the facts. Joseph actually did try to engineer a rivalry between Mozart and Salieri; at one point he produced an event in a grand hall where compositions by both composers were played at opposite ends of the room. Neither composer took the bait; Mozart did express in a letter his frustration that Salieri’s operas were produced more than his own, but he attributed that more to the other power players in Joseph’s circle, not Salieri himself. But it does seem to be true that Salieri felt some kind of survivor’s guilt in regard to Mozart.
Salieri was only six years older than Mozart, though he comes off as being much older in both the play and the film. The rumor that Salieri poisoned him was already widespread a decade after Mozart’s death, which meant that Salieri had to live with it for over a quarter century. Carl Maria von Weber (Mozart’s cousin by marriage) believed the rumor and refused to meet with Salieri. We know from Beethoven’s conversation books that he talked about it at length when he met Rossini. Pushkin’s dramatic poem Mozart and Salieri, the earliest literary source of Amadeus, was written in 1830, just five years after Salieri’s death.
Pete Seeger wasn’t much like Salieri, but they had some things in common. Salieri and Seeger both produced benefit concerts. (Salieri conducted an annual Christmas concert for the widows and orphans of musicians.) They both nurtured and championed young musicians. (Salieri gave a seven-year-old schoolteacher’s son a scholarship to the Vienna Choir Boys, which is why you’ve heard of Franz Schubert.) And they are both less famous than the musicians they associated with despite being tremendously influential in their own right.
But a more apt analogy for Seeger might be Joseph Haydn. Haydn was 24 years older than Mozart; Seeger was 22 years older than Dylan. Both were unfailingly optimistic, very much unlike the morose Salieri. And while Haydn wrote the Austrian national anthem, Seeger adopted an old Methodist Hymn called “I’ll Overcome Some Day” into the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”
Dylan, still very much alive, has already been mythologized as much as Mozart has, with his own help. Dylan worked with James Mangold on the script for A Complete Unknown, including scenes that definitely did not happen in real life, and even in the movie his fictional self is called out for lying and fabricating his past.
Mozart wasn’t always honest either. He lied to his father about his circumstances. He lied to the people who commissioned works from him about why he was late. Even while he was pathetically begging for money from his fellow Masons in his later years he was spending what he had recklessly.
Both Mozart and Dylan composed their lives as well as their music. Their teenage selves had idealized notions about life in Vienna/New York and they fulfilled their dreams of going there and making a particular impression in a particular way that may have conflicted with the truth – but then they both went on to manifest their dreams, thus proving their version of the truth. In both cases the truth in their art is undeniable. In the realm of music one can create one’s own vision of beauty and order.
And, to be fair, both Mozart and Dylan were surrounded by people who were also adopting personas, appropriating identities, and making up arbitrary rules about what music is supposed to be. By claiming their own right to do that, despite not occupying a position of power, they’re inviting us to claim our own power and our own truth – and reminding us that what really matters is what you create.
Jimi Hendrix said that his two favorite musicians were Mozart and Bob Dylan. Dylan himself has been known to play Mozart piano concertos over the sound system before he takes the stage at his concerts.
And I’ll leave you with one more parallel: Doesn’t this portrait look like Timothée Chalamet?
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