Meme 058: Mozart 250 Package No. 2
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I did not receive as many comments on my remarks in the first Mozart 250
package as I had hoped. But several people thought I did not like Mozart.
In fact, I was just talking about the ambiguous stance I had with this
great composer. I was encouraged by several people to give renewed
attention to the Trio, K. 563, which I thought had too many movements, the
LP of which I had gotten rid of when cleaning out most of my LPs. I have
no CD of it now, but I ordered the "complete" Mozart Edition put together
by Brilliant Classics from http://amazon.de for just $110 including
postage, thanks to Michael Bednarek on rec.music.classical.recordings, so
I'll be able to hear it again. It was one of the substantial works Mozart
composed after the Jupiter symphony.
Starting on Mozart's birthday, I have been immersing myself in various
recordings of his last six symphonies, played by such greats as Walter,
Mravinsky, Furtwängler, Scherchen, Abendroth, Klemperer, and Casals, with
Harnoncourt and Schuricht still to come. I squeezed in the mono Scherchen
recording of the Requiem, the work's greatest performance, and will cap
off the celebration with Serenade 10 in Bb, K. 361, for thirteen wind
instruments, in the joyous performance of Stokowski.
It's the 39th symphony that grabbed me the most. It is his most ambiguous
work (and now my favorite). Unlike the clear message of Nos. 40 and 41,
this one is a mystery. And so with the 15th quartet of Schubert (it's
wonderful to have a recording by a really old fashioned group, the
Flonzaleys) and the 13th quartet (with die große Fuge and the remake of
the finale, both) of Beethoven, which has by my favorite work of his for
well over a decade (the Loewenguth Quartet on an early stereo Vox Box
plays it in an appropriately unrefined manner and the very wide stereo
separation characteristic of some of the first stereo records let me hear
the bouncing between the instruments like no other recording).
Mozart is today's most popular composer. Here's the number of
recordings that contain at least one work of the composer on
http://ArchivMusic.com:
4982 Mozart
4456 Bach
3802 Beethoven
2478 Brahms
2386 Tchaikovsky
At the local Barnes and Noble in Bethesda, here are number of CDs in
the main bins, excluding the shelf space for boxes, where Beethoven
exceeds Mozart, in spite of all the Mozart operas (rough estimates):
345 Mozart
253 Bach
230 Beethoven
138 Tchaikovsky
069 Brahms
And there are 92 of Vivaldi and Schubert and 46 of Schumann. I forgot
to count Haydn. This might give a better idea of sales. I have no
figures for sales in the 78 rpm era, but know to a near certainty that
Beethoven led the list. My guess would be something like Beethoven,
Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, but much less
Bach, and with Vivaldi practially unknown. The 78 rpm catalogs had very
little before Bach and almost nothing before Palestrina, born in 1525.
For what it's worth, there's my "Acoustic Chamber Music Sets
(1899-1926): A Discography," _Journal of the Association for Recorded
Sound Collections_, in three parts: Vol. 30, Nos. 2 and 3 (2000) and
Vol. 31, No. 1 (2001). I'll send an electronic copy, in WordPerfect 5.1
for DOS, to any researcher who would like to get it. I put it in the
public domain, as agreed to by the publisher, on 2002 May 29, one year
after the appearance of the final installment. The electronic copy
includes numerous minor corrections. Use it freely. If you put it on
your site, you might make mention of this fact. It is available on my
site, http://www.panix.com/~checker/acch.htm , which has a bunch of
other discographies, as well as articles on many subject unrelated to
music.
It lists 216 recordings, using a broad definition of chamber music.
Beehoven had 26 entries, followed by Mozart with 18, Bach 9, Brahms 8,
Haydn 7, and Schubert and Schumann both 5. Tchaikovsky had just four
and Vivaldi only one, and that was a reduction of Op. 3, No. 6 for
violin and piano, played by Reneé Chemet, who mysteriously vanished in
the far east in 1932, and Harold Craxton, which I have never heard. The
only other acoustic Vivaldi I know of is also a reduction, this time of
just the first movement of the same work, played by Adila Fachiri and
Ethel Hobday.
Anyhow, here's a bunch of further articles on Mozart for your enjoyment
and enlightenment. Again, it's the blasted operas that strike the
authors as the best of Mozart and the best evidence for his greatness
as a man in understanding the human psyche. I'd supplement this with
the chapter on Mozart in B.H. Haggin, _The Listener's Musical
Companion_ and _The New Listener's Musical Companion_ (virtually the
same words). He does indeed praise the opera but devotes much more
space to the instrumental music. Here what he says about the slow
movement of the 21st piano concerto, the most insightful analysis of a
Mozart movement I have ever read:
"Trumpets and kettledrums contribute to the festive brilliance of the
first movement of K. 67, the gaiety of its finale, but they play no
part in the extraordinary Andante in between. In this movement the
orchestra makes a long opening statement of a succession of ideas, on
which the piano then discourses in several sequences of thought that
get to be exceedingly eventful in the way that is so extraordinary: up
above there is the calm of the melody as it proceeds with developing
tensions and involvements, while down below there is the agitation of
faster-moving accompanying violins and violas, the power of plucked
bass-notes; and occcasionally there are intensifying comments by the
woodwinds. All thse, working together, buld up tension and impact that
make this movement, for all its quite, one of Mozart's most powerful
utterances; and indeed with the poser achieved in quiet is one of the
most extraordinary pieces he ever wrote."
-----------end of me, beginning of articles
Mozart's Gift
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=6624&R=EADE7998
His music has taught us how to live.
by Fred Baumann
01/30/2006, Volume 011, Issue 19
IN BEYOND Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejoices that Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, "the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste...
still speaks to us" and warns that "alas, some day all this will
be gone."
Nietzsche was unsure whether the future held the triumph of the
despicable, bourgeois "last man" who is no longer even ashamed of
himself or, as he hoped, of the newly heroic and disciplined races
that the "new philosophers" would mold. Either way, he thought
Mozart would become incomprehensible--though probably not to the
new philosophers or Overmen themselves.
So, does Mozart still speak to us? The fact that we are celebrating
his 250th birthday this month suggests so, and for some fraction of
the elite culture, he surely does. Judging by concert halls, it's
an old and shrinking fraction, but there are still a fair number of
teenagers learning the "Turkish Rondo," so who knows?
Still, I think that what we got in Peter Shaffer's movie Amadeus
roughly represents what the culture generally thinks about Mozart.
He was a silly man, but a genius, who produced music that is very
pleasant to listen to but somewhat lacking in punch. He liked
childish things, like that masquerade The Magic Flute, but he was
serious about death (who isn't?) so he started on that spooky
Requiem, which does get to us, in a churchy kind of way.
Add a bit more--perhaps "who is this woman who does not kiss me?"
from Mozart's child-prodigy phase, maybe his hatred for the
archbishop of Salzburg, something about childish pranks, billiards,
gambling, his wife Constanze's possible infidelity--and it fills
out our picture.
For a while, it seemed that playing his music to infants was a good
way to promote their adult careers; but except for a niche
audience, most of us do not actually choose to listen to it all
that much, at least when Bruce Springsteen is available. A giant of
sorts, yes, up there on the list with Shakespeare, Da Vinci,
and--who? Bach? Goethe?--anyway, those guys we sort of learned
about freshman year.
So maybe we do not hear him so well any more, or maybe we have just
passed him by. And indeed, Nietzsche's view of Mozart, though far
more elegantly and insightfully expressed than my caricature of our
own, isn't that far from it. Like ours, his tone is a little
condescending and seems to find Mozart just a little too
pretty-pretty. Nietzsche refers to Mozart as "rococo," to "his
'good company,' his tender enthusiasms, his childlike delight in
curlicues and Chinese touches, his courtesy of the heart, his
longing for the graceful, those in love, those dancing, those
easily moved to tears, his faith in the south."
While emphasizing that Mozart represented a taste too high for the
future Nietzsche feared, he also lets us know it is too soft for
the future he longed for. We are not, typically, Will to Power
freaks. Nor are we big on "the courtesy of the heart" or "tender
enthusiasms." They lack street, and even quad, cred. If we have a
taste for them, we keep quiet about it. Also, we may share with
Nietzsche and his age a certain tone deafness that comes with
modernity and its big masses, wars, breakthroughs, orchestras, and
amps.
Take that childish entertainment, The Magic Flute. The story is
fantastic and oddly put together, with an apparently
incomprehensible switch in good and bad guys halfway through. There
are magical transformations of hags into nubile girls, visits from
a forest menagerie of music-loving wild animals, and occasional
appearances by 12-year-old divine messengers. Its Singspiel style
offers a stodgy and naive alternation of spoken dialogue with
singing, a clumsy German version of the slick and zingy Italian
opera buffa.
Yet Mozart's biographer Alfred Einstein says that "it is one of
those pieces that can enchant a child at the same time that it . .
. transports the wisest." How so?
True, underneath the stage tricks there is a profound allegory of
the education of the soul, but Mozart also uses the clumsiness and
apparent graceless naiveté of the Singspiel style with such knowing
grace that one lives constantly both inside and outside the
conventions. Naiveté here is false, tongue in cheek, but lovingly
false. The tone takes the stiff, earnest, and childlike seriously,
but provisionally. And of course what is happening at the musical,
stylistic level is replicated at the level of the allegory, where
naive expressions of utopian faith in Enlightenment ("Now the earth
becomes a heavenly realm and mortals equal to the gods") are
announced straight to the audience in glorious assertive music, but
by very serious little boys. Thus, utopia becomes at once a cause
to live for and an impossible and wistful, even slightly comical,
hope.
Holding together with apparently effortless ease the most intensely
characterized opposites is, to me, the essential quality of
Mozart's music and the state of mind it engenders. Another operatic
example is the famous quintet in the first act of Cosi Fan Tutte
where, to the most soaring and blissful music, two couples of
lovers mourn the departure of the men for war, while an elderly
cynic (who, for a bet with the two men, is merely setting up a test
of the women's fidelity) mutters that he'll die if he can't start
laughing.
This is not mere ironic deflation of romantic pretensions. Just as
we know the protestations of eternal love to be foolish, we feel
their present truth and feel pity for the vulnerability they
reveal. There is a similar moment at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro,
where the countess pardons the count, in which much-betrayed, but
still-loving, mercy balances perfectly with resignation and bitter
necessity.
We get it. We feel all of it. No comment is needed.
Nor are these feelings always as gentle as Nietzsche suggests. Who
has ears to hear, knows, for instance, what is going on at the end
of the first act of Don Giovanni. There the Don's victims turn into
a kind of musical lynch mob. Individually attractive, a passionate
clump whose music becomes raucous and hysterical, rising to a
climax that would annihilate, castrate, eat the Don and Leporello
if, at that moment, the two bass baritones did not shout it down
and assert themselves, reestablishing the balance of the conflict.
If we miss this, it is because Mozart indicates even the most
grisly feelings and possibilities beautifully. He never makes the
expressionist move of identifying the genuine or the intense with
the ugly. The presentation of even the feral in beautiful forms,
however, does not attenuate those feelings; it intensifies them, by
holding them up against the beauty and order of their
representation. At the same time, it creates a mediating, and
therefore liberating, distance from those feelings, in which one
can think as well as feel.
Some of Mozart's most obviously emotional music is composed in
minor keys. An example I am particularly fond of is from the String
Quartet in D minor, K. 421, whose last movement consists primarily
of a haunting, sketchily dance-like theme. It can be played, as the
Juilliard Quartet does, at a moderate pace, with a kind of courtly,
civil, and knowledgeable effect. If there is anything melancholy
going on, it is well repressed, on its best behavior, smiling
politely to the company. It can also be played, as the Salomon
Quartet does, a little slower, a little more inwardly, even a bit
spookily; but, as the liner notes tell us, "we are a long way from
the 'confessional' outpourings of some of the later romantics."
Whichever end of the permissible range you emphasize, the very fact
that the melancholy or even eerie feelings the music conveys are
set off by the courtly, and that the inner is in tension with the
outer, strengthens the effect. The ability to be both inside and
out, to feel and reflect on the feeling, to have strong passions
and to be in formal control of them, is a large part of the delight
we take in passages like this, or the first movement of the G minor
string quintet, K. 516. Even where the emotion is at its most
intense, the effect is never merely personal, however bleak or
despairing.
Thus, Terry Teachout in this month's Commentary ("The Major Minor
Mozart") speaks of the "stoic quality" of the G minor symphony, K.
550. I think he means that even when the play and motion is taken
out of the experience, the feeling never simply takes us over.
There is room for reflective control.
That is, listening to Mozart calls to mind (and in some ways turns
you into) a certain kind of person, a more complicated sort than we
mostly go in for today. Not a redemptive Wagnerian hero or cynical
slacker, not a high-minded virtuoso of compassion and/or righteous
indignation, not a "realist" or an "idealist," but someone who both
acknowledges, lives in, accepts the viewpoint of, and participates
in, all human feelings--even the ugly ones, as we see in the
marvelous revenge arias given to the Count, Dr. Bartolo, and
Figaro--but who also, in the end, maintains as sovereign the
viewpoint of rationality and order. (That is why, in their own
ways, all three of those arias are come-dic, even the Count's,
which is also partly genuinely scary.)
In invoking, and to some degree creating, such a person, Mozart
implicitly makes a kind of moral case, a case for how we should
live. It is not "aesthetic" in the sense of replacing the moral
with formal beauty; it is much closer to what we find in
Shakespeare's Tempest or Measure for Measure; i.e., models of a
kind of control of the passions that gives them their due. Yet it
is presented aesthetically, not through argument or exhortation.
In The Magic Flute, an opera whose Masonic libretto the Freemason
Mozart took very seriously (as did Goethe, who wrote a sequel),
Mozart made thematic the creation of such a person. He is the magus
Sarastro, and he is what Tamino, the young hero-in-training (and,
in her way, Pamina, the heroine), is supposed to become. Unlike the
Queen of the Night, who gives way to her passion for justice to the
extent of becoming monstrously unjust, and unlike the slave
Monostatos, who chooses sides according to his odds of being able
to force sex with Pamina, Tamino learns to be able to feel it all
and still control it, to play the flute, in the image of the
allegory, and not have it play him.
In the end, the romantic hero and the homo economicus turn out to
be not basically different, but two sides of the same forged coin.
The Mozartean hero, whom we approach, admire, and even learn to
resemble, if only slightly, puts them to shame.
It is a figure that we don't meet much otherwise. On sale for
generations now have been simpler models of heroism, at their best
the superficially cynical but deeply moral idealist (say, Humphrey
Bogart) but, more typically, various chest-pounding moralists and
romantics.
For that reason--that we tend to operate, as though instinctively,
on romantic and post-romantic antitheses about passion and
reason--it is, in fact, harder to hear Mozart well today than it
used to be. Insofar as his music transcends our categories, we
either consign him to the realm of the pretty-pretty or turn him,
as some 20th-century criticism did, into a grotesque
quasi-existential Angst-ling. And of course, Nietzsche was right
that the language of aristocratic, pre-Romantic taste is no longer
available to us.
Yet, despite all that, Mozart is the most available of composers.
The paths to his depths are plainly and attractively marked at the
surface. And Mozart was probably right, as he indicates in the
crucial scene in The Magic Flute (where Tamino ends up trusting his
naive instincts about beauty and honesty even over a true, but
partial, account of Sarastro's crimes) in thinking that real
openness is perennially possible.
In that, he was, again, probably closer to the truth than was
Nietzsche.
Fred Baumann is the Harry M. Clor professor of political science at
Kenyon College.
Mozart: the man and his myths
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5378386-119295,00.html
Lucasta Miller on a quartet of Mozartian biographies from David
Cairns, Anthony Holden, Julian Rushton and Stanley Sadie
Lucasta Miller
Saturday January 21, 2006
Mozart and His Operas by David Cairns (288pp, Penguin, £22)
The Man Who Wrote Mozart: The Extraordinary Life of Lorenzo Da
Ponte by Anthony Holden (256pp, Weidenfeld, £18.99)
Mozart by Julian Rushton (352pp, Oxford, £18.99)
Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781 by Stanley Sadie (672pp, Oxford,
£25)
Bounded by his legendary years as a child prodigy and his
romantically early death, Mozart's life has offered itself up to
myth-makers more than that of any other composer. The
disproportionate influence in modern times of Peter Shaffer's
brilliant but misleading fictionalisation Amadeus, both as a play
and as a film, has imprisoned the composer in the Madame Tussaud's
of the popular imagination as a curious chimera, half-god,
half-beast. This creature, first created by Pushkin in 1830 in
Mozart and Salieri, was a near madman, "an immortal genius inside a
buffoon's, an idle hooligan's, skull", whose writing of his own
requiem and alleged death by poison at the hands of a musical rival
was as unnatural as his weird personality.
The superficial appeal of these tall stories is obvious, but even
as myths they tend to disappoint. The preposterous murder plot,
based on unsubstantiated rumour, seems to belong incongruously to
the melodramatic world of 19th-century grand opera, rather than the
Enlightenment mindset of The Marriage of Figaro or The Magic Flute.
Amadeus's foul-mouthed freak is ultimately unilluminating because
it dehumanises a composer whose work is so palpably humane. Like
Shakespeare - another subject for endless biographical speculation
- Mozart succeeded in finding a way of representing human emotions
and relationships in art that still feels true and universal today.
His great operas do not merely impress by their supreme control of
style and form; they seem to reflect our own subjectivity back at
us. How he did this is, perhaps, the crux of his genius, yet that
question remains a biographical conundrum.
In Mozart and his Operas - one of a clutch of biographies
celebrating this year's 250th anniversary of the composer's birth -
David Cairns makes the Shakespearean comparison explicit. For him,
Shakespeare's linguistic curiosity, urge to ransack others' styles,
and "gift for reading or hearing something and unspringing its
unrealised potential" (as suggested in Stephen Greenblatt's Will in
the World) reflect Mozart's insatiable appetite for the
assimilation and imitation of musical ideas, which was established
by the time he was four or five.
For some time now the fashion among musicologists has been to put
Mozart back into context. Rather than seeing him as a miraculous
aberration, whose freakish talent appeared out of nowhere, recent
scholars have compared and contrasted his works with those of his
predecessors and contemporaries and have attempted to embed his
music in the milieu from which he emerged. As Richard Taruskin has
recently put it: "The originality we now perceive in Mozart was
really a secondary function or by-product of a mastery so
consummately internalised that it liberated his imagination to
react with seeming spontaneity." Mozart's sheer output - Köchel's
catalogue of his works runs to 1,000 dense pages - is
extraordinary, but output presupposes input.
The person initially responsible for that input was, famously,
Mozart's father Leopold. Maligned by some as a rapaciously pushy
parent, he is treated more sympathetically by Cairns. The foreign
tours may have been exhausting, but far from being forced to play
or compose, little Wolfgang was only with difficulty prised from
his clavier. In 1765, in London, when the nine-year-old infant
phenomenon was subjected to testing for a report to the Royal
Society by Daines Barrington, his passionate commitment was in
evidence: when challenged to improvise a "Song of Rage", he "worked
himself up to such a pitch that he beat his harpsichord like a
person possessed, rising sometimes in his chair" (one wonders
whether the boy was ironically offering his views on the examining
scientist). For Cairns, the real miracle with Mozart is that a
child so schooled in the art of aping adult emotion matured into a
psychologist of genuine Shakespearean depth: it was not merely by
hard work at his craft, but through extraordinary receptiveness to
life experience that Mozart must have achieved his uncanny ability
to render humanity in music.
Yet although Cairns argues humanistically that it was Mozart's
innate moral nature, over and above his technical skill, that was
the key to his success, this argument is slightly undercut by the
fact that his musical analyses tend to be more illuminating than
any direct connections he makes between Mozart's personal life and
the operas. He is impressively accessible to the moderately
musically-literate reader when he gets into the details of the
scoring, explaining the techniques through which emotional affect
is rendered in the operas. It was by emulating - and transcending -
his models that Mozart discovered, in The Marriage of Figaro, a
revolutionary way of "embodying the interplay of living people, the
feelings and passions and thoughts of rounded human beings".
Cairns points out, for example, that the countess's heart-rending
"Porgi, amor" was based on an aria written by Paisiello for the
same character in his recent opera of The Barber of Seville,
Figaro's prequel in the original trilogy of plays by Beaumarchais
(they are the same in terms of key, time signature, tempo and
orchestration). Yet Mozart's aria stretches musical convention with
a new flexibility, so that strict harmonic form is replaced by
continuous development: when it returns to the home key of E flat,
and the words of the opening are repeated, new music unexpectedly
emerges, with dissonance on the bassoon lending an added poignancy.
One could extrapolate further on how this works on the emotions
through its patterns of tension and release, forward and backward
movement: return to the home key should signal release, but the new
tune creates further tension, while the repetition of the words
pulls backwards, subliminally reminding us of the earlier melody
which is now in the past and thus - like the countess's idealism
about love, which has been shattered by her faithless husband -
lost.
What Cairns doesn't do is broaden his field to take in the wider
ramifications of intellectual history. It is in fact possible to
construct - as Richard Taruskin does in his magnificent
multi-volume Oxford History of Western Music, published last year -
a convincing cultural explanation as to why, say, Figaro achieves
"a singularly sympathetic representation of humanity".
Here, Mozart is seen as a product of the Enlightenment (it is
perhaps no accident that the paying public's fascination with the
Wunderkind in the 1760s coincided with the success of Rousseau's
seminal work on childhood development, Emile). As far as comic
opera was concerned, the Enlightenment's project was to privilege
nature over artifice, to present all characters as sharing a
universal humanity regardless of rank, and to produce a sense of
community in feeling not only between characters but between them
and the audience. This, allied to developments in plot construction
- in which, conventionally, the initial scenario is tangled into an
imbroglio, and then sorted out (the latter expressed by the singers
in ensemble finales) - allowed composers to move towards the
creation of an art form which could, in the hands of Mozart,
achieve a perfect, bittersweet closure, in which the plot strands
were satisfyingly tied up, yet whose underlying musical complexity
could encompass, rather than deny, the ambiguities of mixed human
emotion. This is not completely to relativise the sense of
self-recognition, fulfilment and yearning which audiences still
feel when the curtain goes down after Figaro, but it does explain
how and why, at a given historical moment, such an effect was what
opera was overtly aiming at.
In the end, Cairns's faith in Mozart's personal "profound humanity"
as the ultimate key to his great creative breakthroughs is not,
perhaps, enough. This is partly because it fails to bring in the
wider cultural perspective, but also because it remains an
unproblematised assumption. Mozart has left posterity very little
evidence about his inner nature. He did not explore or analyse
himself or others in literary form, so it is only from his music
that we can extrapolate, by an act of imagination, the depths of
his personality. Wolfgang Hildesheimer put this beautifully in his
subtle and still classic biographical meditation of 1977: "We have
before us a score consisting of only two staves - the melodic line
(Mozart's music) and the bass (his external life). The connecting
middle voices are missing - his unconscious, the dictates and
impulses of his inner life, that which governs his motives and
behaviour. A familiar exercise in music is to compose a third,
connecting part ... This is how we must regard the work of
biographers."
Although the more lurid myths that have emerged to fill this gap
have been dispelled, the inner Mozart remains a mystery.
Biographers can reconstruct him in a variety of convincing or
unconvincing ways, but they need to acknowledge, as Hildesheimer
does, that their work - though it answers so many human needs, both
their own and their readers' - is doomed at one level to failure.
Cairns gives us a compassionate and elegantly written account, but
not perhaps a questioning one.
In Mozart's Don Giovanni, the protagonist is a figure of enigmatic
emptiness; seduction is his way of attempting to fill the void at
his centre, and Mozart expresses this by making him constantly
steal, with virtuoso aplomb, the musical styles of his victims.
Mozart himself - whose life's work from earliest childhood was to
seduce his listeners - can seem similarly blank: a screen on to
which his admirers project their desires. He did not need to
mythologise himself; others have done that for him (beginning with
Leopold, whose publicity material for his infant son's performances
exaggerated the child's youth).
The same, however, cannot be said of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the
librettist of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, whose genius
for flamboyant self-mythology was as remarkable as his talent for
adapting texts for operas. Like his friend Casanova, Da Ponte was
both a self-dramatising autobiographer and (by his own account) a
sexual dynamo. His account of working on Don Giovanni, with a
bottle of Tokay on one side of his desk, a supply of Seville
tobacco on the other, and a nubile 16-year-old serving-wench on
call to service his needs at the ring of a bell, is a masterpiece
of fantasy-memoir, especially as he claims to have written the
libretti for two other, non-Mozart operas during that intense
period. He may or may not be exaggerating his capacity to get
through a superhuman workload, but, despite his brilliance, he
never had Mozart's capacity for arduous, single-minded
concentration. During his picaresque, chameleon career, he was
always on the move. Jew and Catholic, priest and womaniser, poet
and bankrupt, shopkeeper and university professor, he began his
long life in and around Venice and ended it in New York. It is hard
to imagine a more flamboyant personal history, a gift to the
biographer Anthony Holden, who relishes his subject's sheer
exuberance.
It is disappointing that Holden's book lacks proper reference
material, consigning it to an ephemeral market. This is certainly
not true of two other bicentenary offerings, both by academic
musicologists: Professor Julian Rushton's compact and rather
technical Mozart, and the late Stanley Sadie's vast Mozart: The
Early Years, 1756-1781. The latter will undoubtedly prove a lasting
monument to scholarship. Sadie amasses an awesome quantity of
descriptive detail on the works, taking into account, for example,
new research on the dating of certain compositions garnered from a
study of the watermarks on the manuscript paper. Yet his resolutely
unpsychological approach may leave the nonspecialist reader
emotionally unsatisfied (so afraid is he of the perils of
psychobiography regarding Mozart's attitude to Leopold that he
bizarrely claims that the father-son relationship in Idomeneo, an
opera about child-sacrifice no less, is "normal, uncomplicated, and
predictable"). Such a wealth of documentation in one volume will
offer an invaluable resource, yet it cannot in the end dispel the
sense of wonder and enigma Mozart still engenders, despite the
efforts of biographers, cultural theorists and musicologists to pin
him down.
Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth is published by Vintage
In praise of... Mozart
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5384926-119295,00.html
Friday January 27, 2006
To his contemporaries in the 18th century Mozart was a brilliant
virtuoso. To the 19th century he was largely a composer of
delightful miniatures. During the 20th century he came to be seen
as the very essence of music itself. And in the 21st century - and
beyond - what kind of Mozart will we find for ourselves?
As we mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart today, two
things that can be said with complete certainty are that Mozart
will endure and that the world will never cease to rediscover him
afresh. Musicians as yet unborn are likely to agree with Rossini
that in our youth Mozart rouses our admiration, in our maturity
despair, and that in our old age he is our consolation.
When Mozart died in 1791, Haydn, no less, expressed the view that
the world will not witness such a talent again in a hundred years.
When those 100 years were up, and Haydn's view had been vindicated,
Hans von Bülow remarked that, even then, Mozart remained "a young
man with a great future in front of him". That remains as true as
ever today. WH Auden got it right when he too looked ahead from
1956 and wrote, of the priest in the Magic Flute: "We who know
little - which is just as well - / About the future can, at least,
foretell, / Whether they live in air-borne nylon cubes, / Practice
group-marriage or are fed through tubes, / That crowds two
centuries from now, will press / (Absurd their hair, ridiculous
their dress), / And pay in currencies however weird / To hear
Sarastro booming through his beard."
Supermozart shopping
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5385918-119295,00.html
David Ward
Friday January 27, 2006
Vienna and Salzburg today celebrated the 250th birthday of a genius
with street parties and the public opening of Mozart's birthplace.
Britain celebrated with a selection of the composer's 600 or so
works played in Morrisons supermarkets across the land. Not live,
but through speakers that usually broadcast more downmarket sounds.
The horn quintet was cooing nicely by the time the Guardian trolley
reached the toilet rolls, disposable razors and cotton rich socks
towards the middle of the Morrisons store in Cheadle Heath, Greater
Manchester.
"I quite like classical music," said one nearby shopper examining
the tights and pushing a trolley laden with lilies and potatoes. "I
don't like that bump, bump stuff they often play. I like the idea
and I'm quite sure a lot of people will."
And they did, even if they didn't realise it was Mozart's birthday;
even if they hadn't been aware of Eine Kleine Nacht Musik from
above until given an information nudge near the fruit and veg.
But then there was a rude interruption, as shocking as the sound of
loud conversation during Figaro at Glyndebourne. "Staff call.
Joanne Groomby, contact 128, Joannne Groomby."
The oboe quartet was playing in pet foods, unnoticed by shopper
Tony Middleton standing near packets of Trill. "I'm not a classical
music fanatic, although I like the more popular pieces," Mr
Middleton said.
"I quite like hearing it in this setting. But my other preference
would be to have no music. I like to be able to choose my music,
not to have what people think I might like."
Another cruel interruption: "Apple turnovers, three for the price
of two, 75p."
The fourth horn concerto serenaded beside the Loyd Grossman pasta
sauces and the cooked meats were cheered up by the Turkish Rondo, a
nippy piece that sped up traffic in the aisles.
Greta and Norman Armitage were uncertain about which ham to choose
but loved the music. "We noticed it as soon as we came in," said
Mrs Armitage. "It's calming and relieves stress. We like classical
music and knew it was the Mozart anniversary today."
For those less well-informed but happy with what they had heard,
Morrisons had laid in stocks of Unforgettable Mozart, The Most
Unforgettable Classics Ever, a CD which was a snip at £3.99. All
but two copies had been sold by lunchtime, though probably not to
one of the checkout staff who preferred Doris Day and Dean Martin
and found this classical stuff a bit depressing.
But Anne Topping, counters manager and music lover (especially
Mozart and Handel), thought it made a very refreshing change.
The store manager, David Whipp, described himself as not much of a
music person but said the feedback from customers had been very
positive. "First and foremost we are a grocery retailer and
classical music is not something we do. But if we do something like
this, it opens people's minds a bit. And it's good if it generates
extra sales and gets people talking about Morrisons."
Still humming the finale of the horn concerto, the Guardian and its
trolley headed to the checkouts where the tills' erratic and
uncoordinated pings provided a descant Mozart would never have
intended.
Peter Sellars to take on Mozart's unfinished 'Muslim' opera
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5370778-119295,00.html
Paul Arendt
Tuesday January 10, 2006
The opera director Peter Sellars has revealed plans for a radical
modern production of Mozart's unfinished work Zaide.
Sellars is well known for his provocative interpretations of Mozart
- he once cast Don Giovanni as a Harlem drug lord - and his Zaide
will be no exception. "Of course I will make it completely
contemporary, as did Mozart," he said.
"Mozart was writing about Europeans in the Muslim world directly in
his lifetime. The piece is not a historical vignette. Even then,
Europe was obsessed with the 'menace' of the Muslim world. It's
about how Europeans engage Muslims in a way that is positive, and
the concept of mercy coming from both sides."
Begun when Mozart was in his early 20s but never completed, Zaide
is set in Turkey and follows a forbidden love affair between the
sultan's daughter and a slave. An overture and the final act are
missing, as are the spoken sections of Johann Andreas Schachtner's
libretto, but Sellars is not planning to finish the story.
"We have no problem with this kind of narrative. The 20th-century
novel and film have taken us to the point where we're interested in
the ellipses. The ending is quite perfect because it is a plea for
mercy, and we don't know what the next step will be. Which, you
could say, is where we are at the beginning of the 21st-century
with the Muslim world and the west."
Sellars' production premieres in Vienna before moving to New York,
where it will become the centrepiece of the Lincoln Center's annual
Mostly Mozart festival.
"What's great is to have a Mozart piece where people don't know the
music going in, and where the public can be genuinely surprised as
each new number appears," Sellars said. "There's one aria that is
beloved and done in concert, but for most of the rest, people will
be hearing the music for the first time."
A concert version of the production will play at the Barbican in
London in July.
DNA detectives discover more skeletons in Mozart family closet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5369763-119295,00.html
Luke Harding in Berlin
Monday January 9, 2006
It is a mystery that has gone on for more than a century: did the
old skull lodged in an Austrian basement really belong to the
greatest composer of all time, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?
The results of DNA tests seeking to solve the mystery were
broadcast on Austrian TV to coincide with the 250th anniversary
this month of the composer's birth. And the answer is: we still
don't know.
Last night researchers revealed that Mozart's "skull" - which has
been in the possession of the Mozart Foundation since 1902 - had a
different DNA result from that of his two "relatives". This could
mean either that the skull is a 200-year-old fake or that it is
indeed genuine but that the two "relatives" dug up from the Mozart
family plot in Salzburg are not from his family at all. The samples
from the skeletons of his supposed relatives had different DNA
results from each other, leading to suspicions that neither was
related to Mozart.
"We got wonderful results from Mozart's skull. Unfortunately the
results from Mozart's niece and grandmother don't match with the
skull, or with each other," Franz Grabner, from Austria's state ORF
television, said last night. "It's still an open question whether
we have the right skull."
It is the latest chapter in a story which began in 1801 when a
gravedigger, Joseph Rothmayer, purportedly dug up Mozart's skull
from a cemetery in Vienna. The composer was buried there in an
unmarked grave following his death in 1791 at the age of 35. His
skeleton subsequently went missing. But his presumed skull - minus
the lower jaw - was handed down to his descendants and eventually
given to the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the town where the
prodigy spent most of his life.
In late 2004 researchers from Innsbruck's institute of forensic
medicine got permission to dig up Mozart's relatives. They opened
the family vault in Salzburg's Sebastian cemetery, discovering nine
skeletons and numerous bones, including those of Mozart's father,
Leopold, and wife, Constanze.
In the end, though, the hottest leads came from two dusty female
skeletons apparently belonging to Mozart's 16-year-old niece,
Jeanette, and maternal grandmother, Euphrosina Pertl. "We needed to
test the mitochondrial DNA which is passed down the female line,"
Walther Parson, the forensic pathologist who carried out the tests
on the skull, told the Guardian. "We had full skeletons from both
of them. Their bones were in rather good shape. We decided to use
the femur."
After taking DNA samples, researchers had the problem of how to get
Mozart's "skull" from Salzburg to their lab in Innsbruck. "We tried
to insure Mozart. But nobody wanted to insure the skull," Prof
Parson said.
The Mozarteum eventually transported the skull in a security van
used for bank deliveries. Prof Parson and his team then removed two
of Mozart's teeth, one of which was sent to a laboratory in the US
for comparative tests.
The other tooth was bleached and chopped in half so DNA could be
extracted. A professional glued it back together afterwards and put
it back in the head. The result arrived in September but was kept
secret until the broadcast.
"It's a bizarre story," Prof Parson said. "The skull is now back in
the Mozarteum in a locked safe." Had it been worth it, though? "My
personal view is that Mozart was the greatest musician who ever
lived on the Earth. But I didn't really care whether the skull was
real or not."
The phoenix
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5367726-119295,00.html
A poet, priest and womaniser, who ended his days as a grocer, he
also wrote the words to some of the greatest operas. On the eve of
Mozart's 250th anniversary, Anthony Holden looks at the colourful
life of his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte
Anthony Holden
Saturday January 7, 2006
On June 4 1805, a 56-year-old Italian immigrant disembarked in
Philadelphia from the transatlantic packet Columbia, carrying only
a violin. The little money on him when he left London, fleeing his
many debtors, he had gambled away on the voyage. Before dying in
New York 33 years later, in his 90th year, he would find new-world
respectability as the first professor of Italian in America. For
now, he set up shop as a grocer.
To those who knew him in the American denouement of his long
European life, there was always an air of mystery about the Abbé
Lorenzo da Ponte. A scholarly poet and teacher, he was also an
ordained Catholic priest, rumoured to have been born Jewish.
Although he had a devoted wife, he also had a reputation as a
womaniser. With his flirtatious eyes and mane of white hair, Da
Ponte charmed all he met. But his self-assurance also excited
mistrust. When one of the first Italian operas was performed in New
York in 1825, he had the nerve to claim he had written it. He had,
so he said, known Mozart. Not to mention Casanova.
Was Lorenzo da Ponte even the professor's real name? Some begged
leave to doubt it. Like the memoirs he had recently written, to pay
off more debts, the old man was so full of tall stories ... The
many lives of Lorenzo da Ponte - librettist of Mozart's three great
operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte -
begin in Venice and hurtle eventfully across Europe before winding
up in New York, where today he lies buried in the world's largest
cemetery, beneath the flight path into JFK Airport.
Born in 1749, in the Venetian hill town of Ceneda (now Vittorio
Veneto), his real name was Emanuele Conegliano, eldest son of a
tanner. Uneducated, illiterate, he ran wild until he was 14, when
his widowed father fell in love with a 16-year-old Christian girl.
Before he could marry her, the family had to be received into the
Catholic church. It being the custom for the eldest son to assume
the name of the bishop who baptised them, Emanuele became Lorenzo
da Ponte.
With Bishop da Ponte as his sponsor, the boy's fortunes took a turn
for the better. He received a classical education, began to write
poetry, and became a Catholic priest. Appointed a professor, he was
soon disillusioned by academic in-fighting; at 24, he resigned to
seek a new life in "the permanent fancy-dress ball that was
Venice".
As the rest of Europe looked to its future via the ideas of Kant,
Rousseau and Voltaire, once mighty Venice was partying its way
towards becoming merely the most beautiful city on earth. As the
French Revolution loomed, Venice's Robespierre was Casanova, the
prototype libertine, soon to become Da Ponte's friend. But first,
the Abbé had to make some conquests of his own. After numerous
affairs, not least with married women, the poet-priest was banished
from Venice. Wandering west across Europe, he arrived in Vienna in
1781 with a letter of introduction to the court composer, Antonio
Salieri, who persuaded the emperor, Joseph II, to appoint Da Ponte
his theatre-poet. Soon he made his name writing libretti for
Salieri and other leading composers.
It was in 1783 that Da Ponte met the young, unemployed and
impoverished composer from Salzburg. Mozart was thrilled to meet
the eminent Abbé, six years his senior. "We have a new poet here,
Abbé da Ponte," he wrote excitedly to his father in Salzburg.
In the wake of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart yearned to
abandon the German tradition for Italian opera. "In opera, the
poetry must be the obedient daughter of the music," he wrote. "The
best thing is when a good composer, who understands the stage
enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true
phoenix."
In Da Ponte, Mozart had met his "true phoenix". On the face of it,
the pair were singularly ill-matched. Beneath his equally playful
exterior, Mozart hid an essential seriousness Da Ponte lacked. Most
of Da Ponte's life so far had been play; all of Mozart's had been
work. By the time the illiterate 14-year-old Da Ponte had been
received into the Catholic church, the seven-year-old Mozart was
already giving concerts, winning awards and writing early
masterpieces.
How ironic, in the light of their respective talents and posthumous
reputations, that the struggling Viennese Mozart should have been
so thrilled to find his "able poet" in the wayward but much
better-known Abbé da Ponte. From such less than kindred spirits,
perhaps, are the greatest artistic partnerships formed. The works
that each wrote with others fall far short of the standards of the
three works they wrote together, which have stood the test of time
as mighty operatic masterpieces. And Da Ponte's poetic skill and
theatrical instincts made an indispensable contribution. Without
his "able poet", Mozart might not have reached the full heights of
which he was capable, in the genre that meant most to him.
Despite Mozart's success with Die Entführung, the emperor's sole
response had been: "Too fine for our ears; and too many notes, my
dear Mozart, too many notes!" - to which the composer's sardonic
reply had been: "Just as many notes, Your Majesty, as are
necessary."
Joseph preferred the less complex music of Salieri, Paisiello and
Martin y Soler, telling the director of his court theatre, Count
Orsini de Rosenberg, that "Mozart's music is much too difficult to
sing". Mozart may not have known of this, but he did know that he
had to write Italian opera to stand a chance of popular success in
Vienna.
The Italian composer Paisiello had recently enjoyed a huge success
with an opera of Beaumarchais's play The Barber of Seville. Now
Mozart persuaded Da Ponte to make a libretto from its sequel, The
Marriage of Figaro. The emperor had banned the play as
"subversive", so they were obliged to work in secret. By November
1785 Da Ponte had delivered a draft to Mozart, who wrote the music
in six weeks. Not until then did the court poet inform the emperor
what he and Mozart had been up to. When Joseph sternly reminded his
poet that the play was banned, Da Ponte assured him that the
process of converting it into an opera had obliged him to shorten
the piece - removing the political content in those scenes that
might give offence. "As to the music," he added, "it is remarkably
beautiful." Once Joseph had discovered this for himself, he
sanctioned Figaro for performance.
It was with this work that opera would come of age. When Da Ponte
was born, Handel reigned supreme; four years after his death,
Wagner would make his debut. Da Ponte and Mozart were the twin
pillars of that crucial transition, transforming opera into an art
form exploring central human issues in a potent, accessible but
above all realistic manner, via characters the audience could
recognise, and with whom they could identify.
Opera buffa was Da Ponte's speciality, Mozart's aspiration. Popular
in Vienna because it encapsulated bourgeois taste rather than
aristocratic pretension, it portrayed people from everyday life
rather than abstract ideals - the man or woman familiar from the
family or the street rather than gods, heroes or classical
archetypes. With different characters of whatever social status
sharing similar views and aspirations, opera buffa reflected the
Enlightenment ideal of the similarity of all human beings,
regardless of birth or rank. As yet, however, it was regarded by
the cognoscenti as an inferior form to seria.
This was soon to be shown up as mere snobbery. But Figaro enjoyed
only nine performances in Vienna before being dropped from the
repertoire. In the second Habsburg city of Prague, however, it
proved a triumph - so much so that Mozart was commissioned to write
another opera, for which Da Ponte suggested a reworking of the old
Don Juan legend. As he set to work on Don Giovanni for Mozart, Da
Ponte was also writing libretti for Salieri and Martin y Soler.
"You won't succeed!" laughed the emperor. "Perhaps not, but I shall
try," he insisted. "In the morning I shall write for Martin, in the
evening for Salieri, and by night for Mozart."
Settling down to his tasks with a bottle of Tokay to his right, an
inkstand in the middle, and a box of Seville tobacco to his left,
he was further distracted by the serving girl, his landlady's
daughter, briefed to supply his every need - including some her
mother had not bargained for. In two months, nonetheless, Da Ponte
delivered his manuscript to Mozart, who set it to music in time for
a triumphant Prague premiere on October 29 1787. Again, the piece
failed in Vienna, where the emperor told Mozart: "The opera is
divine, but it's not food for the teeth of my Viennese."
"We'll give them time to chew it," was Mozart's answer. But the end
of the 1788 season saw the emperor close down the opera - costly
and inappropriate while the nation was at war with the Turks. Faced
with ruin, Da Ponte hatched a plan to keep it going at no cost to
the emperor - who himself commissioned their third collaboration,
Cosi Fan Tutte, one of only two original works among Da Ponte's
50-plus libretti. The role of Fiordiligi was written for his latest
mistress, a singer called Adriana del Bene, better-known as La
Ferrarese.
Joseph II never saw the opera he had commissioned. By its first
night, he already lay dying. As Da Ponte composed an ode in his
memory, jealous enemies at court were busy persuading the new
emperor, Leopold II, that his poet had been plotting against him.
Soon he found himself forbidden entry to the Imperial Theatre, to
see one of his own operas. Within days, as he had been from Venice
10 years before, Da Ponte was banished from Vienna. Kicking his
heels in Trieste, he met a beautiful English-born girl named Nancy
Grahl, whom he promptly married - to the astonishment of all who
knew him. Via a visit to his friend Casanova in Bohemia, the couple
headed for Paris. In Da Ponte's pocket was a letter of introduction
to Marie-Antoinette from her late brother, Joseph.
Casanova saw Da Ponte off with some memorable advice: "Don't go to
Paris, go to London. Once there, never visit the Cafe
degl'Italiani, and never sign your name." When Da Ponte heard of
Marie-Antoinette's imprisonment, he took Casanova's advice and
headed for London. Here, for the next decade, he was poet to the
King's Theatre, Haymarket, now (as Her Majesty's) home to Andrew
Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, then dedicated to Italian
opera. But the gullible Da Ponte fell foul of the theatre's roguish
manager, William Taylor, ignoring Casanova's advice by signing his
name to some business documents. As the scale of Taylor's
mismanagement became clear, Da Ponte was arrested and imprisoned 30
times in three months.
Unable to support his wife and children, he put them on a boat to
America, where Nancy had relatives. After nine more wretched months
in London, he was warned that he again faced arrest for debt. This
time Da Ponte decided to run for it. He did a midnight flit to
Gravesend, where he boarded the Columbia for Philadelphia.
The rest of his life would be spent in the young United States.
After that false start as a grocer, Da Ponte found work as a
teacher of Italian, founding the Manhattan Academy for Young
Gentlemen. Prospering at last, he made it his personal mission to
infuse the new world with a love and knowledge of Italian culture,
particularly music and literature. After a diversion to
Pennsylvania, where he ran a millinery and a distillery, he
returned to New York to become the first professor of Italian in
the United States, at Columbia College (now University), in 1825.
Running a bookshop on the side, Da Ponte presented Columbia and the
New York Public Library with volumes of Italian literature that
form the nucleus of their collections to this day. In 1828, as he
neared 80, he also brought the first Italian opera company to
America, not least for a performance of "his" Don Giovanni. In his
last decade, he built and ran America's first opera house in
Greenwich Village.
On 17 August 1838, five months before his 90th birthday, Da Ponte
died amid his large American family. His original burial place, New
York's Roman Catholic cemetery, was subsumed in 1903 into the
Calvary Cemetery in Queen's. Da Ponte's remains were lost in the
process, but a tombstone was finally erected in 1987 beneath the
jets roaring into JFK.
Da Ponte had proved an archetype of the ideal American immigrant,
contributing as much to his adopted homeland as it had offered him.
But his name will live on as that of Mozart's librettist - and his
poetry will be heard in opera houses all over the world, every
night of every year, for as long as the civilised world turns.
· Anthony Holden's biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, The Man Who Wrote
Mozart, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson for £18.99 on
January 26, the day before the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth
A musical genius? No, Mozart was just a hard-working boy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5365258-119295,00.html
With the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth just weeks away,
the source of his brilliance is being disputed. Alice O'Keeffe
reports
Sunday January 1, 2006
It was Albert Einstein who said that 'as an artist, or a musician,
Mozart was not a man of this world'. Certainly the composer's
extraordinary talents have never been in doubt: he could master a
minuet and trio on the piano in half an hour when he was just four
years old, and he wrote his first opera at the age of 12.
Now, as the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth approaches
this month, one film-maker is setting out to prove that such
astounding achievements were a product more of hard graft than
genius, as has often been assumed.
'I was intrigued by this term "genius", because as far as I can see
it is completely useless,' said Phil Grabsky, director of a new
feature-length documentary, In Search of Mozart, which premieres on
Wednesday at the Barbican Centre in the city of London before being
screened on Channel Five later this month.
'What the characters we sometimes call geniuses have in common is
drive and determination, often good parenting, and the fact that
they are products of the social conditions of their time,' he said.
'All of this was true for Mozart. His talent wasn't simply a gift
from God, it was the result of tremendously hard work.'
The film traces the composer's life and includes interviews with
leading scholars and performers, including Magdelena Kozena and
Renee Fleming. It is the first of the major commemorations
surrounding this year's Mozart anniversary,
Nicholas Kenyon, the author of A Pocket Guide to Mozart, agrees
that the composer's reputation as a genius was created only after
his death. 'This myth tells us a lot about the difference between
the Classical and Romantic ages,' he said. 'Mozart saw himself as a
practical worker. The Romantic composers who succeeded him
perpetuated this idea that he composed thoughtlessly, when all the
evidence is that he wrote and rewrote his work.'
Grabsky's film will reignite the debate over the composer's legacy
initiated by Milos Forman's Oscar-winning 1984 feature film
Amadeus.
'I think many people have the misleading impression, principally
from that very brilliant film, that Mozart was a bawdy,
undisciplined philanderer who occasionally had flashes of genius,'
said Grabsky. 'In fact, he was going to concerts every night,
meeting musicians, listening to other people's work, writing and
rewriting his own. He was very practical about his work, and
entrepreneurial. 'Of course Amadeus was a creative reworking of
Mozart's story. But it had a lasting effect on people.'
According to Charles Hazlewood, presenter of the BBC's 2004 series
The Genius of Mozart, the movie Amadeus put Mozart back at the top
of the musical pantheon alongside Beethoven. 'Before the film was
made an awful lot of people saw his music as charming and naïve
chocolate-box music, whereas in fact it's music with the most
extreme depth,' he said. 'Of course Mozart's achievements were the
combination of extraordinary natural gifts and dedication to his
craft.'
In addition to the academic debate, the anniversary year will be
celebrated with a raft of cultural events celebrating the legacy of
the great composer. Many will take place in his birth city of
Salzburg (renamed 'Schmalzburg' by the cynics), where the summer
festival will include performances of all 22 of Mozart's operas.
The Salzburg Museum will host an exhibition, 'Viva Mozart!', and
the former Kleines Festspielhaus is being transformed into a new
opera house, 'Haus fur Mozart'.
On the composer's birthday, 27 January, international dignitaries
including, reportedly, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
will descend on Austria for two commemorative concerts by the
Vienna Philharmonic orchestra, where works will be played on his
original violin and piano.
Nearly every major event in the country this year will have a
Mozart theme - including the Vienna City Marathon, where costumed
musicians will play soothing music to competitors.
The Mozart souvenir industry, already worth £5.1 million, is going
into overdrive. Products available include Mozart chocolates in
boxes shaped like musical instruments, Mozart milkshakes - even
Mozart knickers and specially-designed spherical sweets called
'Mozartballs'.
In Britain, many of the major concert venues will be hosting Mozart
seasons, including the Barbican centre and the Wigmore Hall. At
Glyndebourne, in Sussex, the National Theatre's Nicholas Hytner
directs his first opera in more than 10 years. Cosi Fan Tutte,
conducted by Ivan Fischer, will open the annual festival in May. In
the US the New York Metropolitan Opera will revive a recent
production of The Magic Flute, while the New York Philharmonic will
stage a three-week tribute series.
Anniversary celebrations planned for 2006
4 January: In Search of Mozart premieres at the Barbican Centre in
London. Shown on Channel Five on 10, 17 and 24 January.
www.insearchofmozart.com
7 January: London's Wigmore Hall's Mozart calendar opens with a
concert by the Classical Opera Company. 020 7844 4440
www.classicalopera.co.uk
20 January: Mozart celebrations in Salzburg get under way.
Highlights include performances by the Vienna Philharmonic.
www.mozarteum.at
27 January: Mozart's birthday celebrated across Europe. In Salzburg
museum the Viva Mozart! exhibition opens. In Vienna, the house
where Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro is opened after
restoration. www.vivamozart.at
27 and 29 January: BBC Radio 3 devotes two days to Mozart's music.
31 January: Le Nozze de Figaro opens at the Royal Opera House in
London. 020 7304 4000 www.roh.org.uk
15, 16 and 16 February: The London Philharmonic Orchestra plays
Mozart at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. 020 7840 4242 www.lpo.org.uk
19 May: Nicholas Hytner's new production of Cosi Fan Tutte opens at
Glyndebourne, Sussex. 01273 813813 www.glyndebourne.com
6 June: The Mostly Mozart season opens at the Barbican. 0845 120
7218 www.barbican.org.uk
A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31essa.html
Essay
By ARTHUR I. MILLER
Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc^2 inspired an outburst of
symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert
Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another
genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago.
There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one
might think.
Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's
"was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the
universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein
believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and
theory lay the music of the spheres which, he wrote, revealed a
"pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws
of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be
plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.
Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which
Einstein attributed his theories.
Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between
their creative processes, as well as their histories.
As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his
emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills
so trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the
house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart's sonatas.
The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, a
friend of Einstein's from high school. "When his violin began to
sing," Mr. Byland told the biographer Carl Seelig, "the walls of
the room seemed to recede for the first time, Mozart in all his
purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure
lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime."
From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss
patent office and doing physics research his "mischief" in his
spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly
Mozart. It was at the core of his creative life.
And just as Mozart's antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein
pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied
indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of
music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist.
He played the violin with passion and often performed at musical
evenings. He enchanted audiences, particularly women, one of whom
gushed that "he had the kind of male beauty that could cause
havoc."
He also empathized with Mozart's ability to continue to compose
magnificent music even in very difficult and impoverished
conditions. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein
was living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult
marriage and money troubles.
That spring he wrote four papers that were destined to change the
course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in
part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries
in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing
theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in
the music of Bach and Mozart.
In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to
the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for
inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.
"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a
difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music,"
recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve
all his difficulties."
In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like
Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.
Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful
theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the
theory's beauty. "Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be
able to escape the charm of this theory," he once said.
The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought
to be. And amazingly, the universe turned out to be pretty much as
Einstein imagined. Its daunting mathematics revealed spectacular
and unexpected phenomena like black holes.
Though a Classical giant, Mozart helped lay groundwork for the
Romantic with its less precise structures. Similarly, Einstein's
theories of relativity completed the era of classical physics and
paved the way for atomic physics and its ambiguities. Like Mozart's
music, Einstein's work is a turning point.
At a 1979 concert for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the
Juilliard Quartet recalled having played for Einstein at his home
in Princeton, N.J. They had taken quartets by Beethoven and Bartok
and two Mozart quintets, said the first violinist, Robert Mann,
whose remarks were recorded by the scholar Harry Woolf.
After playing the Bartok, Mann turned to Einstein. "It would give
us great joy," he said, "to make music with you." Einstein in 1952
no longer had a violin, but the musicians had taken an extra.
Einstein chose Mozart's brooding Quintet in G minor.
"Dr. Einstein hardly referred to the notes on the musical score,"
Mr. Mann recalled, adding, "while his out-of-practice hands were
fragile, his coordination, sense of pitch, and concentration were
awesome."
He seemed to pluck Mozart's melodies out of the air.
Arthur I. Miller, professor of the history and philosophy of
science at University College London, wrote "Empire of the Stars."
TLS: What Mozart and Sid Vicious have in common
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25342-2009588,00.html
Stephen Brown
It is true that one doesn't normally speak
of Mozart and Sid Vicious in the same breath, but they do have this
in common: primitivism. Rock'n'roll began as a primitivist
movement, and it renews itself with mini-primitivisms, of which
punk is just one example. To see Mozart as a primitivist is a
little harder, since his style is so identified with the civilized
and the rational, things we think of as anti-primitive, and yet the
Classical movement in music, like its companion neoclassicism in
art, owed everything to the primitivist desire to begin anew by
stripping away the false and inessential. Écrasez l'infâme. To the
Baroque's heavy sauces, multiple courses, and thickly layered
combinations of tastes and textures, the Classical would propose a
nouvelle cuisine.
Primitivism can take many forms, as many as there are ways of
jettisoning excess baggage in an effort to get back to basics. The
problem is to identify the infamy that must be suppressed, and then
to find the way to crush it. The method that empowered the
Enlightenment was the method of doubt, the Cartesian solution.
Doubt everything until you are left with irreducible truths, and
then build logically and deductively from those axioms,
constructing a new order as you would construct a proof in
geometry. This was the method that imbued Jefferson's thinking: "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness". From such axioms you can build a nation. For
Descartes, it was "Cogito, ergo sum"; for Beethoven,
dah-dah-dah-dum. From those four notes you can generate a symphony.
A formula for producing a convincing Classical piece of music might
look like this: start with an axiomatic idea, one so simple and
basic that it is hard to imagine reducing it further. You're in the
key of C? Then create an outline of a C major chord. (A little more
than half of Mozart's piano sonatas start with an outline of the
home-key chord.) That's a little angular; balance it with a softer
turn of phrase. Now balance those two bars with two other bars.
Where the first two used chords I and V, the balancing phrase could
start with IV and work its way back to I. Now we have four bars
without much flow; balance them with another four bars of running
scales. Keep in mind that everything must be clear and distinct: no
thick textures, just melody and accompaniment. Continue along this
path, follow the rules of sonata form, and you too can create a bad
- but realistic - example of Classical-sounding music.
I recently attended a concert where I heard a lovely performance of
the Concerto for Two Clarinets by Franz Krommer, born in 1759, just
three years after Mozart. It followed the kind of Classical formula
described above and bored me nearly senseless with its
predictability. But I have heard Mozart's Piano Sonata No 11 in A
major (K331), the one that ends with the famous "Rondo alla Turca",
countless times; at one time in my youth I could play the piece
from memory; and even today I do not find it boring. How can
Krommer be boring on a first hearing and Mozart not boring on the
500th?
It might help first to take an excursion into opera, in particular
Don Giovanni, where the dramatic contrasts (unwanted sexual
advances and a duel to the death are followed by broad comedy - Don
Giovanni: I'm here. Leporello: Who's dead, you or the old guy? -
within the first few minutes) disrupt the style's balanced flow.
The danger that Classical-era music runs, that of being swallowed
by its own equanimity, is one that Mozart will avoid, if we let
him. He knew that his music was balanced and rational-sounding, and
could play with the quality as a theatrical effect. In the famous
first-act duet, "Là ci darem la mano", he gives Don Giovanni
perfectly matched, bookend phrases to begin his argument. "Là ci
darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì. Vedi, non è lontano . . . ." The
logic is irrefutable, musically speaking. (This is one of the
reasons Beethoven objected to Don Giovanni. It's not just that he's
a bad character, it's that the music so aids and abets him.)
Zerlina replies with equally balanced phrases, and the duet would
close down quickly were it not for the tail end of her answer,
where she mistrusts him and her melody flies up, unbalancing the
phrase. Don Giovanni comes back with a more forceful line,
conventionally masculine in
Classical-period terms, with wider intervals and angular motion.
Zerlina's response is conventionally feminine, graceful and
turning. Don Giovanni responds more forcefully still. The music
goes back to the top, and the interchange begins to heat up as they
answer on one another's heels until Zerlina's turning motive of
equivocation is repeated three times, each time lower, signalling
her acquiescence and fall. The two of them then chime together:
"Let's go, let's go, to ease the pain of an innocent love" (by
making it a carnal one, is the implication). Don Giovanni says
"Let's go!" again, on his own, to which Zerlina then responds not
with a feminine fall, but with a woman-on-top, rising forte sixth,
"Let's GO!!" - the climax of the piece - before they calm down just
a bit to end in harmony. What began in pure Classical balance ends
with a major reversal. In an attentive production, Don Giovanni
should look a
little taken aback at Zerlina's enthusiasm. Who's seducing whom?
The A Major Piano Sonata is if anything an even better illustration
of rescue-from-equanimity. The first movement is a theme with
variations, and the theme itself (modelled on a folk song) sits
precisely under the hand, a note for each of the five fingers,
pivoting on the C sharp under the middle finger: the epitome of
equipoise. The left hand accompanies a tenth below. In between, a
middle voice adds a pedal tone on the dominant, marking the beat.
At the beginning of the theme's second part, the melody pushes up a
third, hinting at a more lyrical flight, but then comes dancing
quickly down and returns to the opening phrases; a few notes are
marked sforzando away from strong beats; and there is a short
two-bar tag. These are the only elements that push away from
symmetry; otherwise the mood is all luxe et calme. This is
misleading. What follows is full of event, often expanding on those
few asymmetric elements.
The first variation opens with a fragmented and stuttering, though
still quiet and graceful, rhythm, which is then interrupted with
drum-like patterns in the left hand. (This is the first instance of
the Turkish March seeming to want to force its way early onto the
stage.) The second variation, though more conventional, continues
the tendency to bifurcate moods. A triplet pattern underpins it,
but when that rhythm migrates to the right hand, the left hand
starts a series of crushed notes that turn the piano into a
de-tuned percussion instrument. The third variation - to my mind
the most beautiful - moves to A minor. Instead of balanced periods,
it consists of an unbroken stream of sixteenth-notes, almost a
perpetuum mobile, the melody's circular patterns giving it - at
least in context - a distinctly Middle Eastern flavour. The second
half of this variation begins with a lyrical leap that owes nothing
to Turkey; it's just one of those heart-stopping moments of beauty
that Mozart occasionally tosses us without allowing us much time to
savour it. Variation IV is by far the most conventional, with some
hand-crossing which I suspect was the kind of showmanship Mozart
used to exhibit as an eight-year-old when his father, on their trip
to England, had him playing variations at 2s 6d per ticket every
afternoon at the Swan and Hoop, Cornhill. The Adagio that follows
is the least Classical of the variations, even though it begins
with the signature Classical accompaniment, a clockwork Alberti
bass. That pattern stops abruptly to shift into repeated drumbeats
and scales. Classical composers liked isorhythm: once a rhythmic
pattern is established (like Beethoven's groups of four in the
Fifth Symphony) they tend to stick with it. But this variation
never settles into a pattern; instead it uses every kind of
duration from quaver to hemi-demi-semi-quaver. The result is a
movement-within-a-movement that leaves us unsettled, and ready for
the certainty of the concluding variation, where the martial
impetus comes back with great rolled chords in the bass forecasting
those coming up in the Turkish March. Like Zerlina and Don
Giovanni, we have come a long way from the initial calm of the
opening theme. And yet there is not a note that does not seem the
logical consequence of whatever preceded it.
It may be a little late for this question, but: what are we really
talking about? I chose the examples above because they are familiar
ones; there seemed a reasonable chance that a reader could call
them to mind. Even if this is so (and I have to admit that as
familiar as the "Elvira Madigan" piano concerto is, I can never
remember how it goes unless I actually hear it), the experience we
share isn't exactly the same: it's a memory, and each person's
memory is an amalgam of different hearings, differently remembered.
So we are like viewers in an imaginary art gallery, where I am that
irritating person saying "Notice how the use of impasto . . .",
except that there is no object in front of us, rather some kind of
abstracted performance ideal, whose very existence is one of those
wholly Western assumptions that the critic Christopher Small,
something of a primitivist himself, urges us to jettison, at least
in trying to understand a wider panoply of musical cultures. He is
surely right to suggest that "the idea of a musical composition as
having an abstract existence apart from the performer and the
performance, to which the performer aspires to present as close an
approximation as he can" - this from his 1977
Music-Society-Education - is, from a world-historical perspective,
an aberration. He goes on to question other basic things, like the
common notion that music is communication. Small, I think, reacts
against the Romantic sense of an individual genius communicating to
a receptive (and passive) audience. Nevertheless, I believe that
there is value still in the old "abstracted performance ideal" and
that something is being communicated by it, and that the central
question remains the one Robert Browning asks in "A Toccata of
Galuppi's": "Told them something?"
The dark star of Romanticism, the gravitational lens of which
distorts our view of everything close to it, is the great falsifier
of the Classical style. You might think that a Romantic
interpretation of Mozart would exaggerate his dramatic contrasts,
making him one of them. Not at all. Romanticism - and here I refer
not so much to the Romantic movement itself as to that decadent
derivative which continues to flow so strongly through our culture
- reserved that kind of falsifying for his life (and it will be
interesting to see, in the year of his 250th birthday,
if those legends have finally been put to rest) while finding in
his music an excuse for one of those favourite Romantic emotions,
nostalgia for a golden age. Romanticism needed an Age of Innocence
and needed Mozart to be its voice - in this it aligned itself to
the image pushed by his father, Leopold - which was that of a
perpetual child who receives glorious musical messages from Heaven,
each note of which deserves reverence and treasuring.
This was surely not true for Mozart's contemporary listeners. They,
like Galuppi's audience of Venetian socialites, or the Sex Pistols'
roomful of jumping teens, may not have cared to look into the
artist's soul in what would become the Romantic habit, but they did
participate in a shared vision of the world. In this case, it was a
world based on comprehensible principles,
ultimately subject to understanding rather than mystery, in whose
exploration one would encounter alarms and excursions and every
sort of emotion, but also delight, amazement, and moments of
heart-stopping beauty.
The TLS - Letters to the Editor
http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25390-2020281,00.html
6.2.1 (only this one letter included)
Mozart and the human heart
Sir, - With the admirable intention of challenging stereotypical
descriptions of Mozart's music ("Mozart, Classical form, and the
rescue from equanimity", Arts, January 27), Stephen Brown sets up a
thesis which his own subsequent analyses seem unintentionally to
demolish. Mozart's music operates not by simplification,
primitivism or any stripped-down "back to basics" strategy, but by
interrogation and complication. Brown himself demonstrates this
when he describes being bored by the predictability of a concerto
by Mozart's minor contemporary, Franz Krommer. I don't know
Krommer's work. But I have heard and played music by similar
composers. This kind of music is given to piano students for
"technical exercises" and most of it perfectly illustrates the
"back to basics" attitude to composition. The suspicion arises that
Brown's definitions of musical Baroque and Classical may be
over-influenced by the other artistic disciplines - architecture,
for example.
Mozart's classicism is highly unclassical. What he does, and what
Brown actually demonstrates in writing so beautifully about the
Variations in the A major piano sonata (K331) and the aria "La ci
darem la mano", is to take a relatively simple human emotion
(expressed, in both cases, I believe, through a folk-based melody)
and develop it though a wonderfully original rhetoric of
contradiction and resolution. Mozart is not a Romantic, but he is
close on the heels of that movement. In fact, he writes a kind of
programme music, his programme being what used to be called "the
human heart". Doubt is one of the powers of the Enlightenment, as
Brown says, and Mozart gives us doubt at a deeply emotional level.
This can be politically radical in effect: it leads him in his
operatic writing to ascribe full human complexity to minorities,
servants, women. Jane Glover (writing about Die Entführung aus dem
Serail in Mozart's Women) lists other Enlightenment values, namely
"courage, reconciliation and forgiveness". This arc suggests a
further moral "programme" - explicit in most of the operas,
implicit in much of the instrumental music.
Again, Mozart complicates the moral quest with human intricacy.
Perhaps Don Giovanni is the ultimate expression of this
complication - since here the concept of forgiveness is so roundly
and terrifyingly challenged by that of revenge.
Yes, Mozart disturbs us radically, and asks unanswerable questions
(and of course he delights us and cheeks us and makes us laugh).
But it is more in the manner of the novelist than the punk rocker.
He is closer to Zadie Smith than to Sid Vicious.
CAROL RUMENS
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
Larkin Building, University of Hull, Hull.
My problem with Mozart
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5372702-117421,00.html
His operas are wonderful to sing, says Ian Bostridge. But why do
the tenors always get such short shrift?
Ian Bostridge
Friday January 13, 2006
All over the world, opera houses, concert halls and professional
and amateur musicians are celebrating Mozart: this month marks 250
years since his birth. Particularly ambitious is the Salzburg
festival's plan to perform every one of his operas over a single
summer season. As a classical singer I am, inevitably, making my
own modest contribution to the celebrations: singing Mozart arias
in a recital in Hamburg, and appearing in a production of Don
Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera. I don't perform a great deal of
opera but, having the sort of tenor voice that suits Mozart rather
than Verdi, the former figures largely in my career as a theatrical
performer.
But there is a problem with Mozart, one I readdress every time I
sing in one of his operas. It has been said - often - that Mozart
tenor roles are boring.
This is an opinion that I am anxious, for obvious reasons, to
rebut. However, the evidence to support it is easy to find: when do
people get bored in the Marriage of Figaro, otherwise one of the
most miraculously satisfying works in the western canon? When the
irritating minor character Basilio, a small-town Machiavelli of a
singing teacher, insists on singing his aria in the final act,
delaying the denouement and spoiling the fun. He is (unfortunately
for me) a tenor.
It's the same in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the opera Mozart
wrote immediately before Figaro. Belmonte, the tenor hero, has a
wealth of gorgeous music lavished on him. His three beautiful arias
are, however, one, perhaps two, too many for the dramatic
structure. Wenn der Freude Tränen Fließen and Ich Baue Ganz
interrupt the action and are dramatically inert. While technically
challenging, their difficulties are meant to be hidden by the
accomplished singer, so that people will only notice if they are
sung badly. They do not embody struggle in the way Constanze's
bravura aria Martern Aller Arten does; many aficionados will come
to the opera just to hear the dramatic intensity offered by
Constanze's vocal martyrdom. The tension and psychological realism
of Belmonte's famous first aria, O, Wie Ängstlich, the ardour of
the reunion quartet, the painful rapture of the Belmonte/Constanze
duet as they confront death towards the end of the opera - these
are, for me, the moments of Belmonte's that live most intensely,
both when singing and when listening to the piece. It takes
resolute cutting and cunning direction to rescue Belmonte from
being a tiresome goody-goody or a self-satisfied prig.
But it's Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni who is the most revealing
example of my problem with Mozart. Critics and audiences alike
complain of his passivity. He stands as the virtuous and
ineffective opposition to Giovanni's demonic life force, and is
bound to suffer in comparison. But in fact, act one makes sense for
Ottavio in terms of storytelling and dramatic pace. His duet with
Donna Anna after her father's murder by Giovanni is powerful and
affecting; the aria Dalla Sua Pace is a touching and economical
moment of stasis, theatrically highly effective.
It is the second-act aria, Il Mio Tesoro - a piece of exquisite
time-wasting - that can do for Don Ottavio. This is an aria that
explicitly admits it is holding up the action. "Meanwhile, go and
console my beloved," Ottavio sings as he prepares to alert the
authorities to Giovanni's miscreancy. It sounds like a beautiful
and irrelevant serenade, and it has had, rather revealingly, a
healthy life as a concert aria without dramatic context.
In fact, Mozart only ever intended Ottavio to have one aria. Il Mio
Tesoro was written for the original Prague production, Dalla Sua
Pace as part of the revision for a subsequent run in Vienna. This
is often presented as a matter of horses for courses - different
sorts of aria for different singers. But it was also, evidently, a
case of second thoughts being better than first. Without Il Mio
Tesoro, Ottavio disappears rather in act two, but that is in the
nature of the plot, which focuses at that stage on Don Giovanni's
supernatural comeuppance.
It's no use worrying that Don Ottavio in his delayed vengeance
isn't fleshed out into a operatic Hamlet surrogate. Act one's drama
and tenderness and the extraordinary ensembles in both acts should
be enough for any tenor. The problem is that many contemporary
productions, anxious to placate an underused singer or maximise the
use of an expensive tenor, encourage the singer to do both arias.
Being one of the tenors all too eager to be placated - if I'm
offered a lovely aria to sing, who am I to refuse? - I can't really
complain. More beautiful music, less effective drama: it's a
commonplace operatic dilemma.
Don Ottavio's inadequacies have been explained as those of an opera
seria character inhabiting a dramma giocoso - a character from the
old form inhabiting the new. Yet it strikes me that of all the
Mozart roles I have sung, the most satisfying is the title role in
a so-called opera seria: Idomeneo, the earliest opera of Mozart's
to enter the repertoire. Idomeneo's arias always seem to emerge
from the drama, to amplify and intensify it, aided by the brilliant
accompanied recitatives that precede them and weave them into the
musical-dramatic structure.
Eighteenth-century operas on heroic subjects, mythical or
classical, are sometimes seen as the antithesis of Romanticism in
music, bound as they are by the rules of classical drama, formal
and restrained. This is certainly the world Don Ottavio comes from.
Sitting in Milan's La Scala last month, however, listening to
Daniel Harding's triumphant debut conducting Idomeneo, I was
struck, despite the anti-Romanticism of Harding's approach in terms
of sonority and texture, by the utter Romanticism of the piece. The
great, passionate, intense sweep of music that is the first act,
from the overture to Idamante's recognition of his long-lost but
forbidding father, is Romantic in conception and, like the plays of
Shelley or Byron, impossible to represent fully on stage. It is
shattering music of the mind, psychological and intense.
In a peculiar sense, despite the ritual and ceremony of this grand
opera seria, it's much nearer the inner dramatic world of Schubert
or Schumann. For all the beauties of Mozart's more mature stage
works - and Don Giovanni remains an extraordinary piece of music
theatre in which to participate, even if you're playing its least
interesting character - Idomeneo remains the most satisfying to
perform for a tenor, from a selfish point of view at least. It was
Mozart's favourite among his operas, too, no doubt as much for what
it tries to do as for what it actually achieves.
Ian Bostridge will perform the role of Don
Ottavio in Vienna State Opera's production of Don Giovanni on
January 18, 20 and 22. His recital of Mozart Arias is at
Laeiszhalle Hamburg on January 26
Hearing a voice of God in Mozart - baltimoresun.com
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/custom/aetoday/bal-ae.mozart22,1,7120823.story?coll=bal-aetoday-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true
Some dispute the composers genius, but most cannot
By Tim Smith
Sun Music Critic
Originally published January 22, 2006
Soave il vento ... Maybe the wind be gentle, the waves calm ...
To understand the genius and ineffable artistry of Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, this week's 250th birthday boy, you need only hear about
three minutes -- the time it takes to listen to the Trio from Cosi
fan tutte, his mostly comic opera about love, fidelity,
expectations (realistic and unrealistic), sex and the sexes.
The Trio is sung in the first act by the somewhat silly, but
everso- charming ladies Dorabella and Fiordiligi and the
worldlywise Don Alfonso. He has just convinced their grooms-to-be
to play a dirty trick on the women, pretending to go off to war,
but returning in disguise, each to try seducing the other's
supposedly fidelity-hardened fiancee.
Up to this point in the opera, Dorabella and Fiordiligi come off as
one-dimensional, 18th century Valley Girls, but when they see their
intended ones sailing off, they are moved to offer a prayer for
safe journey, with the cynical Don Alfonso chiming in, however
insincerely, to make it a trio.
Suddenly, the women don't seem so superficial.The Trio opens up a
little window into the genuine warmth of their hearts.
We probably shouldn't believe a note of Don Alfonso's contribution,
since we already know his low opinion of female constancy, but
there's nothing snide in the melodic line he sings. Maybe it's just
Mozart's way of helping Don Alfonso keep up the pretense and a
straight face, but, just maybe, it's also a way to let us see a
little sentiment in his heart, too.
As the strings in the orchestra set up a serene rolling pattern for
accompaniment, the vocal lines rise and fall, blending seamlessly
into an aural fabric that is as elegant as it is eloquent. The
effect is time-stopping, timeless. All that insight, all that
musical perfection in a mere three minutes.
With music like this, the word "beautiful" becomes a pathetically
inadequate description.
Such music easily explains why Mozart holds the highest place in
the pantheon of classical composers, and why the 250th anniversary
of his birth -- Jan. 27, 1756 -- deserves all the attention it is
getting worldwide.
Are we making too much of the guy? The inevitably (in this case,
possibly insanely) provocative author Norman Lebrecht thinks so. In
an article last month for the Web site of La Scena Musicale, a
nonprofit organization avowedly in the business of promoting
classical music, Lebrecht wrote:
"Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has
nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him
rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught ... Mozart wrote a little
night music for the ancien regime. He was not so much reactionary
as regressive, a composer content to keep music in a state of
servility so long as it kept him well supplied with frilled cuffs
and fancy quills.Little in such a mediocre life gives cause for
celebration."
Lebrecht isn't the first to take leave of his senses.
Glenn Gould, the stunningly original pianist, once declared:
"Mozart was a bad composer who died too late rather than too
early."
Astonishing variety
It's always good to consider second opinions, of course, to
challenge one's core beliefs and values. But what do we ignore of
all the evidence? Not just the fact that Mozart continues to be so
incredibly popular, but that his music invariably repays attention
by revealing fresh details and expressive possibilities.
To dismiss this music because it came out of the bewigged,
minuet-propelled ambience of 18th-century society or because of its
unflappable classicism, restraint, symmetry and comfortableness is
as absurd as declaring Vermeer a bore because he painted such
pretty, perfectly organized pictures and wasn't as groundbreaking
as Rembrandt.
Within the stylistic conventions of Mozart's day, which he didn't
push against the way Beethoven would, there is nonetheless an
astonishing degree of variety and inventiveness. And something more
-- soul.
The best moment in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, which is full of
fictional and factual silliness (Mozart really did have a curious
fixation on scatological functions and could act pretty
childishly), may be when the exalted composer Antonio Salieri comes
ear to ear with the truth that he won't be exalted for long.
Listening half-heartedly to Mozart's Serenade for Winds, K. 361,
something in the slow movement gives him pause.
"On the page it looked nothing," Salieri says."The beginning
simple,almost comic ...Then suddenly -- high above it -- an oboe, a
single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over
and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight. This was no
composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I'd never
heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had
me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God."
'The divine instinct'
That might be poetic license, but other musicians really did
express such sentiments.
Edvard Grieg: "In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally
the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine
instinct."
Conductor Georg Solti: "Mozart makes you believe in God -- much
more than going to church -- because it cannot be by chance that
such a phenomenon arrives into this world and then passes after [35
years], leaving behind such an unbounded number of unparalleled
masterpieces."
You don't have to buy the Solti theory of intelligent design to
accept the supremacy of Mozart, who excelled in every musical genre
he attempted -- sonatas, chamber works, concertos, symphonies,
choral works, operas. Even with a little healthy skepticism about
proclaimed geniuses and icons of high art is fine, it would take an
awful lot of effort to dismiss this one.
Consider the perfectly judged sparkle of The Marriage of Figaro
Overture, or the never overplayed heartache of the Countess' aria,
Dove Sono, in that opera. The surprisingly dark, troubled energy of
the first movements of Symphony No. 25 and No. 40. The understated
melancholy of the Adagio in Piano Concerto No. 23.
The fugal exhilaration of the Jupiter Symphony's finale. The
profoundly serene,impossibly beautiful Ave verum corpus. The slow,
steady tread and heart-ripping intensity of the Lacrimosa section
in his unfinished Requiem.
Such utterances -- hundreds more are equally persuasive -- could
never have come from a mediocrity, cannot be mistaken for musical
wallpaper. If Mozart is thought of as easy listening, that's our
fault, not his. Haydn, who recognized Mozart's "divine instinct"
early on, said: "The world will not see such talent again for a
hundred years."
Or 250.
MOZART'S EFFECTS
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/music/13674461.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
By Richard Scheinin
Mercury News
Dan Leeson is touring a visitor through the downstairs rooms of his
home on the Peninsula, removing items from shelves and holding them
up like trophies. It seems they once may have belonged to Mozart
and his father Leopold.
``Oh, here's the belt from the saint!'' Leeson says, shaking a
beat-up leather coil from a plastic bag. ``And here's a book of old
Dutch songs,'' he says, grabbing a weathered, leather-bound volume
from the 18th century. He lays it on his kitchen counter. But
flipping through its pages, beautifully illustrated, he dismisses
it as ``not worth mentioning.''
That's because Leeson, 74, a widely known Mozart scholar who used
to play clarinet in the San Jose Symphony, has stumbled upon two
large chests full of goods: paintings, coins, house keys, a ring
with a dozen rose-cut diamonds, an engraved Masonic sword, even,
apparently, saints' possessions, sold by churches as a source of
revenue in Leopold Mozart's time.
If Leeson's hunch is correct -- and his hunch is based on thousands
of hours of study -- these items come from the world's largest
cache of Mozart-related objects, only now coming to light. When he
first saw the trove early in 2004, he says, ``I was unable to
move.''
Historians long have known that Leopold Mozart made a fortune by
touring his children, Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl, both musical
prodigies, through the royal courts of Europe in the 1760s. They
long have known that Leopold mailed boxes of gifts from nobility
back to Salzburg for storage by his landlord, a spice merchant
named Johann Lorenz Hagenauer.
But no one ever knew what became of these treasures -- until, quite
possibly, now, as the world gets ready to celebrate Mozart's 250th
birthday on Friday.
With any ``discovery'' of this kind, there is bound to be
disagreement. In past years, ``authentic'' Haydn sonatas were found
to have been forged. Earlier this month, a much-publicized
investigation into the supposed discovery of Mozart's skull ran
dry. Some scholars who know Leeson and respect his work, including
Christoph Wolff, a Mozart expert at Harvard, still urge caution,
saying Leeson's theories about the objects are plausible but far
from proven.
``There is no question that some of the material in the cache is
authentic,'' says Wolff, who hopes to see a wider investigation of
the objects. Neal Zaslaw, a Mozart expert at Cornell University,
says, ``It seems that the cache is a mixture of things, some
authentic . . . others not.''
Most likely, the debate over the cache will evolve over time, with
additional scholars performing their own independent studies and
staking out their own particular positions. Eventually, a consensus
could be reached. For now, though, Leeson's work is certainly
catching the attention of others in the field.
It's the kind of work that ``would get a lot of hearts racing,''
says Cliff Eisen, a Mozart scholar at King's College London. He is
``quite convinced,'' he says, ``that a large part of the cache is
authentic and Dan's case for most of it strikes me as impeccable.''
Working for an anonymous client who bought the two chests from a
street vendor somewhere in Italy in late 2003, Leeson has spent
nearly two years studying the objects. At first, he tried proving
to himself that they had nothing at all to do with Mozart and his
family, but then, gradually, he began assembling a tightly
cross-hatched body of circumstantial evidence suggesting the
opposite.
And while Leeson is careful to agree that ``we are certain of
nothing,'' he also is clearly amazed that the trove could be
everything he now thinks it is.
``There's no precedent for things like this,'' he says, still a
little baffled by events. ``In the entire 215 years since Mozart
died, probably no more than a dozen relics of his life have
survived. In the entire world,'' he reiterates, ``there are maybe
12 to 15 objects, other than manuscripts and portraits, that are
associated with him, and here -- bang! -- 20 to 25 objects.''
Leeson is a natural raconteur with a way of speaking that comes
from a more innocent time: ``Those kids were gangbusters,'' he
says, describing the keyboard skills of Mozart and Nannerl.
Or, mentioning what he believes to be Leopold Mozart's Masonic
sword, his eyes light up: ``You wanna see it?'' he asks. He heads
off to the living room, saying, ``Pardon me, while I get my sword,
like Tyrone Power!'' He gestures, as if removing a saber from its
scabbard.
Exciting as the chests full of goodies are, there are no plans to
exhibit the objects locally, though Leeson says he wouldn't oppose
a public showing. In the fall, he gave a talk on his discoveries at
Salzburg's Mozarteum, the central institute for the study of Mozart
in the world, where about 15 of the objects were displayed in
December. Researchers there are continuing to look into the
authenticity of the objects and are discreetly mum about their
progress.
``Scrupulous studies are required,'' says Ulrich Leisinger, the
Mozarteum's director of research, adding, ``We take the claim
seriously, but I need sufficient time to do independent research.''
During his visit to the Mozarteum, Leeson says, one of its officers
was more than a little interested in one of the objects, a highly
unusual tortoise-shell snuffbox, circular and gold-ringed and
exquisitely painted with a portrait of hounds.
Leeson says the panelist was ``speechless'' upon seeing it: ``He
must have looked at it for five minutes, holding up everyone else
who wanted to see and touch it.'' When Leeson mentioned that San
Francisco appraisers had put a value of $1,500-$2,000 on the
1760s-era box, the panelist said, ``you can add two zeroes.''
Leeson, to put it succinctly, is a Mozart freak. Raised in
Paterson, N.J., he was smitten with the composer when a grade
school teacher taught a song from ``The Magic Flute'' to his class.
Leeson later wrote a short story about falling for Mozart, called
``Paterson Epiphany.''
He took up the clarinet at eight or nine. After moving to Silicon
Valley with his wife Rosanne in 1976, he played bass clarinet in
the San Jose Symphony for 20 years while also playing the basset
horn with orchestras around the country. An authority on the
history of computing, he worked for years as an IBM marketing
executive and later taught mathematics at DeAnza College.
His shelf-full of writings on Mozart includes a journal article
entitled ``Mozart and Mathematics'' and a book on the story behind
Mozart's unfinished Requiem. Leeson also is the coeditor of one of
the more than 110 volumes of the authoritative Complete New Mozart
Edition, which includes all the composer's works and commentaries
thereon.
Detective work
Given this background, it isn't surprising that Cornell's Zaslaw
referred the buyer of the chests to Leeson in 2004. Leeson
immediately set to work.
Suspecting that a painting of a young girl dressed in 1760s-style
clothing and headdress was Nannerl, of whom few images exist, he
flipped it over and discovered the monograph ``JZ.'' These are the
initials of a German-born, 18th-century painter in London named
John Zoffany, an acquaintance of Leopold Mozart.
Zoffany often is credited with having painted a famous portrait
titled ``Mozart with a Bird's Nest,'' of the composer as a boy. And
he easily could have painted the portrait of Nannerl (``Young Girl
at Chocolate'') inasmuch as she, her brother and parents lived in
London from April 1764 to August 1765. This was during their
``Grand Tour'' of European cities, from Germany to Belgium to
France to England and the Netherlands between 1763 and 1766.
Nannerl appears to be about 12 or 13 in the painting, which is how
old she really was while in London.
Leeson applied more detective work to a painting called ``Boy in
the Red Coat,'' which plays an important role in this story. Not
long after purchasing the two chests, the buyer showed this
painting to an antiques dealer who said, ``You know, that looks
kind of like Mozart,'' and suggested taking the painting and
everything else in the chests to a Mozart specialist.
``Stand still and I'll show you the original,'' Leeson announces in
his living room, lifting ``Boy in the Red Coat'' out of a set of
bed-sheets, its protective wrapping. ``Let's talk about this
painting. I've shown it to eight or nine people; five or six are
certain it's Mozart. But two or three very talented people said,
`Baloney.' ''
The youth in the portrait appears to be about 10. Mozart, born in
1756, would have been about that age in 1766, the year Leeson
surmises the picture was painted, as the tour came to an end. The
initials ``WGM'' on the back of the frame could stand for Wolfgang
Gotlieb Mozart, the composer's baptismal name, ``Amadeus'' being a
later, fancy add-on. And the presence of the livery-style red
jacket -- worn by Mozart in other portraits -- may be important,
because it symbolizes the position of kappellmeister (the conductor
of a choir or orchestra), a job for which Mozart seemed headed.
Now Leeson is ready to try to explain the bigger story of the
chests and their contents.
``Leopold was not a rich guy,'' he begins. But Mozart's father
became one by putting his children on tour in front of wealthy,
adoring audiences. Maynard Solomon, one of Mozart's many
biographers, has written that Leopold's profit from the Grand Tour
was ``between 12,500 and 16,500 florins -- more than 50 times his
annual salary, and a substantial fortune in a country where 500 to
1,000 florins was a very comfortable annual salary.''
Repaying sponsor
Leopold wrote dozens of letters mentioning that he sent substantial
gifts back to Hagenauer, his Salzburg landlord and the tour's
financial backer. These gifts, Leeson figures, were packed in boxes
and crates and stored in the attic at 9 Getreidegasse, where the
Mozarts lived, as did Hagenauer, whose family spice business was on
the ground floor.
The gifts were substantial: ``gold pocket watches . . . gold
snuffboxes . . . gold rings set with the most handsome precious
stones . . . earrings for the girl, necklaces, knives with golden
blades . . . without number and without end . . . It is just like
inspecting a church treasury,'' wrote Father Beda Hübner, a
Salzburg church librarian at the time.
Leeson figures that upon returning to Salzburg, Leopold and
Hagenauer must have settled accounts; Leopold would have sold some
of the gifts to raise cash to repay his backer. Others, for unknown
reasons, likely remained in the attic, even after the Mozarts
changed lodgings. Leeson likens the problem of cleaning the place
out to clearing out a modern garage filled with family possessions.
Finally, in 1831, nearly 40 years after Hagenauer's death, the
house on Getreidegasse was sold and its contents shipped, lock,
stock and barrel, to Trieste where a branch of the family business
had been established.
Leeson's love of genealogy now kicks in: He figures that
Hagenauer's grandson Josef kept the treasures, which were passed on
to his son, Ignaz, and then to his son, Pyrrhus. Next, in 1912,
Pyrrhus married a countess named Carlotta Locatelli and later moved
into her palazzo in the town of Cormons, not far from Trieste.
It is documented that the couple established the
Locatelli-Hagenauer Archives at the palazzo around 1920; no listing
of its inventory has been found, but many of the items in the two
chests have inventory stickers on their backs. Leeson says, ``The
Mozart and Hagenauer stuff must have been there in the archives.''
He throws out a seemingly inconsequential fact: Pyrrhus, an
ex-cavalry officer, was an accomplished horseman, owner of a black
pureblood which he deeply mourned after the animal's death.
The horseshoe clue
Now fast forward to 1951: ``It's six years after World War II,
Italy is a battered country,'' Leeson says, ``and the archives
disappeared. The entire collection, gone, sold -- and sold all over
the place, in pieces, I suspect. The details are unknown. And then,
in 2003, my client made this purchase. So we've got this gap of 50
years. How do we know that this stuff comes from the archives?''
Leeson asks, then answers himself: ``God love this horseshoe.''
It's one more item from the chests.
Pyrrhus's horseshoe! A ``piece of junk,'' Leeson says. But it could
be the proverbial nail in the coffin -- or, in this scenario, the
nail in the storage chest. To Leeson, it's one more sign that
Mozart's world somehow has landed in his living room.
``It is the most important item in the collection because it
connects the wares that my client bought on the streets of Italy
directly back to Hagenauer and 9 Getreidegasse.
``It's an incredible story,'' he says. ``I sometimes cannot believe
that it happened. This kind of thing is not supposed to fall out of
the sky. But it did.''
What they found
Dan Leeson, who lives on the Peninsula, has studied a newly
discovered cache of artifacts that may have passed through the
hands of Mozart, his father and sister and Johann Lorenz Hagenauer,
their landlord in the Austrian city of Salzburg. It includes
paintings, miniature portraits, coins, medals, books, diamond
jewelry, a sword, snuffboxes, playing cards and even a saint's
belt, apparently purchased at a church by Leopold Mozart, the
composer's father, during a grand tour of Europe in 1763-66. Some
of the items:
Paintings including ``Boy in the Red Coat,'' thought to be of
Wolfgang Mozart at age 8-10; a portrait of a man in a red coat,
believed to be Mozart in profile, age 28-32; a portrait of a woman
believed to be Mozart's mother; ``Young Girl at Chocolate,'' of a
young girl thought to be Nannerl Mozart, the composer's sister, age
12-14; a portrait of a young woman, perhaps Nannerl Mozart at about
14-16; and a portrait believed to be of Hagenauer at about 65
Three small portraits of Hagenauer (including one commemorating his
50th wedding anniversary in 1788; another, after his death, may
have been worn by his wife as a mourning pin)
Miniature portraits of Madame Du Barry, mistress of Louis XV (she
may have given it to Mozart or his sister during their grand tour
of Europe) and of Frederick the Great
Two large house keys, possibly to the front and rear doors of 9
Getreidegasse, the building in Salzburg where Mozart lived as a boy
with his family (the keys can't be tested; the locks were changed
in the 19th century)
Saint's relics probably owned by Leopold Mozart
A small religious statue with ``Mozart'' carved into its base,
thought to have been carved by the composer
A ceremonial Masonic sword possibly owned by Leopold Mozart, a
master Mason, and given to Hagenauer
A printed French military book believed to have been a gift to
Leopold Mozart from Prince Louis de Condé
Playing cards possibly owned by Hagenauer, an inveterate card
player
A Protestant Bible printed in 1753, owned by Hagenauer, a Catholic
A ring with 11 rose-cut diamonds, possibly worn by Hagenauer's wife
(who had 11 children)
A painted tortoiseshell snuffbox
To contact Leeson for more information about the cache:
dnleeson@sbc global.net
______________________________________________________________
Contact Richard Scheinin at rsch...@mercurynews.com or (408)
920-5069.
The great magician Mozart was born 250 years ago, and we still don't
know how he did his tricks
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/23/DDG5PGQKRA1.DTL
San Francisco Chronicle
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Monday, January 23, 2006
The life stories of great artists are irresistible because they're
the only clues we have about the mystery of creativity and its
wildly diverse ways. How is it that an ordinary mortal can walk
into a room and come out with the B-Minor Mass or "Anna Karenina"?
Surely, we think, the biography will offer a hint.
In this regard, there may be no composer whose biography is more
irresistible -- or less useful -- than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Friday marks Mozart's 250th birthday, and so the year will bring
yet another of the periodic onslaughts with which the music
industry observes landmark years. Orchestras, opera companies and
chamber groups will fall all over themselves trying to find new
ways of packaging the masterpieces that already form a core part of
their repertoire.
Attempts will be made, as they were in 1991 on the bicentennial of
Mozart's death, to traverse his entire output -- from the little
keyboard pieces he produced as a 6-year-old (listed as No. 1 in the
chronological catalog of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel) to the final
uncompleted Requiem, with all stops in between. New biographies
will be published and old ones reprinted.
For most music lovers, all of this promises to be a magnificent and
slightly overwhelming feast -- a chance to revisit the old
favorites and perhaps to discover some new ones or at least to hear
them in a new light.
But the central conundrum will remain: Who was this guy, and how
did he do what he did? How is it possible that a mere human being
could have created music of such unearthly beauty and emotional
profundity, and apparently (though this point may be overstated)
done it with such effortless facility?
Mozart's life helps a little, but not much. He spent his childhood
years as a combination prodigy and freak show, carted around Europe
with his father and sister to dazzle the aristocracy with his
ability to perform and improvise on the keyboard and violin. One
result of this, surely, was the cultivation of his powers to
entertain; another was his later impatience with listeners unable
to grasp the scope of his achievement.
That impatience only grew during his years as an employee of the
archbishop of Salzburg, a period during which he felt constrained
by the limitations of his provincial hometown. After moving to
Vienna in 1781, he struggled to find and keep a steady job, the
victim not only of his own political shortcomings but also of the
shifting economic and sociological landscape in European musical
life. He died 10 years later, at 35, of a mysterious illness whose
exact identity scholars are still debating (the leading contender
is rheumatic fever).
It's possible to identify some concrete links between Mozart's life
and the music he wrote, but they're mostly matters of style or
artistic technique. The most telling, for instance, was his belated
discovery of the music of Bach, which sent him into a frenzy of
study and self-improvement in an effort to integrate the older
composer's contrapuntal techniques into his music.
And like any composer, his output was shaped by economic dictates.
He wrote piano concertos prolifically -- practically creating the
genre as we know it -- while he was trying to establish a career in
Vienna as a public virtuoso, then gave them up when that effort
foundered.
But the connections that biographers draw, often simplistically,
between an artist's daily and creative lives are hard to spot in
Mozart's case. He didn't write turbulent music when his life was in
turmoil, or impassioned music when he was in love. He composed just
as regularly and as variously in good times and bad.
All of this has the effect of making him seem a somewhat remote
figure, one whose essential humanity has to be inferred, like the
attributes of subatomic particles, rather than observed directly.
The mathematician Mark Kac, in describing the visionary physicist
Richard Feynman, identified two types of geniuses: the ordinary
kind and what he called the "magicians."
"An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as
good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as
to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we
feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with
the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is
completely dark."
Mozart, like Feynman, was a magician. If Beethoven's career
embodied Edison's famous dictum about the comparative importance of
inspiration and perspiration, Mozart's was more like a series of
lightning strokes, producing one unimprovable master-piece after
another.
Not that these weren't the result of fastidious labor and deep
know-how. The idea of Mozart as some kind of savant -- a man-child
who never outgrew the effects of his outlandish early life -- is
trivial and insulting.
Still, writing music came easily to him, to an extent that he
himself didn't seem to entirely understand. "I compose as a sow
piddles," he once wrote with characteristic humor. (Compare this
with Tchaikovsky's wonderfully disciplined account of the creative
process: "I am at my desk at 9 o'clock every morning, and my muse
has learned to be prompt.")
And his music is just as magical as his mind. Analysts armed with
sophisticated explanatory tools can make the works of Bach and
Beethoven, Wagner and Stravinsky yield up their secrets while
Mozart's sorcery remains elusive.
There is something about all of this that is both marvelous and
maddening, and it reduces even determined rationalists to gibbering
about miracles. In the face of a great performance of "The Marriage
of Figaro" or the G-Minor String Quintet, the famous line from
Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" about Mozart "taking dictation from God"
can sometimes have the ring of truth.
Shaffer's play, along with Milos Forman's Oscar-winning film
version, has unfortunately become a central text in this discussion
during the past decades -- unfortunately, because its cunning
dramatic inventions have too often been taken as historical truth,
and that in turn has inspired a backlash among passionate
Mozarteans.
To my mind, Shaffer's play, even with all its unapologetic
inaccuracies, gets at something important about human existence --
our sense of outrage at the unfairness of fate, and our struggle to
come to terms with it.
But Shaffer, perhaps out of dramaturgical need, exaggerates the
situation. He depicts Mozart's nature as directly antithetical to
that of the music he wrote -- crude where the music is subtle,
puerile where it is sophisticated.
The more mundane truth is that the music and the personality of the
man who created it seem to have been oddly independent of each
other. Instead of Shaffer's negative correlation, there was no
particular correlation at all.
So even though Mozart's cherubic, impenetrable visage promises to
gaze upon us from countless posters and program covers during the
coming year, the man behind the face feels as remote as ever. We
can wish him a happy birthday, but not with much sense of intimacy
or personal familiarity.
What we have instead is the music -- the shadowy splendors of the
D-Minor Piano Concerto, the richly observed humanity of "Figaro"
and "Così fan tutte," the robust exuberance of the Clarinet
Quintet. It's like a surprise inheritance in some 19th century
novel, left to us by a wealthy unknown uncle. All we have to do --
or can do -- is treasure it.
E-mail Joshua Kosman at jko...@sfchronicle.com.
Happy birthday from orchestra, opera and on screen
http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/mozarts-music-still-in-tune-with-our-times/2006/01/24/1138066794636.html
The Sydney Morning Herald.
Mozart's music still in tune with our times
January 25, 2006
The revered composer was as commercial as he was creative, writes
Nicholas Kenyon.
WHY IS Mozart the most famous, most unavoidable classical composer
of all time? His music chimes in every Muzak-infested lift, his
name appears in mobile phone predictive text, and he is probably
the composer you hear most when put on eternal hold on the phone.
Certainly this has something to do with the success of Amadeus,
both as superb play and glossily inflated film, which created for
the last decades of the 20th century a fresh image of Mozart - the
outsider, the cheeky genius who did not play by the rules. But his
survival also has to do with the sheer power of his music, which
seems able to accept so many different and even conflicting
interpretations.
Is the great G minor Symphony No.40 a work of "Grecian lightness
and grace" (which is how Schumann heard it), or is it a work of
demonic power and tragedy, as so many conductors have interpreted
it? Or is it a perfectly poised classical masterpiece? All these
things can be true, depending on how we listen to the music.
The real appeal of Mozart's music is its emotional ambiguity, its
ability to sustain different levels of meaning in performance and
of response. Look at a Mozart chocolate wrapper, or a cheap Mozart
CD cover: there you will find the superficial picture of the
innocent child that has been such a potent force in our approach to
Mozart. And you can hear works such as the Eine kleine Nachtmusik
on that level, if you don't listen too carefully.
The idea of Mozart as a respectable, slightly unworldly figure was
a creation of the early 19th century. Because he died young, in
tragic circumstances, his story was romanticised with amazing speed
into one of a neglected genius who suffered for his art. Mozart did
suffer. He did die too young, when his musical achievement was far
from finished.
But what is clear is that Mozart was not a neglected genius. His
music was often appreciated; he was praised and admired from his
earliest years as a keyboard
virtuoso, through the period he hated in the service of the
Archbishop of Salzburg, to the emancipated years he spent in
Vienna. Here Mozart was a very early model of a freelance musician,
selling his wares as a teacher, performer and composer, always in
search of work, always advertising his product, and receiving a
quite considerable income when he was at the height of his
popularity.
Mozart was an extraordinarily practical composer. The romantic
image is of Mozart writing music out of inner compulsion, for some
far-off posterity to relish. This is demonstrably untrue, for we
know that what spurred him to compose was an imminent deadline, a
request from a friend, a commission for a performance.
He sometimes began to write works and then put them in a drawer for
a couple of years until the impetus came to finish them. (This is a
quite recent discovery by the English Mozart scholar Alan Tyson,
who studied the paper on which the composer wrote.)
The 40th symphony is one of three symphonies Mozart produced, it
has often been imagined, for no discernible purpose other than to
express himself. But there were plenty of opportunities where these
works could have been performed in his lifetime. This does not make
them any less remarkable or powerful. It shows him writing for
particular venues or courts or people. That is why his music sounds
the way it does: he cultivates a Parisian style in the "Paris"
symphonies; he writes for the musicians of Prague in the "Prague"
Symphony and Don Giovanni; and he is inspired by particular people
- the soprano Aloysia Lange, his first serious love, and Anton
Stadler playing the clarinet in the glorious Clarinet Concerto and
Quintet.
Sometimes it is felt that to associate Mozart with particular
performing circumstances limits his music. Rather, it makes its
specific qualities all the more remarkable, and adapting those
conditions to present-day performances all the more of a challenge.
Fortunately, Mozart performance has leapt forward in recent
decades, inspired by the idea that to recover some of the
performing style of his time will further illuminate his music.
Performing Mozart as if it were Brahms or Tchaikovsky does the
music little service - Mozart is incredibly specific in his
expressive language, and the instruments of his time bring out
those qualities.
Mozart's history, and his reputation since his death, is bound up
with myth and storytelling. As we look forward to the 250th
anniversary of his birth tomorrow, we are faced with a Mozart who
has become a cultural artefact. Yet we should not dismiss the
stories and legends, and we will never fully disentangle the man
and the music from the myth, for it is in the mythic power of
Mozart's story that much that is so important about him survives.
Those stories tell us what we want to believe about geniuses, about
those who die young, those who create something profound. But we
need constantly to reassess them. There is a famous story about the
"messenger in grey" who anonymously commissions Mozart's Requiem in
the last year of his life.
Mozart says to his wife, "Did I not say I was writing the Requiem
for myself?' falls ill, and dies. The quote may not be true, and
the image in the film Amadeus of Mozart dictating the work from his
deathbed to his arch-rival Salieri is absurd. Yet, only a few years
ago, documents turned up that substantiated the story of the grey
messenger, a count who wanted to pass off the work he commissioned
as his own. Here truth is stranger than fiction.
Mozart's music will endure in our generation, I am sure, because it
is so firmly, uncannily, in tune with our times. Our lack of
certainty, our search for beauty and our encounters with hard
reality, our ability to perceive emotional moods fleetingly and
even simultaneously, our desire for harmony and our acknowledgment
of imperfection - all are perfectly encapsulated in his work.
It is difficult to imagine that his reputation will not still be
flourishing at the next anniversary in 2041, 250 years after his
death. In fact, Mozart is one of the best hopes for the survival of
great music in our increasingly ignorant times.
The ghost of Mozart speaks
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=P8&xml=/arts/2006/01/21/bmmoz21.xml
(Filed: 21/01/2006)
Was he poisoned? Did he resent his father? Ivan Hewett uses the
latest scholarship to imagine an encounter with the composer, born
250 years ago
I'm due to meet Mozart's ghost at the Elysian Fields, but it's hard
to find him among all the other shades. Eventually I find him by a
brook, entertaining some ladies at the harpsichord in the shade of
a juniper tree. "Ah," he says, "I can tell you're from the other
side, your apparel is so odd. Forgive me," he says to the ladies,
with a deep bow, before turning to me. "We don't get many visitors
here. Why have you come? You're not like that vulgar woman who
wants to write down my music from beyond the grave? She must be
getting rich from my efforts."
I explain that I've come from a famous newspaper in England, and
because it's now 250 years since he was born, the editor felt it
was time a few popular misconceptions about his life were cleared
up. "What! Is it really 250 years?" he says, jumping up. I notice
how little he is, his head seeming too large for his body - though
that might be due to the great shock of blond hair, which he's
clearly vain about, as he keeps smoothing it down. "You see, we
have no conception of time here. But if it's so long, surely I'm
now forgotten? When I was alive no one could remember what was
played last year, let alone two-and-a-half centuries ago."
I assure him that he's now quite possibly the most famous musician
who ever lived. "Ha! Not in Vienna, I guess. There they prefer
anyone to me. Perhaps in your country? They were kind to me when I
was little. Your king, I remember, waved to me from his carriage.
And the ladies dandled me on their knee. My father later told me
they were so loose-living because they were godless."
The words come tumbling out so fast, I can see it's going to be
hard to keep him on the subject. And he wants to know all about
England now. "I remember your roast beef and beer are very fine,
mais ils coûtent très chers! My father thought it was the best in
Europe." I explain I'm vegetarian. "What is that?" "I eat only
vegetables." He squeaks with laughter. "What, are you Hindoo? Shall
I extemporise a Hindoo melody for you?" Without waiting for a reply
he rushes off to the fortepiano and rattles off a vaguely
Turkish-sounding melody, to the accompaniment of tinkling laughter
from the ladies, one of whom ruffles his hair.
It's amazing to watch him invent an entire sonata movement. Is that
how he was able to write such a colossal amount of music? "But my
catalogue could have been longer," he says. "I had to spend so much
time teaching and sitting in coaches rattling along bumpy roads in
search of a job, which never came. And you mustn't think composing
was easy. What I just played is fine for making noble ladies clap
their hands. But to please connoisseurs you have to work. I spent
two years writing my six quartets for my dear friend Joseph Haydn."
Mozart drove his father Leopold to distraction with his willingness
to make do with promises and flattery rather than hard cash. But
when I ask Mozart whether he was hopeless with money he looks
aggrieved; in fact for one moment I think he's going to cry. "That
is a monstrous lie. My poor wife, God rest her soul, was always
ill, so we were always spending money on doctors. Also I had to
keep up appearances; no nobleman will employ a ragamuffin."
So it wasn't true that he was buried in a pauper's grave? He looks
baffled. "But I was not a pauper. I had debts, but my prospects
were good, the public in Prague adored my Clemenza di Tito, and the
Viennese were whistling my Magic Flute. Everyone had a modest
burial in those days, it was what the emperor ordered."
A few weeks before his death, Mozart had worried that someone was
poisoning him. Did he think it might be his rival, Salieri? By now
Mozart is starting to look at me oddly. "Do you understand nothing
of music in Vienna? Let me explain," he says patiently. "Salieri
was Italian, he could serve the popular taste for Italian opera
better than I, and he was well in at Court - why should he fear me?
We could get along very well without poisoning the other. Besides,
Salieri attended my Magic Flute, at my expense, and called out
'Bello' and 'Bravo' after every number."
One thing Mozart's letters tell us nothing about is his meeting
with Beethoven, who went to study with Mozart, but had to return
home when his mother became ill. "Oh I remember him so well, what a
talent he had, but what a strange young man, he seemed molto con
fuoco about something and not very polished. I thought, there is a
young man who will have even less success with the Viennese than I.
And yet I hear he became famous." Not only famous, I say, but very
different from Mozart; in fact he famously described Mozart's
piano-playing as "choppy". Mozart is hugely amused by this. "Did
he, the wretch? Well, I thought his was too wild. But he was young,
and of course taste changes."
I'm wondering how Mozart will react to questions about his love
life. I need to ask because another theory about his oddly sudden
death in 1791 is that he was poisoned by the jealous husband of one
his pupils, Maria Hofdemel. Did he have an affair with her?
"Heavens, what business is that of yours? Has it become normal for
newspapers to retail this sort of gossip? Well, you won't get any
from me. In any case, my Constanze was too dear to me to betray her
in any way. She and my father were the two most beloved people in
my life."
Again Mozart is flushed and his bottom lip trembles; which is a bad
sign, as I want to broach the most delicate topic of all. Some
writers say Mozart felt a huge resentment against his father's
domineering influence, and getting himself sacked by their employer
the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg was a kind of symbolic parricide.
Now the tears really do come. "How dare you... my father was the
truest and kindest of men, and if he was severe with me it was for
my own good. Young people must be schooled and disciplined, or they
will never amount to anything. Besides, did you ever see him in
private? He liked a joke as well as I, and he even allowed me to
teach him to play billiards. You are an ignorant man, sir," he
says, wiping his eyes.
To mollify him I remind him that he's universally loved, and people
hum his tunes everywhere. "Which ones?" he says eagerly. "Well,
Papageno's first aria in The Magic Flute," I say, and he beams with
pleasure, sits down at the keyboard and starts to play, elaborating
the tune with a series of variations. Little by little the shades
gather to listen, so many that the little figure of Mozart is
hidden. It's time for me to return to the mundane world.
Next Saturday's 'Daily Telegraph' will include an exclusive CD of
Mozart compositions performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
plus details on how to collect more free CDs as part of our 'Great
Composers' collection.
The Globe and Mail: Mozart, we hardly knew ye
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060126.wxmozart26/BNPrint/Entertainment/
Mozart, we hardly knew ye
Fascination with the composer has hit a crescendo as his 250th birthday
nears, yet it's harder than ever to understand his music
By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Thursday, January 26, 2006 Posted at 4:53 AM EST
So the skull was a dud. All the king's horses, and even the DNA
specialists of the U.S. Army, couldn't establish that a cranium
pulled from a Vienna graveyard two centuries ago could tell us
anything new about Mozart.
Only a materialist age like ours (or a phrenological age, like
Mozart's) would have treated a few hundred grams of bone as a
possible clue to the mysteries associated with Mozart since his
death in 1791 from what is thought to have been a case of rheumatic
fever. The fact that we're still searching for clues tells you
something about this ubiquitous artist's ability to make himself
scarce, even when people are fixated on him.
Mozart fixation is part of our cultural pathology, especially in
this anniversary year (he was born 250 years ago tomorrow, on Jan.
27, 1756). Between now and December, we'll have the most abundant
opportunities yet to attend Mozart performances, listen to Mozart
podcasts, eat Mozart chocolates and visit Mozart exhibitions.
The quantity of these tributes, here and abroad, may be as
significant as their quality, and not just because more concerts
imply more adoration. So much Mozart is performed in any ordinary
year that only a glut would suffice to make this year stand out as
anything special.
For the most part, the feast will offer the same things we've
already experienced many times before. Even a great composer, it
seems, needs to have his stature confirmed by continual repetitions
of the same core masterworks.
When Mozart as a person is talked about, repetition is again the
order of the day. The same repertoire of legends and pious imagery
is retrieved and rehashed, in program notes and lectures, and in
the heads of those who have always known things about Mozart that
may not be true.
We're predisposed to think we know about Mozart, because the people
he lived amongst so obviously didn't. Aside from Haydn's famous
comment about his young friend being "the greatest composer known
to me in person or by name," Mozart's contemporaries didn't
understand the depth of his talent.
By the end of his career they didn't think of him primarily as a
composer, but as a pianist who played his own works. A Viennese
reviewer faulted Don Giovanni for "merely tickling the ear and
letting the heart starve." Mozart had already moved the premiere to
Prague, after a tepid Viennese response to The Marriage of Figaro.
Vienna and Salzburg are now fighting to be recognized as the centre
of Mozart worship, though each was crushingly definitive in
rejecting him while he lived (his departure from the service of the
Archbishop of Salzburg was marked with a literal "boot in the
ass"). The Salzburg Festival is presenting all 22 operas next
summer, and Vienna's abundant musical organizations are straining
to do justice to what the principal Austrian website calls "the
most famous Austrian of all time" (they must have forgotten about
Hitler). We can imagine that Mozart, who would have preferred to
live in England, might have appreciated these ironies.
But accepting Mozart, and putting him and his aesthetic at the
centre of the classical canon, also seems to require some
distortion of what and who he was. People have been poring over his
scores and letters ever since he died, and what they've written
about the character revelations they find there often tells more
about the authors than about Mozart. Like early-modern Europeans in
the New World, they tend to see what they expect to see.
The Romantics looked for a natural child of art, Rousseau's Emile
in a powdered wig, pouring out fully-formed masterpieces until his
early, lonely death. That image has never faded, and was given new
life in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus, in which the jealous Salieri
asks: "Why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?"
Obscene he was, in his potty-mouthed letters and even sometimes in
his work. His publisher cleaned up some bawdy canons in the 1780s
by substituting other words for titles such as, "Lick my ass till
it's nice and clean." Beethoven was never so inconvenient. Even
some recent scholars have trouble dealing with what Freud would
have called Mozart's infantile sexuality. Jane Glover, in her new
book Mozart's Women, breezes past his "most startling" letters with
hardly a line quoted.
The Romantic view accepted at face value Leopold Mozart's claim
that his son was irresponsible and naive in worldly affairs. With
his higher being completely consumed in making pure and perfect
works of art, it stood to reason that Mozart had nothing left for
the management of his daily life.
But as Maynard Solomon points out in his 1995 biography Mozart: A
Life, the father had his own reasons for exaggerating and
cultivating his son's difficulties with the world. Leopold was
financially dependent on him, and had been ever since the day he
took the seven-year-old Mozart and his sister on a three-year tour
around Europe, rushing to exploit their talents before it was too
late. Mozart's childhood was a lot like Michael Jackson's, filled
with work and heavy parental expectation. The adult Mozart failed
in the music business in part because music as a business was only
getting started, as middle-class societies began to supplant court
patronage.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, in his postmodern 1977 biography, argues
that one of the ways Mozart defended himself against the
expectations of others was to develop a language calculated to
present not what he felt but what others (especially his father)
thought he should feel. Letters that look sincere are shown to be
dramatic representations, full of formulae borrowed from opera
seria, the ponderous form that Mozart helped demolish, even while
writing its last important work (La Clemenza di Tito).
Hildesheimer argues that Mozart will always be an enigma. The
writer of the self-concealing letters tells us little more, he
says, than do the painters of the waxy portraits of Mozart and his
clan. It's an unsatisfying view, and subsequent scholars have spent
the past 30 years sniping at it. The public has mostly stuck with
the idea of Mozart as a perennial boyish charmer whose hard later
years are the proof (for some the only proof) that even his most
sunlit works have a dark side. We live in a biographical age, and
we assume that the work reflects the life, even if we have Mozart's
word that work was often his only satisfactory escape from the
squalor of his life.
Richard Taruskin (in his recent Oxford History of Western Music)
attributes Mozart's current iconic status to "his singular skill at
'moving an audience by representations of its own humanity.' " The
quote is unattributed, as if Taruskin is unconsciously noting the
ubiquity of the sentiment. Since many people feel this way not just
about the operas but about the instrumental works too, the more
important Mozart mystery has to do with how this effect is
achieved. But when all the analysis is done and the question still
remains, we're brought back to the evasive figure of the composer.
"There are passages here and there from which only connoisseurs can
derive satisfaction," Mozart wrote of his compositions, "but these
passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot
fail to be pleased, though without knowing why." In a sense, as we
survey his music and the ambivalent evidence of his character, all
of us remain "the less learned," in a study that will never be
completed.
MOZART FETES, FANFARES AND FESTIVALS TOMORROW
Toronto. A Fanfare for Mozart, a gala concert hosted by CBC Radio's
Tom Allen, opens the Toronto International Chamber Music Festival.
http://www.torontochambermusic.com or 416-978-8849.
Toronto. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra's Mozart @ 250 Festival
continues with A Life in Letters, a literary and musical program
created by tenor Michael Schade. 416-593-4828.
Edmonton. On the city-declared "Mozart Day," the Edmonton Symphony
Orchestra performs Mozart's Symphony No. 36 ("Linz").
http://www.edmontonsymphony.com or 1-800-563-5081.
Vancouver. An evening of chamber music and discussion about
Mozart's life and works begins the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra's
four-concert Mozart Festival, with conductor Bramwell Tovey and
soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian. http://www.vancouversymphony.ca or
604-876-3434.
Halifax. At the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, Symphony Nova Scotia
presents an all-Mozart program. http://www.symphonynovascotia.ca or
902-421-1300.
New York. The Metropolitan Opera presents a revival of last
season's new Julie Taymor production of The Magic Flute, while the
New York Philharmonic debuts a three-week Magic of Mozart tribute.
http://www.metoperafamily.org and newyorkphilharmonic.org.
Sheffield, England. The 11-piece Ensemble 360 undertake a marathon,
with concerts from 7:45 p.m. through to 8:45 p.m. the following day
at Sheffield Theatres. http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
Vienna. As part of a three-day festival of music, film and
readings, the Vienna Boys' Choir performs at St. Stephen's
Cathedral. Friday also sees the official opening of the "Mozarthaus
Vienna" (formerly known as Figaro House), a large exhibition on the
life and works of the genius composer.
www.mozart2006.net/eng/index.html.
Salzburg. On Friday, the Carolino Augusteum Museum opens its Viva!
Mozart exhibition, billed as an international focal point of Mozart
Year celebrations. www.mozart2006.net/eng/index.html.
CBC Radio Two pays tribute this weekend, beginning at 6 a.m.,
Friday, with Mozart & Company, A Mozart Timeline: Canada from 1756
to 1791, where leading Mozart tenor Michael Schade reads from
Mozart's letter and host Tom Allen presents highlights of the
composer in Canadian history. www.cbc.ca/mozart/schedule.html.
-- Brad Wheeler
The making of Mozart
http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=a3813b14-5578-42ca-9553-7ac5bd999ec0&k=3943
On the eve of Mozart's 250th birthday, Natasha Gauthier reconsiders
the people who influenced the timeless composer.
Natasha Gauthier
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the very personification of the child
prodigy: playing minuets by age four, composing at six, touring the
courts and cities of Europe with his gifted older sister Nannerl, a
wee tot in a pale blue silk frock coat sitting at a harpsichord,
his feet dangling from the bench, his little powdered wig barely
peeking out over the top.
Talent such as this, we are encouraged to believe, can't be taught.
It just happens. But as the music world celebrates Mozart's 250th
anniversary, it's worth examining the answers to the question: Who
made Mozart?
Most people forget that Mozart benefited throughout his life from
the guidance and experience of various teachers, mentors and
colleagues. Our inaccurate vision of Mozart as self-made man is due
in part to "our romanticized idea of genius," says David Schroeder,
associate dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Dalhousie
University in Halifax. Schroeder is one of Canada's pre-eminent
Mozart scholars, the author of Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of
Resistance, Mischief and Deception.
"Mozart was such an extraordinary achiever that it led to a whole
range of myths," says Schroeder "For example, people like to
believe that he wrote out all his compositions straight from his
head onto paper, with no corrections. But serious Mozart scholars
know that this is not quite the case."
Another such myth is that Mozart's father Leopold -- who was also
his first and most important teacher -- was a second-rate musician
who exploited his brilliant children to enhance his own pathetic
career. But Pops was no slouch. We may have only heard silly
trifles like The Peasant Wedding and Musical Sleigh-Ride, but
Leopold left behind a substantial body of serious compositions,
including some particularly good liturgical music and several fine
symphonies.
"Today we know him primarily as an assistant court composer, but
his training was also in the humanities, particularly
jurisprudence," Schroe-der notes. "He was an intellectual of the
first order and was extremely well-connected throughout Europe,
which of course was very useful later on when he was touring with
his children."
Leopold, in fact, had already achieved a fair measure of fame and
respect before little Wolfgang's gifts came into the picture. "I
for one do not subscribe to the theory that Leopold was forced to
give up his musical career," said Schroeder. "We know that after
1762, Leopold did very little composition and was instead
concentrating on writing. He was every bit as interested in being
taken seriously as a writer."
In fact, Schroeder theorizes that Leopold was planning to write a
biography of his son, in epistolary form. "I think he was going to
use their extraordinary correspondence over the years, which we are
very fortunate to have, as the raw material for this biography. You
often have the sense, in reading these wonderful letters between
father and son, that there's something more there. It's as if
Leopold was trying to preserve something official for posterity."
Among Leopold's many books is his best-known work, a treatise on
violin playing that turned him into something of a celebrity.
Incidentally, this book was completed in 1756, the same year as
Wolfgang's birth.
Posterity's opinion of Leopold's child-rearing skills has not been
kind, but Schroeder thinks the judgment has been too harsh.
"I think his reputation as a slave driver doesn't hold," Schroeder
says. "Wolfgang was a keener. He loved to practise and study, and
he appears to have truly enjoyed performing. So I don't think his
father was forcing him to do anything he didn't want to do. It
wasn't like Beethoven, who had a genuinely abusive father."
But Schroeder feels the criticism is fair with regards to the
Mozart family's gruelling touring schedule. "Leopold was criticized
by people at the time for exposing his children to such risks. You
have to remember that in the 18th century, travel was a very
dangerous undertaking. Apart from the possibility you could be
robbed or killed, there was illness and disease to worry about. We
know that both Mozart and his sister became very sick on one trip,
to the point where it was feared they might not survive, and
Leopold was blamed for his poor judgment."
There is little doubt, however, about Leopold's pedagogical skills.
Schroeder says Mozart's earliest lessons at his father's knee laid
a solid technical and theoretical groundwork for the prodigy's
later development.
Another early mentor was an Italian priest, Giovanni Martini.
Leopold took his son to see the esteemed musician at his school in
Bologna, where Martini subjected Wolfgang to a series of tests to
see if there was substance behind the hype. Mozart did not study
with Martini for very long, but always respected his opinion.
Later, as a young man, he would often write to him from Salzburg to
complain about his frustration and the stifling lack of creativity
at the archbishop's court.
In 1764, the Mozarts travelled to London, where they met another
figure who was to make a lasting impression on Wolfgang: Johann
Christian Bach, known as the "London Bach," the youngest surviving
son of the old Leipzig Cantor. Coincidentally, J.C. had also been a
student of Padre Martini's.
"J.C. Bach was a very famous organizer of concerts in London, and
Leopold, who was so organized and well-connected, wrote well ahead
of time and arranged a meeting," says Schroeder. "Apparently Johann
Christian and Wolfgang took an instant liking to each other, so we
have these charming stories, which I have no reason to doubt, of
little Mozart sitting on Bach's lap at the keyboard playing music
for four hands."
Josef Haydn was another powerful, although less intimate,
influence. Unlike Beethoven, who was 15 years his junior, Mozart
never directly studied with Haydn. "We aren't sure how much contact
Mozart had with Haydn until about the mid-1780s, when they both
belonged to the same Masonic lodge in Vienna," Schroeder says. "But
Haydn was the most important composer alive. There was no getting
around it; everyone was influenced by him."
In 1781, Haydn published his groundbreaking Op. 33 string quartets,
considered to be the first fully developed masterpieces of the
classical string quartet form. Inspired, Mozart composed a
half-dozen quartets between 1782 and 1785. He published the
complete set with an uncharacteristically fawning dedication to
Haydn, writing, among other flatteries, "I have learned from Haydn
how to write quartets." In a highly unusual move, Mozart also
relinquished all rights for the works to Haydn.
As if that weren't homage enough, in January 1785, Mozart organized
a performance of the so-called Haydn quartets -- which he called
"my six children" -- for Haydn himself. We know that Mozart played
viola in the ensemble and that his father joined him on violin.
According to lore, after the concert, Haydn remarked to Leopold,
"Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the
greatest composer known to me either in person or by name."
On the surface, it's all touching proof of a younger scion's
devotion to his aging role model. But to Schroeder, it sounds
almost too good to be true.
"For one thing, the letter of dedication is extremely odd," he
explains. "Mozart calls Haydn his 'best friend' and makes
references to their 'father-son' relationship. He's laying it on
pretty thick. I think the letter is meant to be ironic, and Mozart
was really presenting his quartets as competing with Haydn's --
trying to one-up him, even."
Other contemporaries who directly influenced what and how Mozart
wrote were the instrumentalists and singers he worked with.
Fortunately for us -- and somewhat dauntingly for musicians trying
to play Mozart today -- Mozart was surrounded by some of the
greatest virtuosi of all time: people like tenor Anton Raas,
soprano Caterina Cavalieri, clarinettist Anton Stadler and French
horn player Ignaz Leitgeb.
"We invariably forget today that Mozart was a creation of his
time," notes Richard Turp, a well-known Montreal concert organizer,
music journalist and radio personality with an encyclopedic
knowledge of opera.
"Since the beginning, composers tailored their works to the artists
they had at hand," Turp says. This was strategic as much as it was
generous. "By showing the artists at their best, they were
guaranteeing more success for their work."
Like Schroeder, Turp calls Mozart's well-preserved correspondence a
"treasure," and says the exchanges between Mozart and his musicians
-- which usually increased as the performance date loomed closer --
offer priceless insight into the inner, sometimes devious workings
of a genius's mind.
"For example, Anton Raas wanted Mozart to rewrite the quartet in
Idomeneo. He complained in a letter to Mozart, basically saying,
'there's nothing in there for me.' Mozart wasn't going to change a
damn note, but the way he told Raas was very subtle and clever. He
wrote back something to the effect of 'oh, don't worry, a wonderful
singer like you will know how to make it outstanding,' and so on.
He was really sucking up, but it worked. Raas sang it as it was
composed. And of course, Mozart was right."
It wasn't just musicians who influenced Mozart. Well-travelled,
gregarious and open-minded, he cultivated a wide circle of friends.
One of these was Louise d'Epinay: writer, bluestocking and hostess
of one of the most brilliant salons in pre-revolutionary France.
D'Epinay boasted Rousseau as a lover and she maintained close
friendships with Diderot and Voltaire. She was also the mistress of
Baron von Grimm, Austria's ambassador to France, and in 1778 Mozart
visited them at their home in Paris.
"Mozart and Louise d'Epinay hit it off beautifully," Schroeder
says. "He adored her, although there is no evidence their
relationship was anything other than platonic. She was much older
than he was. But she was witty and gifted and she knew absolutely
everybody.
"At her salon, Mozart learned about French literature and
philosophy, especially Voltaire, which of course had a huge effect
on his ideas later on. There's a noticeable shift in the style of
his letter-writing after they become friends."
Mozart himself wrote, "I pay no attention whatever to anybody's
praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings."
However, Mozart had an enormous capacity for exaggeration, and as
closer inspection of historical facts shows, he was no island. From
proper bowing technique to the basics of counterpoint to advanced
philosophical ideas, Mozart absorbed his teachers' lessons like a
sponge (and, contrary to his assertion, was immensely pleased when
praised). But it's also clear that as long as the word prodigy is
used, some aspects of Mozart's talent will -- and should -- remain
unexplained, unnatural, miraculous.
"I can accept at least a little of the notion that Mozart was in a
class apart," Schroeder says. "There are things he could not
possibly have learned: his fantastic ability to improvise, his
astonishing memory, the way he could read the most difficult music
on sight, and so on. This is something that happened from within."
Terry Teachout: The Major Minor Mozart
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12101066_1
Two-hundred-fifty years after his birth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is
in a class apart, perhaps not the most popular of all classical
composers--that prize more likely goes to Beethoven or Bach--but
without doubt the most admired. Even at the height of postmodernism
with its Nietzschean "transvaluation of all values," no critic ever
seriously tried to question his singular stature, or even to
revalue significantly any of his major works. He remained, and
remains, untouchable.
No less remarkably, composers and performers join with critics in
this consensus.^1 One might easily put together an anthology of
heartfelt tributes to Mozart's music, were it not that the result
would be so repetitious. Suffice it to quote Aaron Copland, writing
in 1956 on the occasion of the Mozart bicentenary:
[W]e can pore over him, dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in
the end there remains something that will not be seized. That is
why, each time a Mozart work begins . . . we composers listen with
a certain awe and wonder, not unmixed with despair. The wonder we
share with everyone; the despair comes from the realization that
only this one man at this one moment in musical history could have
created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.
Some part of Copland's wonder, of course, must have stemmed from
the fact that its object was a child prodigy without formal
education who wrote his first symphony at the age of nine and his
last one a mere 23 years later, not long before his early death.
All prodigies are by definition interesting, but in Mozart's case
the interest is heightened by the fact that he not only died young
but left behind an oeuvre so extensive and all-encompassing that it
might as well have been the work of a fully mature composer who
died at sixty, or even eighty.
In addition, though, there is the still greater puzzle of the
apparent incongruity between Mozart's music and his personality.
Forget the foul-mouthed idiot savant of Peter Shaffer's movie
Amadeus (1984); the real Mozart is elusive enough without benefit
of caricature. "It is impossible," wrote the great English
musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, "to exaggerate the depth and
power of Mozart's thought." Yet Karoline Pichler, who knew him
socially, described a man "in whose personal intercourse there was
absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost
no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other
higher interests." His surviving letters paint a similarly
inexplicable portrait of a likable, lively-minded lightweight.
The gap between man and artist is so vast, in fact, that one
half-wonders why some ragtag band of ardent pseudo-scholars has not
come along to claim that the music of "the man from Salzburg" was
really written by a more cultivated and better situated
contemporary.
Our feeling of disconnection from Mozart the man--what Copland
speaks of as our inability to "seize" him--extends to the works
themselves. Except for the greater sophistication that came with
age, there is no readily apparent relationship between the
expressive qualities of Mozart's music and the emotional landmarks
of his life. He was an 18th-century craftsman whose pieces arose
not from "inspiration" but as a result of pressing professional
demands. In the words of the late Stanley Sadie, whose final book,
the newly published Mozart: The Early Years, 1756-1781,^2 was to
have been the first installment of a comprehensive two-volume
biography:
Mozart . . . never wrote a piece of music simply because he felt
like it or because of some "inner need" but virtually always
because it was in some sense a requirement.
This deprives the biographer of his usual stock-in-trade, for it
means that Mozart cannot be written about in the same way as, say,
Beethoven or Schubert (or, for that matter, Shakespeare),
interweaving life and work in a psychologically illuminating
manner. In particular, whatever quality makes certain of his
compositions "deeper" and "darker" than others is inaccessible to
speculation.
Yet some are indeed deeper and darker, and one whole group of these
latter pieces, to which I want to devote the balance of this essay,
stands mystifyingly apart from the rest. These are the
comparatively few multi-movement works cast in minor keys: two
piano sonatas out of seventeen, two piano concertos out of 27, two
symphonies out of 41. While these and other minor-key works of
similar scale are not necessarily of higher quality than their
major-key counterparts, they do share a special intensity of
expression not found in such masterpieces as the C Major Symphony,
K. 551, familiarly known as the "Jupiter."
This intensity manifests itself in many ways, from the turbulence
of the first movement of the D Minor Piano Concerto, K. 466, to the
crisp austerity of the E Minor Violin Sonata, K. 304. Sometimes, as
in the G Minor String Quintet, K. 516, one perceives the minor-key
quality as a tint, a single aspect of a carefully balanced,
classically poised totality. At other times, as in the unabashedly
stern A Minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, it becomes overwhelming,
infusing an entire piece with its distinctive coloration. In every
case, though, the large-scale minor-key pieces, different as they
are from one another, are similar in their power to stir the
listener's emotions--just as one feels, whether rightly or wrongly,
that Mozart's own emotions were more fully engaged in the act of
their creation, and that in them he was somehow playing for higher
stakes.^3
Many performers have said as much about the minor-key works,
including the Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel:
The pieces in the minor do more than just present a dark backdrop
to Mozart's brilliance. . . . I know of no other composer
fundamentally transformed while writing in minor keys.
But at least as many commentators have been reluctant to ascribe
such distinctive qualities to these works, preferring to
concentrate on the features they have in common with the minor-key
music of Mozart's contemporaries and predecessors. Nor should this
reluctance be dismissed as mere pedantry. For all his stupendous
gifts, Mozart was a man of his time, and the seeming "perfection"
of his music, as Copland reminds us, arises in large part from the
fact that he had at his fingertips a fully developed musical
language that had yet to be disrupted by the innovations of
Beethoven and the later Romantics.
Mozart himself made no known statements indicating that he regarded
his minor-key works as exceptional. Does this mean, then, that his
use of the minor key was merely an arbitrary classical-period
convention? Or did it indeed signify something more? In order to
answer this question, we must start by making an effort to hear the
minor-key works as they are, rather than as the Romantics thought
they were.
To appreciate the difference between Mozart's minor- and major-key
works, it helps to look at what they have in common.
To my mind, no one has done a better job of concisely explaining
what makes Mozart Mozart than Donald Tovey, whose essay on the G
Minor Symphony, K. 550, the greatest of the minor-key works, is a
convenient starting point. Tovey offers a seeming paradox that will
startle many readers: "We can only belittle and vulgarize our ideas
of Mozart by trying to construe him as a tragic artist." What could
he possibly mean, especially with reference to the G Minor
Symphony, still widely regarded as the locus classicus of tragedy
in music? The answer, Tovey replies, is that Mozart was up to
something altogether different: "Mozart's whole musical language
is, and remains throughout, the language of comic opera."
This bald-faced assertion, so surprising at first glance, turns out
on closer inspection to be all but self-evident. From the rush and
bustle of the outer movements of the G Minor Symphony (whose
compositional language Tovey likens to Rossini's Overture to The
Barber of Seville) to the wittily "theatrical" exchanges between
soloist and orchestra in the later piano concertos, one finds in
Mozart's mature instrumental works an abundance of proof that he
thought of all his music in dramatic terms--and that the kind of
"drama" he had in mind was 18th-century opera buffa, abstracted at
times to the point of sublimity but still essentially comic.
For the Romantic of deepest hue, such a claim must necessarily have
the effect of trivializing Mozart's minor-key music. But Mozart
himself, lest we forget, was not a Romantic--indeed, Romanticism
per se did not exist in his lifetime--and thus was not afflicted by
the paralyzing idea that comedy is unserious. As Tovey goes on to
say:
If we are to understand Mozart, we must rid our minds of the
presumption that a tragic issue is intrinsically greater than any
other. . . . [I]t is not only difficult to see depths of agony in
the rhythms and idioms of comedy, but it is not very intelligent to
attempt to see them. Comedy uses the language of real life; and
people in real life often find the language of comedy the only
dignified expression for their deepest feelings.
Still, there remains a vast difference between the expressive
effects of the "Jupiter" and G Minor Symphonies. Though both were
shaped in the mold of opera buffa, few listeners will fail to hear
lightness and liberation in the one and dark introspection in the
other. Can this be explained solely by a failure of historical
imagination on our part? Or is the difference between the two works
as real as we feel it to be?
While Stanley Sadie does not directly address this question in
Mozart: The Early Years, he does deal specifically and in detail
with Mozart's youthful embrace of the minor key, and in so doing
sheds invaluable light on the style that is heard for the first
time in the "Little" G Minor Symphony, K. 183, composed in 1773.
In discussing this work, Sadie is quick to place it in its proper
historical context. Not only had other composers of the Sturm und
Drang school already turned out numerous minor-key symphonies full
of "syncopated repeated notes, snapped rhythms, tremolandos, large
leaps, urgently repeated phrases, and forceful orchestral unison
passages," but Mozart himself had included similarly impassioned
minor-key passages in his early operas. As Sadie rightly concludes:
"[W]e have to be on guard against any facile assumption that Mozart
and his contemporaries brought the same emotional associations to
such music as we do today."
Yet, having issued this warning, Sadie goes on to declare the
"Little" G Minor Symphony to be Mozart's "first `great' work, his
earliest, it seems to 20th-century listeners, to enter the realms
of serious human feeling." And for all his understandable wariness
about reading Romantic preconceptions into a piece of classical
music, Sadie is surely right to use such unabashedly emotive
language to describe the "Little" G Minor. However much Mozart may
have drawn on earlier examples, however deeply rooted the symphony
is in the classical style, it is hard to hear it without sensing
that the seventeen-year-old Mozart had for the first time grasped
the nettle of life.
To be sure, one may say this without necessarily leaping to the
further conclusion that the "Little" G Minor must somehow mirror a
specific event or cluster of events. At the same time, however, it
would be wrong to conclude that Mozart's life was emotionally
uneventful, or that his music had no relationship whatsoever to
exterior circumstances. Rather, one must make such interpretations
with the greatest of care.
Of particular interest on this count are Sadie's remarks about two
important minor-key works written around the time of the death of
Mozart's mother in 1778, the E Minor Violin Sonata and A Minor
Piano Sonata:
There is no real reason to imagine that he used his music as
vehicle for the expression of his own personal feelings: at this
period, at least, there is certainly no evidence that he did so--no
statement in a letter about the significance of any work to life
events. . . . He in fact wrote to Leopold [his father] that in the
days of his mother's illness he "had ample leisure for composing,
but could not have written a single note." His letters written on
the day of her death and in the ensuing days do not suggest that
the emotions he was experiencing were of a kind that he would want
to express in music.
On the other hand, Sadie leaves no doubt that the two sonatas
embody some form of strong emotion, going so far as to speak of the
"bleak qualities" of the E Minor Violin Sonata and--even more
notably--declaring that the "sustained urgency and agitation" of
the first movement of the A Minor Piano Sonata "seem almost to
embody anger and frustration."
Bleakness, urgency, anger, frustration: these are not words one
normally uses to describe 18th-century classical music. Yet just as
they flow easily from the pen of a modern-day Mozart scholar fully
aware of the need to hear Mozart's music in its historical context,
so are they more than likely to spring to the mind of a modern-day
listener who hears one of Mozart's minor-key compositions for the
very first time.
No less surprising is that we are using them to describe the work
of a young man. When artists in their twenties, however talented,
succumb to unhappiness, the fruits of their sorrow tend to be
self-indulgent. Not so Mozart. From the "Little" G Minor onward,
his minor-key music was emotionally disciplined, and as the
emotions grew more powerful, so did the discipline become more
rigorous and far-reaching.
This progression reaches its climax in the later and better-known
of Mozart's two symphonies in G minor. Here the inherent tension
between passionate emotion and classical syntax resolves itself in
a perfect balance of technical means and expressive ends. Mozart
transposes the comic language of his opera buffa style into the
minor key in order to say . . . what?
It would be the height of superfluity to try to put into words the
"meaning" of the G Minor Symphony. But I have always been struck by
what I think of as the stoic quality of this touchstone of Western
art. It is as if Mozart were telling us something so profoundly
serious that it could only be said, as it is said by Prospero in
The Tempest, when accompanied by the saddest of smiles:
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
That such ultimate truths can indeed be told without recourse to
words is one of the supreme mysteries of Western art. That they
were accessible to an unsophisticated, unintellectual ex-prodigy
who died at the age of thirty-five is a mystery of another kind
altogether.
No wonder, then, that Aaron Copland was unable to consider Mozart's
achievement without feeling a touch of despair. It is, after all,
what most of us feel when forced to measure ourselves against the
yardstick of genius.
Mozart in Minor: A Selective Discography
Comparatively few conductors and instrumentalists trained during
the 19th century programmed Mozart's music with any frequency, and
their interpretations typically ran to the sentimental. It was not
until the 1930's that a distinctively "classical" style of Mozart
playing began to find its way onto record. Since then, Mozart's
minor-key works have all been recorded numerous times in
unprettified versions. Here are ten of the best performances
currently available on CD:
1933: The Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer, who specialized in the
Austro-German classics, was also a gifted conductor who frequently
led his own concerto performances from the keyboard (as Mozart
himself had previously done). His bracingly dramatic self-conducted
version of the D Minor Concerto, accompanied by the London
Philharmonic, is one of the most contemporary-sounding of early
Mozart recordings (Appian APR 5523).
1934: Artur Schnabel was one of the first celebrity
instrumentalists to make Mozart's music a central part of his
repertoire, both in concert and on record. In addition to several
concertos and sonatas, he recorded the G Minor Piano Quartet, K.
478, with members of the Pro Arte Quartet, a Franco-Belgian
ensemble with an old-fashioned Romantic ensemble style that the
group modified in response to Schnabel's passionate directness
(Pearl GEM 0104).
1937: Ignace Jan Paderewski, who like Schnabel studied with the
celebrated piano teacher Theodor Leschetizsky, was a Chopin
specialist widely considered to be the quintessential Romantic-era
virtuoso (though his technique was in fact notoriously erratic).
His only Mozart recording, made near the end of his career, is a
graceful, rhythmically free version of the A Minor Rondo, K. 511,
in which the 19th-century view of Mozart can be heard at its most
attractive (Pearl GEMM CD 9499).
1950: Dinu Lipatti would have been the greatest classical pianist
of the postwar era had he not died of cancer at the age of
thirty-three. Among the handful of recordings he left behind is a
taut yet lyrical version of the A Minor Sonata that confirms his
reputation as an artist of unrivaled purity (EMI Classics CDU 5
67003 2).
1962: Glenn Gould recorded only one Mozart piano concerto, the C
Minor, which he claimed not to like. Be that as it may, his
performance, attractively accompanied by Walter Susskind and the
CBC Symphony, is noteworthy for Gould's electrifyingly incisive
playing of the solo part (Sony SMK 52626).
1968: Benjamin Britten, one of the few major 20th-century composers
to have distinguished himself as an interpreter of music other than
his own, made many Mozart recordings, the finest of which is his
version with the English Chamber Orchestra of the G Minor Symphony.
Unusually, Britten takes all the repeats indicated by Mozart,
thereby expanding the scale of the piece in a manner consistent
with his vigorous yet classically balanced conducting. This
recording is available as part of a two-CD set that also includes
Britten's equally impressive 1971 conducting of the "Little" G
Minor Symphony (London 444 323-2LF2, two CD's).
1973: In addition to recording extensively as a soloist, Arthur
Grumiaux, a Belgian violinist of uncommon stylishness, also led a
trio whose recorded performances of Mozart's six string quintets
(augmented by the violinist Arpad Gérecz and the violist Max
Lesueur) remain definitive three decades later. The jewel of the
set is the lucid, supremely elegant G Minor Quintet (Philips 470
950-2PTR3, three CD's).
1989: At the very end of his long life, Vladimir Horowitz recorded
the B Minor Adagio, K. 540, in a session that took place in the
living room of his New York apartment. Though the arch-Romantic
Horowitz played little of Mozart's music in public, he was
fascinated by the "seriousness, solemnity, and pathos" of this
free-standing minor-key movement, and not least by the chromatic
inflections that he found to "foreshadow Chopin and Wagner."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Horowitz's interpretation, if
rhythmically freer than what one would expect from a younger
pianist, is both shapely and disciplined (DGG 427 772-2GH).
1994: Since the 70's, many recordings of Mozart's music have been
made on replicas of 18th-century instruments played in a
musicologically informed style that seeks to reproduce that of the
composer's own time. Comparatively few of these performances,
however, have been as effective or memorable as those given on
modern instruments. Among the few is William Christie's recording
with Les Arts Florissants, the French period-instrument ensemble,
of the unfinished D Minor Requiem, K. 626, in the standard version
completed by Mozart's pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr. The lean and
transparent instrumental textures of this highly dramatic
performance, whose vocal soloists include the tenor Christoph
Prégardien and the contralto Nathalie Stutzmann, let the choral
parts come through with unusual clarity (Erato 0630-10697-2).
2004: Hilary Hahn, the most gifted of today's young violinists,
recently released an album of four Mozart violin sonatas that
includes a pristinely fresh version of the two-movement E Minor
Sonata (the composer's only work in that key), sensitively
accompanied by Natalie Zhu, her regular recital partner (DGG
B0004771-02GH).
Terry Teachout, Commentary's regular music critic and the drama
critic of the Wall Street Journal, is at work on a biography of
Louis Armstrong. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
1 I know only one sweepingly negative remark about him by a
well-known musician. Noël Coward, who in addition to being a comic
playwright was also a songwriter of note, claimed after a visit to
the Glyndebourne Festival that Mozart's operas sounded like
"piddling on flannel."
2 W.W. Norton, 644 pp., $35.00.
3 Recommended recordings of these and other minor-key works by
Mozart are listed in the discography at the end of this piece.
TCS Daily - 'If Nothing Else Remains of Humanity, Then Let This Be Our
Monument...'
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=012706C
By Lee Harris : BIO | 27 Jan 2006
One night a group of highly advanced scientists from another galaxy
abduct me in their space craft. They tell me that they have good
news and bad news. The good news is that they have been so
impressed by my TCS articles that they had chosen me to make an
important decision that will affect the way other intelligent life
forms in the universe remember the human race. The bad news is that
they are going to destroy the planet earth, me included, because
they have come to despair of our ever becoming sufficiently
rational to be members in good standing of their intergalactic
utopian community.
Yet, back to the good news, or what is left of it; the aliens want
me, and me alone, to decide what human monument will be spared from
the otherwise universal destruction awaiting our species and all
the cultural objects that we have created in our brief tenure on
this obscure planet. For example, the aliens offer me the choice of
saving the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower, the Sistine
Chapel, or the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building, or
the Taj Mahal. But whatever item I select, it alone will continue
to survive, and it alone will remain as evidence of the best that
such a bad lot as us could do, despite our bestial failings.
What monument of humanity so I choose?
Without a moment's hesitation, I respond, "Why, obviously, the
opera, The Marriage of Figaro, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."
This is not the answer the aliens were expecting, and I notice
that, after an awkward silence, they are fascinated. "Where do we
find this opera of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? In which of your
so-called nations does this great monument exist?"
"Oh, it is everywhere. It is in China, in Australia, in France, in
Morocco, in Sweden. It is in Alaska, in Peru, in Tahiti, in Kenya.
No doubt, it is even in Antarctica."
"But how can a monument be in so many places at once? And what can
such a strange monument be made of?"
"Oh, it is only made of sound waves."
"Sound waves?" They exclaim.
"Yes, but a very interesting pattern of sound waves." I explain.
"So that is the best legacy your world has to offer -- an
interesting pattern of sound waves? Nothing made of granite or of
stone? Nothing made of steel or yryxa? [Don't look it up. The word
was new to me too.] Surely, reconsider our offer. We are willing to
transport the entire Great Wall of China to our Museum of Extinct
Intergalactic Curiosities, if only you give the word. Of what
permanent value can sound waves be? You make a noise, and then it
almost immediately disappears."
"Yes, that is true of most noise. But, you see, some of what you
call noise does not disappear. People hear it once, and then they
want to hear it over again. And, in certain cases, over and over
and over again."
"So that is what your music is? Noise that you humans wish to hear
over and over again?"
"Well, that is one way of putting it."
"But why, if you have once heard the noise, do you wish to have it
repeated? Where we come from, noise is of value only if it is a
means of exchanging scientific information. For example, if my
friend 6758-B tells me that the circumference of your pathetic
planet is roughly 25,000 of your pathetic miles, can you possibly
think that I wish to hear this statement repeated even once, let
alone over and over and over again? Are you humans that forgetful?"
"No, oddly enough, we wish to hear music over and over again not
because we have forgotten it, but precisely because we remember it.
Indeed, it is the music we remember the best that we want to listen
to again and again."
"A baffling species!" The group of aliens murmurs. "Why would you
wish to hear again what you already know? What is the point in it?
If you have absorbed the information the first time, what is the
point in wishing to hear it again? When you have learned that two
plus two equals four -- as we assume you have -- then why go on
repeating it ad infinitum? We are most profoundly puzzled."
"Ah, that is where you are wrong. Music is not information."
"Then what is it?"
Looking around at the interior of their spaceship, I ask, "What is
this machine of yours for?"
"To take us to other worlds."
"That is what our music does. It takes us to other worlds. Only
without the need of such a clumsy contraption." I tell them, with a
quiet sense of superiority.
"So you are claiming that this music of yours is a superior
technology to ours?"
"Oh, vastly." I respond. "For it takes us to worlds that none of
your space ships, however advanced, can ever hope to reach."
Whereupon one of the aliens says, with a sneer, "Let the earthling
prove that this music of theirs takes them to another world."
"Easily. Put me in front of my stereo, and watch me as I listen to
Mozart's opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Then you will see if I
speak truly or not."
We land and the aliens observe me putting the first CD of Mozart's
opera on my stereo. No sooner does the sparkling overture begin
than they commence to whisper to each other. "Look at the
earthling. His hands are swaying and his feet are tapping. And see
how he is smiling rapturously. He appears to be in a kind of
trance. Truly, it seems that he is in another world. And now,
listen to him, he is singing along with the humans in the opera. He
laughs with them, he cries with them. One moment he is dancing,
another he is marching."
At the end of the opera, the aliens see that I have returned to the
earth, and they ask. "Tell us about this world of Figaro you have
been visiting?"
"It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a
world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where
adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a
world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of
power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits.
It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their
husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a
world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the
lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live. It is a
reflection of our own humanity at its best and at its worst --
sordid, silly, sublime. That's why I have chosen it. If nothing
else remains of humanity, then let this be our monument -- for it
will tell your fellow extraterrestrials that here on earth we may
have squabbled and bickered, unlike you, but that, unlike you, we
had a magic that permitted us to turn all our petty human drama
into the most glorious music imaginable -- a music that lifted us
far above ourselves, and above all mortal and passing things."
When I finish my little speech, I notice that the chief alien is
sitting very quietly. He looks up at me, and says, with a bit of
embarrassment, "That tune Figaro sings at the end of the first act.
La-da-da, La-da-da, La-da-duh-duh," he begins tentatively. "You
remember it?"
"It's called Non più andrai. And you hummed it rather well."
"Would it be possible," he asks me rather awkwardly, "if only for
scientific purposes, of course -- would it be possible to hear it
again? Just once?"
"And that other tune -- the one where the little boy Cherubino
sings where he talks about love," another of aliens chimes in.
"Yes, and how about that Sextet in the Third Act? Would it be
possible for us to hear that again, too. Just for scientific
purposes."
We listen to the opera all once more, and a few times after that.
"How foolish of us to have felt that we were your superior," one of
the aliens says toward morning.
"Here, while we were wandering from one boringly rational planet to
another, you humans had already created a heaven on earth for
yourselves. No wonder all human beings love the music of Mozart so
much," the chief alien says as he is about to get back on board the
ship, my copy of Erich Kleiber's recording of Marriage of Figaro
under his flipper-like right appendage. Then with a glance at the
death-ray mounted at the front of the sleek craft, he gives me a
questioning look. "Is it true that all humans love Mozart, is it
not? Because we can deal with those who don't -- quite easy.
Indeed, a mere flick of a switch and they could be vaporized."
I ponder for a moment, then I assure him, "Yes, of course...all
human beings love him. You don't think anyone could fail to love
Mozart, do you?"
"It seems hardly possible," the chief alien agrees, and humming
Figaro's Non più andrai, he and the other alien march happily into
their space craft, and disappear into the fading stars.
Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies. Mozart was
born 250 years ago today.
How to stage a revolution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5367486-110432,00.html
Beaumarchais, the dramatist behind The Marriage of Figaro and The
Barber of Seville, was more than a mere playwright - he shaped the
18th century. By Michael Billington
Michael Billington
Friday January 6, 2006
Pity the poor dramatist whose work becomes a successful opera.
Unless he is Shakespeare or Schiller, he will usually find that he
is simply regarded as source material. So it is with Beaumarchais
whose twin masterpieces, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of
Figaro, are rarely seen outside France and have been largely
superseded by the more famous operas. But, with new productions of
both Rossini's Barber and Mozart's Figaro at Covent Garden, it is
high time we re-examined, and revived, the revolutionary writer who
inspired them.
Louis XVI, with uncanny prophetic insight, said of The Marriage of
Figaro: "For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have
to be torn down first." Napoleon famously described it as "the
Revolution in action". When people question, as they constantly do,
the political potency of theatre, they should always remember the
shining example of Beaumarchais.
The playwright's own bizarre life, from 1732 to 1799, would itself
make a good opera. As a Parisian watchmaker, he invented a
timepiece that was accurate to the second and small enough to fit
inside a ring. As a litigious journalist, he took on a notoriously
corrupt Paris magistrate, Goezman, whose reputation he left in
tatters. As a French 007, he came to the aid of another of Louis
XVI's secret agents, the Chevalier d'Eon, who was a robustly
heterosexual transvestite. And in the 1790s he financed the first
complete edition of Voltaire's works and promoted a monument to
Liberty on the site now occupied by the Eiffel Tower.
As if this were not enough, Beaumarchais could be said to have
helped foment two of the greatest revolutions in history. He
actively encouraged the French government's support of the revolt
of the American colonies, and, in 1777, organised the shipment of
ammunition, guns and military equipment for 25,000 men, which led
to the decisive victory at Saratoga. And, as a playwright, he
created with The Marriage of Figaro a work that decisively shaped
public events in his native France. Even his earlier work, The
Barber of Seville, written in 1775, has its own subversive charge.
Indeed one opera director, William Relton, recently suggested to me
that this is just as radical as The Marriage of Figaro.
On the simplest level, Barber looks like a stock commedia dell'arte
plot. Old, possessive guardian (Bartholo) seeks to marry young ward
(Rosine) but is defeated by the girl's wily lover (Almaviva) and
his servant (Figaro). This is the standard stuff of farce, with
Bartholo as the foolish Pantalone and Figaro as the nippy
Arlecchino.
But what is striking about the play - far more than the Rossini
opera - is the sceptical, questioning nature of the servant and the
extent to which he becomes the author's mouthpiece. In sharp
contrast to the later play, Almaviva and Figaro work towards the
same end: the overthrow of Bartholo's authority. But, from their
opening exchanges, there is not merely an implied equality but an
assumption of superior wit and intelligence on the part of the
servant. When the Count dismisses Figaro as idle and dissolute, the
latter instantly asks: "On the basis of the virtues commonly
required in a servant, does Your Excellency know many masters who
would pass muster as valets?" And it is Figaro who takes the
initiative in suggesting that Almaviva insinuates himself into
Bartholo's house as a drunken soldier. The servant drives the plot,
the master simply executes it.
It is on The Marriage of Figaro, however, that Beaumarchais's
revolutionary reputation rests. For most people the work is chiefly
familiar as transmitted through the Mozart-Da Ponte opera, a
sublime social comedy in which class is clearly a crucial factor.
The Count, still clinging on the residue of droit du seigneur, is
defeated in his designs on Susanna, whose marriage to Figaro is
triumphantly achieved.
What the operagoer misses, however, is the radical fervour that
motors Beaumarchais's play. The dramatic Figaro has a famous
incendiary speech that generalises from his own predicament.
"Because you are a great nobleman," he says to the Count, "you
think you are a great genius. Nobility, fortune, rank, position!
How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such
advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born - nothing
more! For the rest - a very ordinary man. Whereas I, lost among the
obscure crowd, have had to deploy more knowledge, more calculation
and skill merely to survive than has sufficed to rule all the
provinces of Spain for a century." What is clear, as John Wood's
Penguin translation shows, is that this was an assault on the
hereditary principle; and it was understood as such at the time.
John Wells, who did a translation for a 1974 Jonathan Miller
production of the play, pointed out the dangerous parallels the
play offered. "The Count, having renounced his droit du seigneur,
his absolute power over his subjects, is trying illicitly to
re-establish it. Louis XVI, vacillating over the liberal reforms
that Beaumarchais believed would lead to constitutional monarchy,
behaved in exactly the same way." And the king was intelligent
enough to get the point; which is why a play completed in 1782 had
to wait two years before receiving its first public performance at
the Comédie Française.
But did The Marriage of Figaro really help overturn the social
order? Carlyle, I think, was aesthetically wrong but historically
right when he wrote in The French Revolution: "Small substance in
that Figaro: thin wire-drawn intrigues, thin wire-drawn sentiments
and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks
itself, as through a wholly mad universe, adroitly, with a
high-sniffing air: wherein each, as was hinted, which is the grand
secret, may see some image of himself, and of his own state and
ways."
Carlyle, for all his genius, was no dramatic critic: The Marriage
of Figaro is a very fine play. But Carlyle was spot on when he
suggested it afforded everyone an image of himself. At one point,
for instance, the Count complains that "the servants in this house
take longer to dress than their masters" to which Figaro replies,
"Because they have no servants to assist them." It is not difficult
to imagine the effect of exchanges like this on the audience at the
Comédie Française, where the play ran for 100 nights; and, as
Carlyle says: "All France runs with it, laughing applause."
Beaumarchais can be described in many ways: as a fortune-hunting
adventurer, a raffish opportunist, a calculating survivor willing
to flatter the powerful when he needed their patronage. But he was,
above all, an instinctive libertarian whose whole life, as Wood
writes, "was an assertion of individuality against the constraints
of social privilege". That is why he helped shape the 18th century
and why he still speaks to us today: he realised nothing was more
subversive than comedy. And, good as it is to find the Rossini and
Mozart operas he inspired back at Covent Garden, it would be even
better to find his plays given their theatrical due.
Il Barbiere di Siviglia is in rep until January 14, Le Nozze di
Figaro opens on January 31, both at the Royal Opera House, London.
Box office: 020-7304 4000
Peter T. Daniels
on Mozart, or on any other topic whatsoever?
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net