Mozart and the concept of equality

One of the qualities of sociological analysis, when it is able to overthrow conventional methodology, is its capacity to resort to unusual sources, often overlooked by mainstream research methods. Creative sources, as they are sometimes called, are able to cast new light to well-known social phenomena or processes, providing the social scientist with a new perspective from which to observe the social. By adopting alternative sources, the social scientist is bound to redefine his theoretical and methodological certainties, provided that ‘the researcher or social scientist allows him/herself to step outside his/her natural habit [...] in order to be inspired, provoked, moved or persuaded by insights and ideas found at the outskirts of or even outside the confines of his/her own scientific discipline’. This paper takes the idea seriously according to which creative sources may help understand social reality and social phenomena. It puts into brackets the methodological problem of the use of fictional sources as tools to say something about non- fictional phenomena, its main task being the analysis of the relations among equality, individualisation and social complexity analysed by making reference to unusual material, that is, three of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas (namely, Idomeneo re di Creta, Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni). My perspective is not that of a sociologist of art since I do not intend to analyse Mozart’s masterpieces from a sociological point of view. On the contrary, they will be read as quasi-real social settings, made up of narratives, actions and interactions, which will be assumed as a metaphor of social reality: by making reference to the librettos of the three operas, I will try and verify different potentialities for social actions related to social contexts characterized by different degrees of social complexity.