I am a musician - at least that’s what I tell people. For about ten years I laboured in the pop-music industry as a song-writer, with varying degrees of success. I have now returned to it.
    Despite the fact that many of the technical skills of orchestration were beyond our reach, most of us admired those who had the traditional skills of arranging and orchestrating. My particular heroes are Richard Carpenter (all Carpenters songs are superbly orchestrated) and the young Elvis Presley : this is how a young genius uses his voice, almost as a synchopated instrument against a rhythm track.
    Synthesisers and sequencers have partly replaced many of the older skills. A semi-professional electronic keyboard, properly used, can now construct a near-orchestral experience in one’s own home. Working with such an instrument in my own house, I fell under the spell of Mozart, who I am convinced would have done wonders with today’s musical technology.
    Every time I play Mozart’s music I am reminded that his music is so good that for a few moments I’m deceived into thinking I could compose this way myself. Well, I can’t - and that’s that. Parody - yes, but the real thing : no. Take the slow movement from Piano Concerto No. 21, sometimes known as Elvira Madigan due to its use in a Swedish film of that name. Listen carefully to the dissonances, dischords and resolutions : the grace with which the music moves from key to key, the fluctuation in mood, the sheer emotional depth of the piece. It is staggering, and it’s popular : good, popular music - you can even whistle it!
    It was while I was studying some of the beautiful tunes (melodies, if you prefer) from The Magic Flute that I discovered Mozart was a fellow Freemason - and his opera, a masonic piece. Why had this music been composed and what, I wondered, were its aims?

The Magic Flute

By 1790, throughout the whole of Europe, Freemasonry was viewed with increasing distaste by the powers-that-be. There is no escaping the fact that the American Revolution was led by Freemasons Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, to name but three. In 1783, Britain formally recognised the United States. 1789 marked the beginning of the French Revolution, again supported (especially in its early days) by the very same type of person who wanted to see a state based on harmony, brotherhood and fellowship (some hope, as it turned out).
    The Austrian Empire was fundamentally a benign laissez-faire kind of arrangement, but whereas thirty years earlier Freemasons had been seen as a civilizing and worthwhile influence on the state, by 1791 they were deeply suspect to monarchical western Europe and its secret police. This is the background to The Magic Flute. Crudely put, the opera was an attempt to appease the establishment by making the perfectly justified inference that Freemasonry was more a spiritual and less a political pursuit - and quite good fun as well. Listen, if you can, to the Overture. Notice the way that the music comes to a complete halt to deliver three repeated notes : the Fellow-craft knocks. Mozart’s hit-musical (if you like) of 1791 displayed ritual-work in such a manner as to show its unthreatening nature to society at large, whilst at the same time glorifying Brotherhood, Enlightenment and Wisdom.
    It was General Ludendorf, the early supporter of Hitler, who suggested that Mozart had been poisoned by masons for revealing ‘secrets’ in The Magic Flute. Masonry, being liberal, tolerant and non-racist, had naturally been banned by the Nazis (who believed it to be part of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’), and many a mason ended up in a concentration-camp. So, under the Nazis, Ludendorf’s ludicrous view prevailed, with no-one left at large in Germany to contradict him.
    In fact, shortly after Mozart’s death in December 1791, his lodge, The Newly-Crowned Hope Lodge in Vienna (Joseph Haydn was also a member), held an elaborate memorial in his honour. As for The Magic Flute, in spite of its massive popular success, the authorities banned Freemasonry in Austria three years after his death, in 1794. Freemasonry survived, unscathed, in Britain. Perhaps this relative liberty explains why Mozart himself once wrote :
    “Above all else, I am an Englishman.”
    What remains, of course, is the music - and the masonry. In the Preface to his brilliant book 1791 - Mozart’s last Year, H.C. Robbins-Landon sums it up like this: “The Mozartian legacy is as good an excuse for mankind’s existence as we shall ever encounter, and is perhaps a still small hope for our ultimate survival.”
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has got me back into writing pop-music; I hope he would approve.