Richard Powers, author of the magnificent novel “The Time of Our Singing” — a story of a Jewish German refugee and a black American woman and their family that comes as close as prose can to capturing the beauty of music, the nature of time and the hope for an overriding unity — wrote a lovely essay on Mozart in yesterday’s New York Times: “A Head for Music.”
Powers commented on the futility of ongoing forensic tests on Mozart’s skull by doctors, chemists and forensic pathologists, who have been probing it as if it could explain Mozart’s mind-boggling musical ability:
Even if DNA analysis does succeed in confirming the skull’s identity, it will lay to rest exactly zero of the mysteries still surrounding Mozart. Nor will any future advances in science ever put to rest the unsolved Mozart, the inexplicable genius, that most troubles and transforms us.
If you are really looking for messages from beyond the grave . . . you could do worse than listen to the Commendatore’s words, in "Don Giovanni," when he comes back to tell the Don truths neither confirmed nor yet disproved by medical science: Non si pasce di cibo mortale. Chi si pasce di cibo celeste.
Those who partake of heavenly food do not need the mortal stuff. What can the bones know that the notes don’t? Forget the forensics and face the music. The mysteries hidden in Mozart’s skull are everywhere for the hearing.
As the Yiddish poet Y.L. Peretz wrote: “The whole world is nothing more than a singing and a dancing before the Holy One . . . [E]very letter in the Torah is a musical note.” And every person is a different stanza, there for the hearing, part of a greater composition. (Hat tip: Bradley Shavit Artson).