TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Copyright extremists and Mozart

By Paul Biba

We’ve discussed Mark Helprin before, but this is a new article by kos that also contains some very interesting historical information. It’s reprinted with permission and thanks to Cerebus for the link. The article begins:

The wankers (now led by novelist Mark Helprin) are now arguing for unlimited and perpetual copyright? Really?

To me, and I think to most people, it’s a good thing that the authors of West Side Story were able to put their work together without constantly looking over their shoulder at whether or not things were getting too close to Romeo & Juliet or needing to somehow deny that that’s what they were doing. The fact that the work is more-or-less explicitly a retelling of an already classic cultural landmark gives it a kind of additional resonance. Trying harder to make it different in order to stay on the right side of the law would likely have actually made the thing seem more trite and derivative; if you simply rely on lazy clichés you’re not infringing on anyone in particular.

And of course that’s to say nothing of the fact that Shakespeare himself was often re-doing other works that prevailed in his time. The convention is to think of stronger intellectual property law as law that’s favorable to creators. And in some ways it is. But it’s important to note that the main users of copyrighted material are also creators. The output of this blog is copyrighted, but lots of the inputs—from quotations to photos to YouTube clips—are also copyrighted.

From Haleperin’s text:

“It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn’t. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down [...]

Interesting that Helprin would cite Mozart, who hailed from a world in which composers borrowed heavily from each other, not to mention built upon existing works: Every single one of his operas were based on someone else’s stories. He certainly didn’t write the stories of Don Giovanni or the Marriage of Figaro.

And even the music was sometimes borrowed from elsewhere. People think Mozart was the composer of “Twinkle twinkle little star”, but he actually wrote 12 variations for piano of the French tune “Ah vous dirai-je, Maman”. In other words, one of Mozart’s most famous tunes is not really his, but “borrowed” or “inspired” by an existing folk melody. And then there’s the Magic Flute:

According to Buch’s recently conducted research—based on the discovery of an audience member’s diary, a book of vocal texts found in the Austrian National Library, and old newspaper ads—Dervish was performed before The Magic Flute was written and was very likely heard by Mozart. Both Dervish and Flute feature princes as their protagonists as well as simple jester-sidekicks. In Flute, the latter is Papageno, the lovably dopey bell-ringing man-bird; in Dervish, it’s Mandolino, a wacky fisherman with a magic fool’s cap and—ding, ding!—a set of bells too. Both sidekicks have female counterparts (Mandolino with Mandolina, Papageno with Papagena); the princes share their mission—to win a princess—with the help of a secret observer; and magic everyday items serve as important props.

Even the music is somewhat similar, despite Dervish being a far less cohesive, intelligent, and grandiose work. Dervish’s overture opens with three stately chords, just like the Magic Flute’s—many people remark on Mozart’s interest in the mythical and Masonic importance of the number 3. Dervish features an aria almost identical to Papageno’s famous anthem. And bells, a brand-new operatic element at the time, are used in both pieces.

Calling Mozart a plagiarist would be going too far; the musicians from within his theatrical community borrowed freely from each other as colleagues and partners who made livings off ticket sales. And it’s not uncommon for classical-music composers to quote one another; using age-old tunes like the dirgey Dies Irae (used most notably in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique), chorales of Bach (in tons of music from the Baroque to the present day), or famous folk tunes like the Eastern European melody that first appeared in Smetana’s Moldau and later showed up in Naftali Herz Imber’s score for the Jewish “Hatikva.” Usually, fear of being called derivative—one of classical music’s most serious insults—is enough to keep composers from out-and-out plagiarism. But it does happen, and the borrowers aren’t always second-tier hacks, either. Beethoven used Pachelbel’s Canon in the rondo of his Op. 28 Piano Sonata somewhat sneakily; Richard Strauss took 50 themes from Vittorio Gnecchi’s 1905 opera Cassandra for use in Elektra in what was less tribute than underhanded grab. Shostakovich commented on the whole issue of theme-stealing himself with his use of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” an instantly recognizable tune, in his sarcastically witty Prelude No. 15 in D Flat, Op. 87.

Ironically, The Beneficent Dervish lived on only because it was lifted: If Mozart had never lived, it surely would have disappeared into the ether.

Not so ironically. Many a contemporary pop song has experienced a revival after being featured as a sample in a hip hop piece. Movies based on classics often spur new sales of an old, mostly forgotten tome, while exposing the work to a brand new audience. And how many obscure stories have been rescued by national bloggers, like Talking Point Memo’s ferreting out of US attorney firing stories from all over the country, finding the common narrative, and bringing the explosive story to a national audience (and the national media)?

The copyright extremists have a myopic view of the issue that would stifled the creativity of the Mozarts of the past. Funny that the great composer would be cited as supposed support for such a myopic and regressive approach to intellectual property.