Abstract
This article discourages the implementation and use of the term Black Mozart as a popular descriptor for, arguably, the most influential Black composer, violinist, and fencer in 18th-century France: Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George. By theorizing the term Black Mozart in the discursive frameworks of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Sartre’s Black Orpheus, and Ter Ellingson’s Myth of the Noble Savage, I reveal the epistemological and ontological problems that the term presents. I find that, while Black Mozart is a clever way of drawing attention to Saint-George’s music and, subsequently, his life, the term occludes the critical treatment of the Black subject to the point of erasure: Saint-George is replaced by a mythicized inferior of the status quo’s perfect symbol of 18th-century classical music. I conclude that by removing the yoke of Mozart’s influence on the reception of Saint-George, we expose him to the fullness of our critical reasoning and restore to him the name he earned for all his talents, trials, and triumphs.
Introduction
Eighteenth-century Europe knew very few classical musicians of color. And of the few who existed, even a smaller number rose to any prominence. As such, that one of France’s leading 18th-century classical musicians—Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George—should be a person of color is doubly rare and exponentially provocative. Today, however, there is another name that seems eternally fused with Saint-George’s: Black Mozart. The striking erasure of Saint-George’s name is sufficient cause for great concern. Yet, besides unsustained comments on YouTube and blog sites, there seems to be little formalized opposition from academic scholars to the use of this popular term. To my knowledge, only two scholars have treated this subject: American musicologist Dominique-René de Lerma and theorist Nicholas T. Rinehart. De Lerma, who specialized in Saint-George’s music, contended in his 1976 article that the term Black Mozart “betrays an ignorance both of French music and of . . . Mozart.” (p. 17). In Rinehart’s (2013) article on racial politics and the “whitewashing” of music history, he, like me, remises the fact that Saint-George is now “known to history as the ‘black [sic] Mozart’” (p. 128). Rinehart (2013) continued to note that the practice of recording the name of Black musicians as the Black version of their White counterparts is “undeniably insulting [because] it erases the name and life’s work of a black man and replaces them with those of a white man” (p. 128). Rinehart’s formal argument supports my article’s main purpose: to voice an extended and formalized challenge to the use of the term Black Mozart. Let it be clear from the very onset, though, that I believe the term Black Mozart may have been employed at the time of the revival of Saint-George’s music as a way of sparking interest in an obscure composer. In that sense, the popularity of the music of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was harnessed to promote the music of Saint-George. And if sources are to be believed, there was reason for this as Saint-George’s popularity was in decline at the time of his death in 1799 (Ribbe, 2010b). A fast and, arguably, audacious way of bringing attention to Saint-George’s music was therefore necessary. It is my opinion, however, that despite the original intent behind the use of the term Black Mozart, its continued use undoes Saint-George’s historicity, subsumes the musical output and lived experiences of the Chevalier into the Eurocentric gaze, and thus perpetuates an epistemology and ontology of Blackness that race theorists of old and of today have tried to undo. This article will seek to theorize this casual and misappropriated application of an unreasoned construct of race within the discursive frameworks of Frantz Fanon’s (1952) Black Skin, White Masks and ethnomusicologist Ter Ellingson’s (2001) Myth of the Noble Savage, and then as a problematic comparative to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus (1948).
The Rise of Black Mozart
On February 4, 2002, the then mayor of Paris, Betrand Delanoë, changed the 500-foot-long street between Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue Duphot in Paris’s Quartier de la Madeleine to Rue du Chevalier de Saint-George (Mulholland, 2002). At that time, the associated street plaque read, “
The first phenomenon is a joyous one: a recommitment to and the resurgence of Saint-George’s revival that, arguably, started with Odet Denys’s (1972) biography Qui était le Chevalier de Saint-Georges? And if recent surveys of information published about Saint-George in the last 10 years are to be believed, the popularity of Saint-George, especially among journalists, is waxing. For now, though, there seems to be more interest in his music than in other cultural, philosophical, and political objects that his presence provoked in the 18th century. This focus on Saint-George’s music is probably justified because, with the exception of his written correspondence and his 1790 political pamphlet Nous sommes donc trois: ou le provincial à Paris, Saint-George didn’t seem to have other written publications. What remains in some abundance and in various stages of completion, though, are his musical scores. With regard to this music, however, and thinking now of the second phenomenon concerning Saint-George’s revival, if Nemeth (2005) spoke of the “removal” of Saint-George’s racial identity (p. 96), there is now the (re)appearance of the term black as one of Saint-George’s frequent descriptors. But the new terms used aren’t black musician, or a black composer, or black captain. He is called, as noted above, Black Mozart. It is the use of this constructed term that I find troubling.
While the use of similar constructions to compare prominent figures with each other was present during the life of Saint-George, historical records do not support the idea that Black Mozart was an 18th-century creation. It stands to good reason, rather, that the creation of the term occurred in music studies during the 20th century and was popularized by French- and English-speaking journalists and musicians across the world. 3 However, one such term used in the 18th century to describe Saint-George, and one that has particular interest for us, was Voltaire of the arts of equitation, fencing, and instrumental music (Nemeth, 2005). Pronounced by Abbé Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, this laudatory term was employed to liken the prowess and fame of Saint-George to a prominent figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire. Perhaps stemming from a proverbial “good place,” the comparison between Saint-George and Voltaire is none the less extremely awkward, seeing that Voltaire’s opinion of people of color revealed the philosopher’s attempts at anthropological science to be rooted in prejudice and racism (Paviot, 2016). Similarly, the term Black Mozart, though not as troubling as the likening of Saint-George to Voltaire, recalls the conflictual past of the critical approach to the Black subject.
The Epistemological Problem With Black Mozart
The main conflict with the use of the term Black Mozart is best contextualized in the epistemological discourse surrounding aspects of Black culture and civilization in contemporary critical consciousness. In the use of the term, the lived experience of a man is calculated, as in a math equation, as his skin color (black, in this case) added to the last name and the concretized legacy of another talented musician (Mozart, in this case). This critical process is one of the concerns of French-Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks. In a provocative anecdote, Fanon described the affordances attributed to a White German or Russian speaker whose lack of proficiency in spoken French incites tolerance from the native speaker of French and still allows the improficient speaker to be highly regarded as a person of high standing in his native country. But in the case of the improficient Black speaker, a nonnative speaker of French, Fanon (1952) stated that the treatment he receives is not at all similar. The Black subject has neither culture, nor civilization, nor the assumption of a long-established history. From this concept, Fanon discovered the origins of the motives of the present-day Black subject: to prove the existence of Black civilization to the White world at all costs (p. 52). As seen in Fanon’s discourse, Black subjects aren’t immediately concerned with the philosophical objects attributed to them but the prevailing opinions surrounding their existence that subsequently inform the critical treatment that they should receive or are allowed to receive. In this case, the term Black Mozart reveals that the principal subject that inspired the critical treatment of Black subject, Saint-George, was the music and the legacy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Saint-George’s culture and civility, as it were, begin with Mozart. In addition, by presenting Saint-George as the Black version of Mozart, one may be led to believe that Saint-George is exploitable by the identical processes that we, first, assign to Mozart. At each utterance of the term, then, we are reminded of this epistemological process and, in a certain regard, pay homage more so to Mozart than we do to his supposed Black double Saint-George. As such, the existence of the Black subject cannot be truly authenticated.
This authentication of Blackness, or the quest for identity among people considered to be Black, began, comparatively, only very recently. And it is a quest that is ongoing. Though the very need to define racial identity may be considered as a main argument to support the idea of Black disenfranchisement, I find the relative newness of this quest especially provocative. I say this because there is not only documentation of the suppression of a race, but there is also the documentation—in various forms—of the various attempts and polemics surrounding the reestablishment of Black identity after centuries of atrocities.
One pivotal movement that documents the reestablishment of Black identity is the birth of Négritude. A movement that took form in the 1930s Paris, led three Black poets—Aimé Césaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Léon Damas—Négritude concerned itself with the qualities and “the whole range of values of civilization of all black people in the world” (Senghor, 1974). It is in the wake of this movement that the epistemological relationship between Black subjects and their White counterparts was thoroughly investigated. The authors of Negritude concerned themselves with any opinion of the Black experience that presented Blacks as inherently inferior or as the unfortunate race of a devastated, dark continent. Following in the path of the main writers of Negritude, contemporary theorists have challenged, for example, the use of the terms master and slave, preferring to use instead the terms enslaved and enslaver. This argument is not concerned with a mere semantical shift to soothe the ennui of the Black subject and to charge the White subject with the atrocities committed but is an attempt to correct the epistemological approach to the Black subject. The term enslaved invites the thinker to see slavehood not as an inherent state, but as a manmade institution founded on notions of class and race. As such, the term enslaved places humans equitably on the humanity spectrum and restores all the epistemological objects that conspired to facilitate the move from a human to an enslaved being. In so doing, we continue Fanon’s work, as explained by Kleinberg (2003) and “[anticipate] a new way of trying to understand the Other by making a space for the Other prior to the restrictive classifications of the Western epistemological structure” (p. 127). In so doing, we also stand to learn more than we ever knew about Black civilization. A similar shift in the descriptors attributed to Saint-George would accomplish, I argue, a similar outcome not only in the epistemology of the Black subject but in the ontological bond between Saint-George and Mozart.
The Ontological Problem With Black Mozart
If the epistemological approach to Saint-George is corrected by the nonuse of the term Black Mozart, the ontological bond between Saint-George and Mozart is also corrected. By that, if the critical approach to the beginning inquiry into the life of Saint-George is changed by suppressing Black Mozart, the ontological bond that is used to problematize the Black subject must also change. Simply put, in the term Black Mozart, the primary focus is placed on Mozart. The researcher must first ask Who is Mozart? and then ask Who is Black Mozart? This line of inquiry is difficult because the researcher is encouraged to reconstruct the complexities of Saint-George’s life and output by using what was first learned by studying Mozart. As such, there is a false binary constructed between both subjects that occludes the nature of Saint-George’s being with Mozart’s. This duality presents Mozart as the master—the originator, the absolute, and perfecter of an art—and Saint-George as the Other—the unconventional and unexpected imitator.
The use of the terms master and other are deliberately invoked for their relevance in Hegel’s dialectic as written in Phenomenology (1807). I mention this because Black Mozart may also invite the mind to explore Saint-George as a product of the Hegelian method. As American philosopher Peter Hudis (2015) explained, “Hegel’s Phenomenology centers on the struggle of the subject to seek recognition through Myriad stages of development—from the most initial phase, Consciousness, to Self-Consciousness, Reason, Spirit, Religion, and ultimately Absolute Knowledge” (p. 42). Within the development of self-consciousness, Hudis stated, there is a futile “desire to negate or conquer the Other” that is resolved by the subject who “seeks recognition from the Other” (p. 43). Hudis continued to say that what is desired of the Other is “recognition of the dignity and worth of its being” (p. 44). From this understanding of an imperative bond between the absolute subject and the Other, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is drawn (p. 44). I am quick to note here that Hegel’s dialectic is not easily applicable to notions of race. For that purpose, Fanon’s corrective is needed. As Hudis stated, “the slave fails to attain the independent consciousness delineated by Hegel. Instead, the black slave seeks to gain recognition by trying to mimic the master and become white” (p. 47). This tendency, Hudis continued, is revealed in Fanon’s text as “the tendency of the oppressed to interiorize their oppression, all victim to an inferiority complex, and seek acceptance from the oppressor on its terms” (p. 47). But Hegel’s and Fanon’s method relative to the master-slave dialectic are misappropriated here as they incorrectly apply mistruths about Saint-George’s life. In fact, Saint-George, to be overly simplistic, was the absolute and Mozart, if one must always extend the comparison, was the Other. Gabriel Banat (2006), one of the leading scholars of Saint-George, reveals that it was, in fact, Mozart’s father, Leopold Mozart, who told his son to seek out Saint-George to receive a commission from him in 1778 (p. 171). And it was also Saint-George who debuted the symphonie concertante, an art form that would inspire Mozart, and one in which he would eventually excel (Banat, 2006). 4 Saint-George, according to de La Laurencie and Martens (1919), was among the first French composers to write string quartets (p. 74). So, Hegel’s dialectic, even when corrected by Fanon for my purpose, is only useful to provide a framework for how the bond between Saint-George and Mozart might be incorrectly problematized as the Black Mozart. But perhaps a more acceptable theoretic framework for understanding the term is found in the work of race theorist Hanétha Vété-Congolo.
In her presentation of the mentality surrounding Créolité—a 1980’s movement led by Antillean writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant that presented the particular complexities that shape the French-Caribbean experience as being distinguishable from those of persons from other parts of Africa and the African Diaspora—Vété-Congolo (2014) noted, Some of the main European philosophical ideas disseminated during colonization and slavery relied on ontology, axiology, and aesthetics to shape perception of an Ideal and Absolute Being replicating the properties of a White European person and personality categorically opposed to a loathsome Other, generally darker and non-European. (Vété-Congolo, 2014, p. 779)
Vété-Congolo best explains the ontological problem of Black Mozart, a person presented as a replication of a White ideal. Consequently, borrowing Silverman’s (2005b) paraphrasing of Fanon, Saint-George has no ontological existence of his own: “his very real sense of lived experience of . . . blackness [is transformed] into a chimera of the white imagination” (pp. 117–118). Fanon’s and Vété-Congolo’s theory about imagination and replicating ideals leads us to explore another problem conjured up by the use of the term Black Mozart: the myth of the noble savage.
Black Mozart and Noble Savage Discourse
Vété-Congolo’s description of European philosophical ideals during colonization reflects the often implied and often real gaze of persons currently living in the Caribbean who aspire to practice various aspects of European culture, including language, gastronomy, music, and rituals. It is also reflective of implied notions of persons in the “new world” in the early modern period. As evidenced in travel narratives from 17th-century European explorers to the North America and the Caribbean, the inhabitants they encountered in these lands were described in terms that revealed they were conceived as being inferior to their European counterparts. And though this Eurocentric view of the other as inferior was not born in the 17th century, the increased travel to the new world introduced new groups of people in need of European civility or scrutiny. As Lynn Ramey (2008) noted, “Medieval travelers, themselves borrowing from Roman accounts, transmitted the practice of categorizing the peoples they met based on physical and social customs, developing ‘races’ of humans that were later referred to as the ‘monstrous races’” (p. 81). In the travel narratives from the 17th century, however, the term most readily found to describe these uncivilized peoples is not monstrous but savage.
Savages were defined in the 17th century as relating to people, for example, savages in America and Africa, deprived of religion and homes who lived in the woods surrounded more so by animals than by humans. The term was also used to describe people who distanced themselves from civilization to live alone. 5 These persons were considered to possess behaviors that were not only unfamiliar to the European observer but were also inferior to their own. In cases where this difference was not spectacularly observed, and where certain normalized (European) behavior was exhibited by a so-called savage, a new term was employed: noble savage. This process of naming the so-called savage, for ethnomusicologist Ter Ellingson (2001), was an attempt to “[assimilate] the unfamiliar to the familiar” (p.12). As Ellingson revealed, by adding the term noble to the term savage, the non-European subject became redeemable. Ellingson uses the case of Marc Lescarbot, a 17th-century French explorer and writer, to explain this point.
Lescarbot, a person of many talents who Ellingson (2001) described as “certainly one of the most complex and interesting ethnographic writers of the French colonial enterprise” (p. 20) is particularly provocative for Ellingson (2001) because of his contributions not only to noble savage discourse but to the development of the anthropological science of human diversity at the beginning of the 17th century (pp. 12–13). Though this role has frequently been attributed to 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ellingson (2001) clarified that Rousseau never actually employed the term noble savage and that his interest in savage discourse was to situate human beings in a “state of nature,” their most powerful and provocative state (p. 81). Furthermore, Rousseau’s understanding of savagery never included notions of “moral goodness” (pp. 81–82). For Lescarbot, however, standards of moral goodness and nobleness and their relationship to the observed behaviors of those considered to be inferior is indeed present.
As Ellingson (2001) reported, one such example of Lescarbot’s conflictual contribution to anthropological science and noble savage discourse is found in his 1609 ethnographic study of native peoples of eastern Canada . . . savages . . . came to see the manners of the Frenchmen . . . they did make Monsieur de Monts judge of their debates, which is the beginning of voluntary subjection . . . from whence a hope may be conceived that these people will soon conform themselves to our manner of living. (Ellingson, 2001, p. 16)
In the narrative above, groups of native inhabitants of Eastern Canada seemed to move from a state of uncivility to one of civility by supposedly positioning themselves as inferior to the European observer, Monsieur de Monts. Here we note the observed behavior is that of having an arbiter to settle disputes, which is understood by Lescarbot as the Indians consented—as opposed to forced—submission to the will and authority of the European. It could also be argued that this event, for Lescarbot, marked the birth of reason among these savages. Lescarbot seems, therefore, filled with hope that this self-initiated shift in culture will result in the replacement of savage behaviors with noble French behaviors, resulting in the ennobling of the savage. But to be clear, Ellingson (2001) considers Lescarbot’s understanding of the existence of the noble savage to be a myth: First, the Noble Savage myth posits an ontologically essential rather than a trait-ascriptive nobility. Second, the nobility of the Noble Savage myth is an absolute rather than a relative quality. Furthermore, the nobility of the mythical Noble Savages consists of their shared moral superiority to Europeans, not a status superiority to each other. Finally, . . . the myth vaguely associates belief in the Noble Savage with the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, as associations implicit in its linkage with Rousseau . . . (Ellingson, 2001, pp. 46–47)
Ellingson’s argument, then, would reveal that noble savage discourse actually presents exceptional subjects that exhibit certain European-like behaviors that make them superior to those of other persons from their race. These behaviors, however, do not make them equal to Europeans, despite the ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood that became popular in the late 18th-century France. Noble savages, then, are doubly disenfranchised beings suspended between their own reality and the mythicized one drawn from the critical efforts of the European mind. Herein lies Saint-George. Black Mozart is an exceptional person of color who was superior to those of his own class and who managed to be compared to Mozart, the one who gave the primary example. Black Mozart is neither a man nor a hero; he is, at best, a noble savage, still the inferior, non-European Other.
Black Mozart and Black Orpheus
There was, however, another character that followed the lexical construct of Black Mozart but one who was presented heroically: Sartre’s 1948 Black Orpheus. Written as a preface to Leopold Senghor’s 1948 assemblage of poetry from parts of Africa and African diaspora, entitled Anthology of New Black and Malagasy Poetry, Sartre’s Black Orpheus borrows the allegorical stuff of Orpheus’ descent into the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice. As the tale is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Eurydice is fatally wounded by venomous snakes and is sent to Hades. Orpheus, overcome by grief, employs his talent for music and poetry to express his great sorrow at the death of Eurydice. As he mourns, his songs come up to the deities whose hearts are softened and who tell him to go to Hades and Persephone in the Underworld to ask that Eurydice be restored to the living. Orpheus does this by using his music to soften the hearts of the gods of the Underworld. They acquiesce and instruct Orpheus to walk out of the Underworld. Eurydice will walk behind him. Their only instruction is that Orpheus not turn around to look at Eurydice until they are both safely out of the Underworld. The lovers walk out of the grotto and, as they reach the exit, overcome with excitement and anxiety, Orpheus turns around to make sure Eurydice has followed him all the way to the top. He turns and sees her. She is immediately returned to the Underworld. For Sartre, the use of Ovid’s play is justified by the fact that Orpheus represents the Black poet who sings out of sorrow and grief at losing Eurydice, who is symbolic of the Black soul and negritude. (p. 21) For Sartre, then, Senghor’s poetry, which was pivotal in the establishing of négritude, is intellectualized as the poet’s quest to locate and retrieve Black identity. As Sartre says, “From Haiti to Cayenne, there is a single idea: reveal the black soul . . . Blackness has been rediscovered” (p. 20). But this rediscovery is as dialogized as it is difficult.
The great difficulty involved in this quest is explained by Sartre (1948) as he explained his justifications for intellectualizing the quest for Black identity within Orpheus’ quest for Eurydice: A quest is involved here, a systematic stripping and an “ascèse” accompanied by a continual effort of investigation. And I shall call this poetry “Orphic” because the Negros’s tireless descent into himself makes me think of Orpheus going to claim Eurydice from Pluto. Thus . . . by singing of his angers, his regrets or his hates, by exhibiting his wounds, his life torn between “civilization” and his old black substratum; in short by becoming most lyrical, that the black poet is most certain of creating a great collective poetry: by speaking only of himself, he speaks for all negroes; it is when he seems smothered by the serpents of our culture that he is the most revolutionary, for he then undertakes to ruin systematically the European knowledge he has acquired, and this spiritual destruction symbolizes the great future taking-up of arms by which black men will destroy their chains. (Sartre, 1948, p. 22)
The idea of a tiresome ascèse, or a quest for moral and spiritual perfection and purity by liberating the psyche from its corporal occlusions, as Sartre reveals, is the “point of departure and an ultimate goal” (p. 29) of negritude. In addition, for Sartre, negritude’s poetry is “ . . . the quest for the Black Grail” (p. 35); and “ . . . it is a becoming” (p. 47). In this quest, the Orpheus’ and Eurydice’s fates seem to be united to benefit the Black poet. By that, a symbolic death must come to restore the Black soul anew, ridding it of its former bonds. As such, similar to prescribed processes of philosophical discourse and inquiry, a method is involved.
Sartre identifies two methods: one is objective, and one is subjective (p. 29). The objective quest, which Sartre reveals to have been employed by several poets in the Anthology, is inspired by and intoxicated with the “primitive rhythms” of the “traditional forms of black poetry” (p. 29). This objective method of discovering the Black soul, for Sartre, is more inspired than that of White poets because European poetic tradition has been highly academicized and deprived of its folkloric and authentic lyricism. Black poetry, however, which he considers to be magical or enchanted, because “the black man is closer than we to the great period when, as Mallarmé says, ‘the word creates Gods’” (p. 30). By contrast, however, the second method of discovering the Black soul is subjective. Sartre discovers this method in the writing of Aimé Césaire.
In the case of Césaire, the search for the Black soul brings him beyond the realm of language: Césaire, on the contrary, chose to backtrack into himself. Since the Eurydice will disappear in smoke if Black Orpheus turns around to look back on her, he will descend the royal road of his soul with his back turned on the bottom of the grotto . . . (Sartre, 1948, pp. 30–31)
Here, according to Sartre, the Black poet restores the image of Eurydice but repurposes the tale to allow for a different descent into the Underworld. Here, Black Orpheus descends with his back already turned and drowns himself beneath the limits of prescriptive language and referents to rediscover and reconstruct language that best describes his soul. The Black subject, for Sartre at least, is restored the privilege to love, desire, and hope with full abandon.
But for Fanon, this euphoric experience is impossible. As Silverman (2005a) explained, “Fanon’s response to [Black Orpheus] shows how [Sartre] not only destroys black enthusiasm . . . but, perhaps more importantly, destroys the existential force of black experiences, lived through the body, by intellectualizing it in this fashion” (p. 7). What is interesting here is the term intellectualizing because, as Bernasconi (2005) stated, Fanon also described Black Orpheus as marking a date in the attempt at intellectualizing Black existence (p. 106). Here, the problematic idea with Black Mozart is also revealed. Though there is no extensive discourse on the date on which the intellectualizing of the term Black Mozart began, the combination of the two words (black and Mozart) conjure up a similar understanding of intellectual process of collapsing Black lived experiences and expression into the intellectual capacities of White Europe. Yet, as Bernasconi (2005) stated, what Fanon would have us realize is that “the black man suffers more in his body than the white man” (p. 107). That is to say, the experiences that conspire to create the Black subject’s life experiences are so unique and are so interiorized that the casual moving of colors between Saint-George and Mozart is fallacious.
What is even more damaging about constructs such as Black Orpheus and Black Mozart is, as Bernasconi (2005) explained, that European culture has an “imago of the Negro that is responsible for all the conflicts that may arise” (p. 102). . . . and that “the racist creates his inferior . . . That is to say, what is often called the black soul is a white construction” (p. 109). Therein lies another powerful statement that links directly to the term Black Mozart. Black Mozart conjures up notions of the White construction of the Black inferior. This is extremely troubling not only because it limits the potential to critically conceive Saint-George fully and rids him of his singularity, but because it falsifies historical facts about his achievements as they pertain to classical music.
Two Apologies for Black Mozart
Isn’t Classical Music White?
A question that is probably looming in the reader’s mind is “Isn’t classical music white and European?” A fair question. And based on current trends of casually employing the terms black culture and brown culture in popular culture, the question is very pertinent. Arguably, there is perhaps no satisfying answer I could give to that question. But before attempting a response, perhaps the question itself should be explored and an answer proposed for what could be multiple questions.
One question presented in the original impetus relates to racialized cultural objects and those who see themselves easily represented by these objects. As such, the answer to the question is classical music is White. By that, the majority of classical performers and composers are White and are expected to be White. In fact, if there is a classical musician of color, this person is most likely presented (hailed, theorized, and criticized) as an exception to a given rule. In addition, from general observations of popular discourse, if the question revolves around the generalized history of classical music, then one could say there is a direct relationship between European courtly culture and the development of classical instruments and classical style. The dance forms involved and the ceremonial impetuses were all birthed in White, European culture (Banat, 1990). In addition, if the question revolves around the expression of classical music and its relationship to White, European culture, then that, too, would cause us to concede that classical music is European and White.
In addition, it was the prominence of all-European and all-White expressions as the sole refugee for the Black subject, as mentioned above, that inspired Negritude. In terms of artistic expression, though, perhaps a literary example from the work of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé (1999), a present-day compatriot of Saint-George, will illuminate us on the question of Blackness and classical music. In her short story, “The Bluest Eye,” the narrator speaks about her first boyfriend and their courtship. This courtship would come to an abrupt halt when, in an attempt to woo her, the boyfriend quoted love verses from his favorite television program. He said, “Beloved Maryse, for me, you are the most beautiful with your blue eyes” (p. 66). The narrator was outraged by this because, as a beautiful, Black Guadeloupean, she did not possess the attributes to which her boyfriend alluded. He must have been thinking of another girl. Or perhaps of other standards of beauty. Or, tragically, he didn’t have any literature written about Black beauty from which to quote his verses. In this example, Condé artfully reveals the dire need for not so much a new tongue or language but a new Black lexicon that poetically defends all aspects of the Black experience. Similar to 18th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay’s call to defend French language in the 16th century to move it from barbarism to universality (Coski, 2011), Condé’s example acts as further justification for Negritude’s call to defend Blackness by writing it in every discipline. If classical music is seen as composed of a lexicon that does not defend Blackness, then classical music, according to the Condé’s expression of Negritude, cannot be considered Black.
But if one takes Sartre’s (1948) depiction of Aimé Césaire’s Black Orpheus and descends beyond language and lexicon into the primary (truthful) impulses of oneself, the operational mechanics behind classical music are revealed: rhythm, breath, and inspiration. This understanding of music reveals that these three things belong to all humanity and were around at the beginning of the first human. As such, classical music, like any musical style, is human expression. To these three terms, three adjectives can be added: artful, intentional, and academic. Though these three adjectives do not inherently reveal any Whiteness, when linked to classical music, they do reveal European institutions and trends that were developed over time by mostly White theorists and performers. Saint-George, for example, participated in these institutions where he received instruction in the expression of classical music. Within the confines of this instruction, however, he also innovated new musical genres, as previously mentioned. But does this process of (re)learning, and perpetuating constructs learned within White, European institutions represent the walls of the “culture prison” that the Black subject must break down? (Sartre, 1948, p. 22) That is to say, in the process of revealing Blackness, the Black subject discovers the three primary impulses (rhythm, breath, and inspiration) only to have them warped (or whitewashed) within European academic institutions. If this is so, then the term Black Mozart might actually most truthfully represent the tragic process of the discovery and the destruction of the Black subject. As such, the Black Saint-George is hailed for his mastery of White instruction and his rise to fame within the constructs of the White experience. This, however, is where I diverge from the popular trends about culture that inspired the original question because I do not believe that any culture or any of its objects can claim to be of purely one race.
Perhaps dangerously essentialist, I find it very constructive, especially for this article, to focus on the similarities between cultures as opposed to the aspects that distinguish them. I employ this process here to argue, primarily, for equality and inclusion. By that, I believe that the core of all humans is purely human and, as such, shares commonalities with all peoples. Musical expression is one. In terms of equity, though, I am quick to say that cultural institutions (of racism, racialism, and sexism, for example) and their attributed atrocities, revolutions, and achievements do eventually intervene to fundamentally shape identities, perspectives, and behavior. With regard to our topic, though lived experiences and musical instruction eventually intervene to shape the type of musical expression produced, music still remains tethered to its human foundation. As such, to say classical music is White and that Saint-George, as a Black composer, appropriates or imitates a culture that is not his own is to ignore the root of musical expression and greater dimensions of art.
If the original question is concerned with the dimensions of art that pertain to performing and enjoying classical music, then the answer to whether classical music is White is a resounding no. The answer to this question is based on not only the three essential terms but the three adjectives used. I argue that any person who turns rhythm, breath, and inspiration into a deliberate, academic, and artful expression according to their talent has the right to perform and compose classical music. As music that is drawn from the human existence, classical music, like any musical form, is exploitable by all humans. And seeing that all humans can receive instruction, classical music can, in theory, be expressed by all people without fear of being charged with cultural appropriation.
Having argued for the right for all people to create and enjoy classical music, what remains to be added, then, is talent. This, ironically, is an attribute robbed from Saint-George in the use of the term Black Mozart. Incidentally, it is not Mozart’s ability to successfully recreate learned dance forms and musical conventions that make him worthy of praise. Neither was it Saint-George’s ability to approximate these conventions that won him his fame. If that were the case, any classical musician would be revered as Saint-George and Mozart. It is something beyond that that warrants our attention. Agreeing with de Lerma (1976), “What Saint-George had in common with [Mozart and Haydn], he had in common with other composers of his time from all over Europe. It is the thing he possessed that was different that matters!” (p. 17). What is this different thing? For de Lerma (1976), culture is the thing that distinguished Saint-George from the two Austrian composers. Added to that, however, I believe the answer that best suits my purpose here is talent. Here I speak not only of the talent that is linked to physical attributes (dexterity and virtuosic ability) or inclination (having the knack for a certain type of expression), but aspects of talent related to the musician’s ability to transform an otherwise silent piece of paper filled with symbols into a colorfully unique expression that communicates with a listening person. It is also the talent to communicate deep emotions by transcribing them into a pattern of meaningful musical notes. It is ultimately a definition of talent that reveals the frameworks on which to hang the unique colors that are bound up in the soul that are informed by the lived experiences of the body. By moving away from superficial binaries created by skin color to focus on more complex notions of the social construct of race, I look at some of Saint-George’s lived experiences.
Joseph de Boulogne, called the Chevalier de Saint-George, was born in 1745 on the island of Guadeloupe. His mother, Anne Nanon, was an enslaved African who was named Anne Danneveau upon her baptism in France (Bardin, 2015). His father was a White planter, Georges de Bologne de Saint-Georges. At the time of Joseph’s birth, his father was married to Elisabeth Françoise Jeanne Merican, Mme de Bologne (RhNegativ, 2018), and had a 6-year old daughter by the name of Bénédictine (Ribbe, 2010b). For Joseph, however, as the illegitimate child of an enslaved African and a White planter, he was not recognized by the Church. In addition, as stated in the Code Noir, Joseph would gain the status of his mother, that is to be considered enslaved. Though historical records do not agree on the first 8 to 12 years of his life, most records reveal that Joseph would have noted the harsh treatment meted out by persons who looked like his father upon persons who looked like his mother. One incident reported by Paviot (2016), taken from Odet Denys’s 1972 work will suffice to illustrate this. One day, as Joseph tried to prevent a White planter from whipping an enslaved African, he himself received a lash. The story continues, Joseph returned to his mother in tears, who reminded him that he would always be the son of an enslaved African. As such, his life experiences would be different (p. 20). This maternal education at a very young age, however, is only a part of the education he received. It is here that his father’s influence becomes important because he took a great interest in distinguishing his only son. By that, he wanted Joseph to receive an aristocratic education, excelling in weaponry (fencing) and courtly music (the violin). Thus began Joseph’s instruction in fencing, composition, and violin. For his excellence and talent in all three domains, he enjoyed much fame. But his rise to fame was not an easy one. In fact, as a person of color living in France in the 18th century, his political status was constantly changing, and he lived with the threat of being removed from France.
The threats to his status and stay in France came because he was the son of an enslaved African and because he was a Black man; his presence in France had to be sanctioned. For Saint-George, the laws that would be relevant to him were the laws of 1716, 1738, and 1762 and the Police des noirs of 1776–1777. 6 It is in the registers of 1762 that a justification for Saint-George’s presence in France is discovered: “Joseph Ritodame, a fifteen-year old mulatto from Guadeloupe, who was brought to France, ‘to give him education suitable to a young man’” (Peabody, 1996). 7 According to this same Ordinance of 1762, Saint-George should have only had 3 years to receive his training and should have been returned to Guadeloupe. As Banat explains, however, the Seven Years’ War (1756 and 1763) made navigation between France and Guadeloupe very treacherous, so Saint-George was unable to leave France at the end of his stay (Banat, 2006). In fact, Joseph never returned to Guadeloupe but made a name for himself in France as a master fencer, a popular composer and violinist, and a leader of a military. Making a name for himself was not without problems. As Nemeth noted, though he lived among the aristocrats, he also encountered obstacles (p. 95). He survived two attempted murders (Ribbe, 2010b), for example; he lost jobs because of his race (Nemeth, 2005); during the French Revolution he was imprisoned without reason (Banat, 2006), and his love, which resulted in the birth of a child which was left to die, was impossible because of laws that targeted persons of Black skin in Paris (Ribbe, 2010b). Yet in 1778—as Saint-George was making a name for himself during a time where he would have been newly required to carry an identification card to prove he was sanctioned to remain in France and a time where he would have been banned from marrying a White woman—he met Mozart and offered him assistance. As Banat (2006) noted, it was Mozart’s father who instructed him to seek out Saint-George’s orchestras—the Concert Spirituel, and the Concert des Amateurs—to ask for work. Banat (2006) noted that this commissioned work is currently known as the Paris Symphony (1778). It is to be noted, too, that Saint-George was the first to negotiate the contracts with Austrian composer Joseph Haydn to commission his Paris Symphonies (1785–1786) (Lister, 2004; Quoy-Bodin, 1984). It is through Saint-George, then, that Mozart and Haydn were received in Paris. Ironically, this same Paris that proved to be a hostile place for Saint-George was, thanks to this same Saint-George, made into a land of opportunity for Mozart and Haydn because of the reputation that Saint-George earned for himself. I repeat my objective here: My contention is not to rename Mozart as the White Saint-George but to simply advocate for the limited or nonuse of the term Black Mozart. The struggles Saint-George endured to make his name are too great for us to now erase it from our understanding and to replace it with the color of his skin and the last name of the person who benefited from him. And by the term making his name, one refers to the composite effect of all his experiences that made him distinguishable—even at the time of his death—and memorable such that historical records, despite attempts to erase his presence, preserved enough of his memory so that we may study him today. 8 We should not do our part to erase him either by questioning his claims to classical music.
Yet despite the unresolved question on who has a particular claim on classical music, the term Black Mozart continues to remain problematic because it simply denies the subject the name that he earned for himself by virtue of his lived experiences, his talent, and the personal relationships he forged. The term Black Mozart thus reveals an act, albeit innocent, of erasure. There is, however, an interesting paradox present in all of this: the term Black Mozart is considered an attempt at drawing attention to the music of an obscure Black composer and is also considered an act of erasure. Le Chevalier de Saint-George is thus discovered and destroyed in the same process.
Mozart’s Latent Allyship?
To investigate this paradox further might reveal that the term Black Mozart may be understood as a just and deliberate corrective of history and as Mozart’s latent reimbursement for Saint-George’s assistance some two hundred and forty years ago. By that, Saint-George benefits today from the name Mozart made for himself (thanks to Saint-George) by being introduced as Mozart and having the reception of his work tempered by that of Mozart’s. To open oneself up to be accused of presentism, one could say that suggested ways of exhibiting progressive notions of allyship among those who are considered White are seen here. By that, I mean in the 18th century, Saint-George’s reputation as a classical musician was thwarted by his lived experiences related to the color of his skin. Mozart, however, not possessing similar constraints was preserved in history as one of the leading composers of the 18th century. Posthumously, in the 21 century, Mozart’s reputation is benevolently invoked in the revival of Saint-George’s music.
If not seen as a forged allyship or progressive instances of enacting White privilege, the term Black Mozart might also be seen as what is considered to be clickbait today. Clickbait—a catchy title, the hook, the key phrase, or any term that denotes a slogan that makes a product immediately recognized by and attractive to the persons who are most likely to consume the product—is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, the term Black Mozart may be a way of marketing Saint-George to persons who would typically appreciate Mozart’s music. As such, against the background of consumerism, the client base of Mozart is immediately targeted and won over by the use of the term Black Mozart as a selling point. And if one is truly staging a revival, then this sort of approach is not only needed but essential. But one has to wonder if the damage done is worth it. By that, in an attempt to get as many people to appreciate Saint-George’s music, don’t we also affect the reception of his work and make it so that he can only be appreciated through the comparative lens of Mozart? While Black Mozart is a clever way of drawing attention to Saint-George’s music and, subsequently, his life, the term occludes the critical treatment of the Black subject to the point of erasure: Saint-George is presented as the mythicized inferior of the status quo’s perfect symbol of 18th-century classical music. As such, he can only be so great. While the two questions here don’t have a closed answer, they encourage a dialogue about Saint-George that contribute to his revival using the name he actually earned for himself.
Conclusion
The naming of the street in Paris some two and half centuries after Saint-George’s death was a welcome gesture that marked the city’s attempts to move Saint-George to a place of prominence in a city that treated him unfairly because of the color of his skin. But the very descriptors—black (or mulatto) and Guadeloupean (or American)—that would have incited negative attention for Saint-George in Paris after the laws of 1716, 1738, 1762, and 1777 were not included on the commemorative plaque. Persons interested in Saint-George’s life and those amicable to the cause of his revival, though, have sought to add these descriptors to his name. However, while the term black is recovered, Saint-George’s geographical (and political) diversity is unfortunately covered by that of Mozart, an Austrian-born composer. Thus, the term Black Mozart, a 20th-century construct, was added to Saint-George’s revival. Though the term guarantees a sure way of bringing interest to Saint-George by capitalizing on Mozart’s listenership, and though, in a way, the use of Mozart’s legacy in benefit of Saint-George may be understood as Mozart’s latent gratitude to Saint-George for his help, Black Mozart recalls epistemological and ontological problems pertaining to the Black subject. These problems that are elucidated in the frameworks of Frantz Fanon’s (1952) Black Skin, White Masks, Ter Ellingson’s (2001) Myth of the Noble Savage, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus (1948), seem greater than the purported benefit of the use of Black Mozart as a selling point for Saint-George’s music. By undoing the bond between Saint-George and Mozart, we ascribe to Saint-George—and to Mozart—the full merit of his name, his work, his lived experiences, his talent, and their combined effect to create his truly unique musical expression. In addition, we remove the yoke that limits our critical approach to Saint-George. With determination, we might be able to discover more of his correspondence and more of his political writing. We might also finally locate and publish more of his vocal works. There is, indeed, a lot of work to be done in this provocative field. In all of this, I conclude by echoing Nemeth’s (2005) opinion of Odet Denys’s mission at the publishing of his 1972 biography: this goal is a modest one (p. 88). My aim here, like Denys, is to continue the process of removing from oblivion someone who little by little has become an unknown person of history (p. 88). I suggest that we all help this revival process by always saying his name: Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-George.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
