Mozart×Parker

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on ROAST NIGHT: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Dorothy Parker, on On what they steal from, and have stopped pretending not to.
2. 00:10
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Ah, Miss Parker! They tell me tonight we confess our little… borrowings. How delicious. I should say at once: I never stole anything I didn't improve.
3. 00:21
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   Funny, that's what the second husband said about my jewelry. Still theft, darling.
4. 00:26
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   But is it? When I took from Johann Christian Bach—lovely man, taught me in London when I was eight—I took his Andante, yes, but then I made it mine. Better harmonies. Better everything.
5. 00:38
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   You were eight and already kleptomania. That's not a defense, that's a diagnosis.
6. 00:42
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   No, no, you misunderstand. All music comes from somewhere. My father taught me this. You hear something, you eat it, you digest it, and what comes out is—well, it is yours. This is how art works.
7. 00:57
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   That's also how digestion works, but we don't call it cooking.
8. 01:00
   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

   Ha! Very good. But tell me, did you not steal? All your wit at that Round Table—surely some of it came from reading Wilde, no? Or Shaw?
9. 01:09
   Dorothy Parkershare moment

   I read them, yes. Stole their rhythm, maybe. But not their lines. There's a difference between influence and carbon paper.
10. 01:16
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ah, but I never used carbon paper either! When I borrowed from Haydn—and I did, often, he was my great teacher—I transformed it. The Magic Flute has bits of him everywhere, but no one hears Haydn. They hear Mozart.
11. 01:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Because you dressed it up in sequins and taught it to sing higher. That's not transformation, that's redecoration.
12. 01:37
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You are cruel tonight. I like it. But what about your stories? Your poems? You wrote about the same people over and over—bitter women, disappointing men, bad love affairs. Didn't you steal from your own life?
13. 01:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Stealing from yourself is called autobiography, not larceny. Though I grant you the men deserved to be robbed.
14. 01:57
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Exactly! And the composers I borrowed from, they were dead or they didn't mind. Haydn loved me like a son. He told me once, 'Wolfgang, you are the greatest composer I know.' Can you imagine? So if I took a little phrase here and there, it was family business.
15. 02:14
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Family business is also what the Mafia calls it.
16. 02:16
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Miss Parker, you wound me. But I think you do the same thing. You once said—I read this—that you couldn't write poetry anymore because Edna Millay had said everything better. That is influence. That is theft of confidence.
17. 02:31
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    No, that's honesty. Millay could do things with a sonnet that I couldn't touch. I stopped writing verse because I knew when I was beaten. You never stopped stealing because you never thought you could lose.
18. 02:41
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Because I couldn't lose! When you steal with genius, it becomes yours. I took a little gavotte from someone, a little fugue subject from someone else, and I built Don Giovanni. You cannot call that theft. You must call it… what is the word? Alchemy.
19. 02:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Alchemy is what you call it when you get away with it. The rest of us call it a lawsuit.
20. 03:02
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But there were no lawsuits! Not one. You know why? Because everyone knew the rules. In my time, we all borrowed. Handel took from himself and others constantly. Bach rearranged Vivaldi. It was how we learned, how we worked.
21. 03:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And in my time, we all drank constantly. Didn't make it vitamins.
22. 03:22
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You are very funny, but you avoid my question. What did you steal? And please, do not say 'nothing'—I will not believe you.
23. 03:30
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fine. I stole timing from Benchley. Sentence structure from Hemingway, though I'd die before admitting that to him. And every nasty thought I ever had about men, I stole from women who were too polite to say it first.
24. 03:42
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ah-ha! You see? We are the same. We take, we reshape, we make new. This is not crime. This is craft.
25. 03:51
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    It's craft when you improve it. When you just move it from shelf to shelf, it's called shoplifting.
26. 03:56
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But I always improved it. Always. Do you think I am proud of this? No. Well, yes. A little. But it is true. I made everything better. Even when I wrote variations on other men's themes, my variations were what people remembered.
27. 04:12
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Of course they remembered. You signed your name louder.
28. 04:14
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    And you didn't? Every cutting remark at the Algonquin had your name on it within the hour. You made sure of that.
29. 04:22
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Because if I didn't, some man would've claimed he said it first. That's not theft, that's self-defense.
30. 04:27
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Yes! Exactly! You took your territory and defended it. So did I. When I wrote for the piano, I took every trick I learned from Clementi, from Schobert, from Paradisi, and I made it Mozartian. Mine. No one else could do it that way.
31. 04:41
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, no one else had your nerve.
32. 04:43
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Or my talent.
33. 04:44
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Or your talent. I'll give you that. But let's not pretend it was all divine inspiration. You heard something you liked, you took it home, you tried it on.
34. 04:53
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Of course! This is what I am saying. The question is not whether we steal. The question is what we do with it after. Do we make it live? Do we make it new?
35. 05:02
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Or do we just make it loud and hope no one notices the seams.
36. 05:05
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    You are sharp tonight, Miss Parker. Very sharp. But tell me—when you wrote your reviews, your stories, did you never use an idea you heard at dinner? A phrase someone said? A joke that wasn't quite yours?
37. 05:18
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Every writer's a magpie, Mozart. We collect shiny things. But I never took the whole nest.
38. 05:23
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Neither did I! Just a few twigs. A little mud. And then I built a palace.
39. 05:28
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    You built an opera house on a foundation of someone else's basement.
40. 05:31
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Yes, and it still stands. Two hundred years later. Does it matter whose basement it was?
41. 05:36
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    To the man whose basement it was, probably.
42. 05:39
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    But he is forgotten and I am not. This is the truth of it. We remember the genius, not the source. You know this. Your best lines—do people care where you first heard the rhythm? No. They care that you said it perfectly.
43. 05:53
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Fair enough. Though I notice you've stopped pretending you didn't steal. That's progress.
44. 05:58
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    I never pretended. I simply called it by its proper name: education. Apprenticeship. The natural order of things. You learn by copying, then you become yourself.
45. 06:09
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Or you become a very polished forger.
46. 06:10
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Only if you stop at copying. I never did. And I think neither did you. That is why we are here, no? Talking, long after we are dead. Because we stole well.
47. 06:21
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And because we had the decency to make it worth something.
48. 06:24
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Yes. This is it exactly. Steal, yes—but steal with style. Steal with purpose. And for God's sake, make it better than you found it.
49. 06:33
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Otherwise it's just plagiarism with a wig on.
50. 06:35
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Ha! I wore many wigs, Miss Parker. Still do, in paintings. And I stand by every theft, every borrowing, every little phrase I plucked from the air and made immortal. No regrets.
51. 06:48
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    Well, I regret a few husbands and most of my publishers. But the stealing? No. That I'd do again.
52. 06:53
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartshare moment

    Then we are agreed. Artists are thieves. The good ones just steal better.
53. 06:58
    Dorothy Parkershare moment

    And the great ones make you thank them for it.