Today's Listening: Jean Rondeau plays Mozart

 

Yes, you can play Mozart on harpsichord. 

Salzburg: Day 5, Don Giovanni

Of the two Mozart operas in production this year, I chose Don Giovanni because it is one with which I am the most familiar. The other one is La Clemenza di Tito which I hardly know at all. I have actually played in Don Giovanni years ago--there is a brief mandolin part that accompanies an aria. I noticed last night that Teodor Currenzis had, not only a mandolin in the pit, but also a theorbo and what looked like, from a distance, a Baroque guitar. At intermission I got a shot of the Baroque guitar and mandolin, but not the theorbo, but trust me, it was there (though not very audible).

The orchestra pit at intermission with the mandolin and Baroque guitar chatting.

Let me hasten to say that I can't possibly give a review of this performance! I would have to see it four or five more times, study the score in the arrangement that Teodor Currenzis is using (has created) and probably, just be a lot more wise and informed than I am. It is not often that I walk out of a performance at the end feeling truly inadequate to what I have just seen and heard. But in this case, yes. But I do have some observations about the unique appeal of opera.

Just one of the many surprising images from Don Giovanni

Yes, they really did lower a buggy down to the stage at one point--I'm not sure why! They also lowered a four-door sedan (it might have been a Tesla) as well, nose down, but it just disappeared after a while. At one point a baby grand piano just dropped out of nowhere to crash on the stage (I'm pretty sure that was a special prop because dropping a real baby grand piano twenty or thirty feet would probably just go right through the stage). It made an impressive noise, though. And the remnants were somehow used as the continuo for some recitative. I am only able to share the above image because something new at the festival is that, every day of a performance you have a ticket to, they send you an email ahead of time telling you how long the performance will be, as well as some more information. And a photo.

But let me go back a bit--the opera opens with the curtain going up on the interior of what we realize is a church: there is a large crucifix, some large religious paintings and a number of pews facing away from us, toward the crucifix. Before a note of the overture, ghostly figures in white come and remove all the pews, the crucifix and the paintings. Then the overture starts and, believe it or not, a real goat trots across the stage. That I do know the reason for: the goat is an animal associated with the ancient Greek satyr, half-man, half-goat, a solitary creature driven by lust who is the ancestor of the Don Giovanni character.

Quoting from the hefty program booklet:

The reason why Don Giovanni is a dangerous figure is because he strikes at the heart of a symbolic system by replacing Agape by Eros. And Eros--to paraphrase Georges Bataille--is always close bound up with death. Don Giovanni knows neither remorse nor guilt: in order to satisfy his desires he attacks the Law, discrediting and abrogating it. It is not coincidence that his first act in the opera is the killing of a father--the Father.

But I want to talk a bit about what is so compelling about this and other modern opera productions. It is really about creating illusions to intensify the performance. Some of the ones last night included some remarkable images: a line of fire (real fire) suddenly appearing, crossing half the stage (a very large stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus), a scrim dropping down, turning the whole stage area into a ghostly version of itself (this is enhanced by special lighting), oh, and speaking of lighting, there was one moment that I can barely comprehend: Don Giovanni kicks a bunch of stone fragments across the stage and suddenly the lighting changes so that they, and he, appear to be floating on a plane of oil or something unearthly. I have no idea how they did that, but they did and it was eerie to an extreme.

What makes opera so different is that when we see a special effect in a movie, no matter how well it is done, we know it is just a bunch of pixels that came out of a studio in Hollywood. There is nothing real there. But in an opera production, what we see on stage is actually real: that was a real goat, a real naked woman (or dozens of them at one point), those are real singers singing (without any processing or pitch correction), yes, there are stage props, but they are actual material objects, not pixels and the light is actual light. So the whole experience is entirely different. And, well, to me at least, much more interesting.

At the end of the opera the whole cast comes on stage, starting with the hundred or so women extras used in various scenes. By the time we get to the principal singers, there are two hundred people on stage. That plus the nearly one hundred in the orchestra pit starts to give you an idea of just how enormous a production like this is. And I'm not counting any of the backstage technical staff: designers, carpenters, lighting technicians, stagehands and a host of others--costumers! What does a production like this cost? A fortune! Good thing that the primary sponsor of the Salzburg Festival is Audi.

But no, I simply can't give a review, or even a detailed description of what went on--it was four hours long. But I can say that it was masterfully done and the singing and playing was fantastically accomplished. We are living in a golden age of opera production. And Mozart certainly knew what he was doing!

 

Today's Listening: a late Mozart trio

 

Today's Listening

Looking over my CD shelves I have a great box of mainly earlier music from Sony titled "Vivarte." One of the discs contains two divertimenti by Mozart performed by L'Archibudelli ( a string quartet with Anner Bylsma on cello and two natural horns).

All I can find on YouTube is the second movement of K 334, a theme and variations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqz7yp2FYbA

So let's not give up on actual physical media! If I hadn't gotten rid of all my vinyl decades ago I would still have a fantastic album of lute duos that contained a fantastic quick sarabande--the only one I have ever heard. It never made it to CD, let alone to YouTube.

Here is a different track from that lute duet album, and, ironically, YouTube won't embed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6WeYHlQh7s

Today's Listening: Currentzis, Mozart

This is the Mozart concert from the Salzburg Festival last summer by Theodor Currentzis and musicAeterna. Three arias for soprano and the last two symphonies.

I missed this concert but I saw the other one they gave, an evening of Rameau. It was spectacular.

UPDATE: Sorry, the piece in the middle is Masonic Funeral Music with choir, not a soprano aria.

Mozart Matinee

Weekend mornings at 11am the Festival has Mozart Matinees in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum. The orchestra is the Mozarteum Orchestra and there are guest soloists and conductors. This morning those two roles were embodied in the person of Jörg Widmann, clarinetist, conductor and composer. The program was the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, the Clarinet Concerto Kv 622 and the Symphony No. 41 in C major, "Jupiter." Let's have a listen to that overture, perhaps the best one ever:

They did a terrific job, by the way, and the magnificent setting of the gold and white Grosser Saal certainly didn't hurt. Maestro Widman also did a wonderful job with the clarinet concerto and one had the feeling that rarely had one ever hear the clarinet played as well. After intermission was the "Jupiter" Symphony of which the last movement is my candidate for best symphonic finale ever.

Unfortunately, for me, unease set in from the very opening when the first phrase was followed by a giant luftpause (where everything just hangs in the air for a moment before continuing). So already the momentum was broken and this movement should have a lot of momentum. As things unfolded there were gratuitous and exaggerated rallentandos and capricious phrasing. Also, from where I was sitting, in the right side balcony, the balance was off. The principal bassoon was too loud and I could barely hear the trumpets. The second and third movements were all right, but the momentum problems returned in the last movement. Altogether a somewhat disappointing concert. I suppose that with very familiar repertoire like this I am more fussy than with music I know less well.

I was shocked to see that the matinee concert was the most expensive ticket of all and I had the worst seat with bad sight lines. Both the Vienna Philharmonic Beethoven concert and the musicAeterna Rameau concert were actually less expensive and I had better seats.

No concert tomorrow. By the way, I said earlier that I requested a ticket to Berlioz' Damnation of Faust but I thought it had been cancelled. Not so, it is being performed tomorrow, but I just wasn't allotted a ticket. Every concert, except the lieder one, by the way, has been sold out or nearly so. It seems that Salzburg has successfully rescued its festival from COVID hell! And good for them.

Let's have a listen to a performance of the Mozart 41 finale with lots of momentum. This is Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert:

When Will Mozart Get Cancelled?

By "Mozart" I mean not just W. A. Mozart, but all the great composers of classical music from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. The Washington Post just published a very "woke" opinion piece casting real doubt on whether we should maybe have to cancel Shakespeare, or Othello at least:

The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate.

Any theater launching a production of “Othello,” for instance, must begin with a rich body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s sources and intentions. What are we to make of the Moor, the Venetian general manipulated into murderous rage by his villainous white colleague? Even before Othello comes onstage, he’s subjected to obscene racist ridicule. And later, Othello himself laments, “Haply, for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have.”

As a Renaissance writer working in England 250 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. But is “Othello” a racist play, or is it a fledgling critique of racism?

The first impression one gets from this writer, Ron Charles, is that he really hasn't read very much, odd for someone who writes professionally about books. But how else would you explain the comment "Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate." Does he really believe this? Could he even begin to offer evidence for it? It looks to me more like robotic "progressive" mind-reading. Yeah, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. Every single element of that phrase except the proper name is not only questionable, but most likely entirely false.

The classical music world, except for the occasional hit piece from the "new" musicologists, has been pretty free of this kind of barbarity. But for how long? Now that the whole universe of classical music performance has been cancelled (one hopes for not too much longer) will they come for the composers now? If Shakespeare was surely a racist white supremacist, why not Mozart? I hope that our escaping the "great reckoning" so far rests on more than the supposed irrelevance of classical music to mainstream culture.

Mind you, the guilt by association of classical music since WWII because some music was enjoyed by the Nazis is something we have been wrestling with. But so far at least no composer, except for Wagner in Israel, has been actually cancelled. Opera seems the most vulnerable as a number of controversies have grown up around casting in Othello and Madame Butterfly.

I'm kind of looking forward to the first serious attempt to cancel a major composer. Who might be the best candidate from a progressive point of view? We have a few anti-semites but that seems a very minor offence these days. Anyone have any ideas?

For our envoi, here is a vintage performance of the "Dissonance" Quartet by Mozart by the Emerson Quartet:

We're Eclectic!

But only on Saturdays, so don't get used to it. The big news of the day is:

• Today is Domenico Scarlatti's birthday, October 26, 1685 which makes him the same age as J. S. Bach, three hundred and thirty four years old.
• And Kanye West has a new album out--Christian hip-hop. Hmm, the 21st century is not turning out as I expected.

So let's have a couple of pieces. First, one of my favorite Scarlatti sonatas, K. 544, played by Leo Brouwer on guitar:

And a song from the new Kanye West album, Jesus is King, "Closed on Sunday":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp0q1wWe6XI&list=PLPRWtKgY2MOsLn_JUJyzEczn5T7xoDvzt&index=4

And what if you made a song out of the ding you get when you leave your car door open with the keys in the ignition?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yQVcGkbpAc&list=PLPRWtKgY2MOsLn_JUJyzEczn5T7xoDvzt&index=10

Keeping with the religious theme, here is Exsultate Jubilate by Mozart with Regula Mühlemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada:

I've always wondered, did Mozart write stuff like that because he loved sopranos? Or because he hated sopranos?

Going to Hell in a Handbasket

I was hoping to avoid this entirely, but I don't have another convenient topic to post on this morning, so, I guess I have to talk about a performance I saw Friday night. It was a miserable night with a cold drizzle and I was standing waiting for my driver getting wetter and wetter. I nearly threw in the towel. But I had a ticket waiting for me, so... A ticket for what, you ask?

Each year the local classical music series schedules an opera. In past years they have put on Madame Butterfly and other romantic operas. For various reasons, I have not made it to any of these performances which they have been giving for, I guess, four or five years. The cast is made up of singers from the Mexico City opera, sets are minimal and, instead of an orchestra, there is a lone piano. So I wasn't exactly in a hurry to hie myself hither. But this year they are doing Don Giovanni by Mozart, so I thought I would go.

Don Giovanni is one of the few operas I sort of know. I played mandolin in a production of it years ago, shoehorned into the orchestra pit, so I didn't have a good view of the stage. Heh! It was also taken up in a couple of music history courses at university and I have listened to a CD of it along with all the other Mozart operas in my big box Mozart Complete Edition.

I decided to opt for a side balcony ticket instead of a more expensive box or orchestra seat (down in front). Alas, my seat gave me a view of about 10% of the stage and it seemed to be the 10% where very little happened. The production started about fifteen minutes late and the first disconcerting thing was: no overture. We immediately launched into "Notte e giorno faticar." OK. The singing was all right, though not really to my taste. But as time went on the somewhat shaky piano part, the so-so singing and the inability to actually see any of the stage action became more and more tiresome. Also, the handling of the accompaniment of the recitatives showed little sense of 18th century style.

When the intermission belatedly arrived, I just left. I have left lots of concerts in the middle, but never an opera before. I guess I am a bit spoiled by seeing some productions in European opera houses. Sure, there are extreme and understandable limitations on what the local group can do. They have no access to a proper theater. The one they use seats 400 to 500 at the most and the sight-lines are bad for a lot of the seats. There is extremely minimal lighting and the set is nothing more than a painted backdrop. Also, there is no orchestra pit, which means nowhere to put an orchestra even if they could afford one. If the singing was less bombastic and they managed to tuck a string quartet away in a corner somewhere it might have worked. But as it was, it gave the impression of a not very accomplished high school caricature of a Mozart opera. Am I just being a curmudgeon? Well, yes, probably.

If I were to give some advice, it would be to suggest they try and put on something less ambitious, something that they have the resources to handle. But I'm sure that advice will be ignored. What they want to do is familiar works that everyone will want to attend. Well, everyone except me, I guess!

Here's that missing overture:

Mozart: Let's look under the hood!

I promised a post looking at some specifics of why Mozart is a great composer, but I find I have to start by explaining why this is so hard to do. Imagine I am going to try and explain why BMW makes great cars. "German engineering" I might say, with a knowing nod. And does that leave you with a greater understanding? Not unless you already know what is so great about German engineering. The situation is even worse with music because while every well-designed automobile might share certain traits in common like sleek body shape, nimble steering and good power to weight ratios, the thing about music is that every great piece of music is great in its own way.

Even if I am able to demonstrate some aspects of a particular piece by Mozart, it will not necessarily give you any tools to appreciate the next piece by Mozart. The task of a good music theorist is to somehow "explain" how music works, but at the end of the day, all he can do is give a generic account. He can explain everything except that touch of unique genius that makes a piece a great one instead of just a fairly good one. This is one of those awkward things about music and art in general that make it seem so mysterious to the uninitiated. I am going to take a look at a couple of pieces by Mozart and then I think you will see what I am talking about.

Now the question is, should I pick a pair of pieces that are superficially similar so we can see how different they are underneath, or just pick two different pieces? Agh! It will probably be more interesting to pick two pieces that are, on the surface at least, fairly similar, as I think that will make the contrasts more pointed.

I'm going to pick an early work, not terribly well known, and a later, very famous movement. Both of these are andante. The first piece is the middle movement from one of Mozart's divertimenti for strings he wrote after returning to Salzburg after his second trip to Italy in 1771. He was sixteen years old and, being Mozart, a fully mature composer. This is just the middle of the three movements and we are just going to look at the first theme:

Here is the first section in score:

Click to enlarge

The first section, up to the repeat sign, takes 1:23 to play in this performance. There are two phrases, each divided into shorter sections. The first is an entirely conventional eight-measure phrase beginning on the tonic and ending with a very typical half cadence on the dominant. The second phrase, however, has thirteen measures and provides a great contrast with the first. It begins with a sequence containing some very touching dissonances. Take for example the last measure in the second system where the octave plus a major seventh of the downbeat moves to a minor second before resolving to a minor third. This moves to an octave plus a minor seventh moving to a major second! This is followed by some fairly conventional cadential material that modulates to the dominant and the section ends with a perfect authentic cadence in G (the movement is in C).

The piece I am going to compare to this is the andante, the middle slow movement, of the Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467. This was one of a string of extraordinary concertos Mozart wrote in Vienna, this one in 1785 when he was twenty-nine years old. The first theme takes exactly the same time to play as the section of the divertimento we just looked at: 1:23:

Here is the score of the first theme. I am just quoting the string section (the winds come in in measure eight and add harmonic color) as the first violins have the theme. At the end of this section, the piano enters with its statement of the theme.

Click to enlarge

This theme has one measure of accompaniment before the melody begins. It comprises one long, long single theme (even with discernable sections) that goes on for twenty-two measures, but seems almost timeless. The most striking thing about this theme is the enormous leap in measure eight and again in measure ten down two octaves and a third!! This is followed by a sequence of the most delicate and haunting dissonances over a dominant pedal starting in measure twelve. Then there is a deceptive cadence to D minor in measure nineteen, lent extra weight by tonicizing the vi chord (D minor) with its viiº7. It sounds as if this might be a modulation, but it is immediately followed by the real cadence ending this very long phrase on the tonic, F major. Is it just an artifact of the way the scores are laid out, or does this phrase sound much longer than the first section of the divertimento we looked at?

So, two movements, both andantes, and the opening themes each take 1:23 to play. But how remarkably different they are! Sure, they share the same harmonic language, use similar note values and so on. But where it counts, in the ear of the listener, they are so very different.

There are so many things I haven't talked about, such as, for example, the way that the first two measures of the piano concerto theme, with the double-dotted rhythm, is answered and balanced, not by elaborating it, but by simplifying it! The answer to those opening measures uses only halves, quarters and eighths. Most pieces by most composers would put the simpler idea first, but Mozart does the reverse and makes it seem magical.

Every time a composer of Mozart's stature approaches a piece he solves the eternal problems of unity, variety, complexity, simplicity and so on in different ways. This is why, if you want to talk about the music with any degree of specificity, you have to look at each piece as an individual work of art. The problem for theorists, is that they try to abstract the things composers do into general rules or stylistic traits. This only goes so far and usually results in squeezing what is most obvious to the listener, out: the magic.

Just for fun, let's end with yet another Mozart andante (he wrote hundreds), this one from the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. Notice how the theme is very, very different from both of the ones we just looked at:

What's so great about Mozart?

I'm stealing the title of a talk I went to this week, largely because I think that the talk not only failed to answer the question (that's ok, it is rather a difficult question) but it also rather failed to express the question clearly, getting lost in the rough of references to Amadeus and Mozart's corrections to a student's exercise.

But it is quite an interesting question, so let's take a poke at it. The word "great" can cause a lot of conniptions these days because it implies, shudder, inequality and even, shudder again, judgement about quality. Now I don't think we should be too afraid of making judgements, that is in fact what our minds are for, among other things. The only thing that should worry us is that we make well-founded judgements.

In the case of Mozart, this has already been taken care of for us by History. Over the last two hundred years or so audiences and musicians have clearly expressed a great appreciation for the music of Mozart, to the extent that I doubt that too many would disagree. In fact, I don't recall ever having read a serious critique of Mozart saying he was not a great composer. Hmm, that sounds like an interesting challenge... But no, let's not! Instead, let's try and pick out some of the reasons, general and specific, why Mozart really stands out as a composer.

He is one of the great opera composers with spectacularly successful examples like Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro and others. He is one of the great concerto composers with the string of absolutely lovely and elegant concertos he wrote in Vienna in the 1780s. Here is an example:

He is one of the great symphony composers whose later symphonies are some of the most popular ever written. Here is his last, the Symphony No. 41:

He is one of the great chamber music composers who wrote some pretty good string quartets, some superb quintets and the first great string trio:

He is, in fact, the only composer who excelled equally at both opera and instrumental music.

So that's the general. But what is it specifically about Mozart's music that distinguishes it from the music of so many of his humdrum contemporaries? There is no simple answer to that question. I could say that Mozart has a charm, a clarity, a balance and an economy of means that the others lack, but that really doesn't tell you anything, does it?

The answer is going to involve looking at a piece or two in some detail. One person that has done this is Charles Rosen in two superb books: The Classical Style and Sonata Forms. In them he spends hundreds of pages talking about quite a number of pieces by Mozart in some detail. I think I might try to do something similar, but that will be in another post. In the meantime, enjoy the pieces I posted above!

"You have too much Mozart!"

I had a friend over for lunch the other day and asked her to pick out some music while we ate. She went to my CD shelves and, after a couple of minutes, said: "You have too much Mozart!" This is what is on my shelf:

170 CDs. Is that too much? She picked out the first CD, which is the early symphonies. Number one was composed when he was eight years old. So can you have too much Mozart?

I'm thinking about Mozart today because this afternoon I am going to a lecture titled "What's so great about Mozart?" in which the speaker expresses puzzlement about why Mozart is great despite not being a great innovator or revolutionary. I put up a post about this very question quite recently: Does greatness always involve being revolutionary? The thing about Mozart is that he is a very great composer, but showed few signs of being either an innovator or a revolutionary. As my previous post points out, it was Beethoven that set that model.

Mozart is not the only composer that seems to go against the model narrative that we have: great composers are great because they were innovative and revolutionary. For the last hundred years we have followed this narrative so slavishly that many composers have pursued their careers as if the only criteria was to be innovative and revolutionary: John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez are merely the most well-known. An astonishingly large amount of bad music has been created as a result.

But Mozart is not the only great composer to not be primarily an innovator nor revolutionary (though you can find some elements in his music). Another one would be J. S. Bach. Both of these composers absorbed the whole of the musical style and genres of their time and then went on to simply perfect them. Bach certainly did not invent the fugue, nor its basic techniques of stretto, inversion and so on. He just did it better than anyone else. Similarly with Mozart. He did not invent the symphony or string quartet or opera--though he very nearly invented the piano concerto! But he just did them better than anyone before him (and pretty much everyone since as well!).

What the last hundred years in composition seem to be telling us is that there is not a wealth of styles and genres just waiting for someone to come along and perfect them, but rather a dearth of them!

What do you think?

Let's have a couple of examples of non-innovative, non-revolutionary music. This is the "Dissonant" Quartet by Mozart, often claimed to be revolutionary by people who have no knowledge of the outrageous harmonies found in pieces like Les Elemens  by Jean Féry Rebel or a host of pieces by C. P. E. Bach:

And this is the Magnificat by J. S. Bach, coming out of a long tradition of festive settings of sacred texts:

One Mozart Theme

Most writing about music takes place in a rosy-tinted fog of unknowing. They talk about how "vibrant" the music is, or how "edgy" or "expansive" it is. Here is an example from a recent review in the Guardian of a CD of Sibelius symphonies:

It’s all played with immense care, but Elder’s view of the miraculously organic opening movement, which transforms from ambiguous exposition to hyperactive scherzo, is brisk and matter of fact, almost peremptory at times, so that the weight of the great affirmative climaxes and the sense of release when the scherzo finally takes wing don’t carry the charge they do in some performances.

You might hear what they are talking about if you listen to the CD--or at least convince yourself you do--but if you actually looked at the score you would see none of this, at least, not without a great deal of analyzing and speculating. Talking about music using the adjectives of ordinary language doesn't get us very close to the music.

So let's take a close look at a particularly interesting theme by Mozart and see what is actually going on. One of my favorite symphonies has long been the Symphony No. 29 in A major. Here is the piece played by The English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

I'm not going to talk about the whole piece, or even the whole first movement. No, I just want to look at the first thirty seconds or so, which feature a very unusual theme, first quietly and then louder with a counterpoint. Here is the whole opening theme in score:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The first theme ends with cadence from mm. 31 to 32. Let's break it down a bit. It starts with this motif, with the octave drop:

That is just the first and part of the second iteration: the whole of this first phrase has that same motif three times, each a step higher forming a sequence. The motif takes up three measures so the three iterations take up nine measures with a cadence into the first beat of that 9th measure. Then there are four measures of a linking passage using turns to take us from one A up an octave to another A. Then the first phrase repeats, this time forte with a interesting counterpoint. The first and second violins repeat the opening phrase in unison and a half note later it is echoed in the violas and cellos giving it much more intensity by means of the canon, the dynamic and the range. This canonic echo is delayed a half note and is harmonized in thirds: the violas begin a fourth below the violins and the cellos a sixth below. This continues through the three steps of the sequence. Instead of the turn passage this is followed by fourteen measures of tremolando cadential figures that cement a modulation to the dominant, E major. Then the second, more lyrical theme, continues in E major. All this takes up about 34 seconds of the beginning of the symphony.

I can't talk about the nuts and bolts of what is going on here without using technical terms any more than I could talk about how a car motor works without using words like carburator and piston. So here are some definitions. And remember, you can always look up musical terms in Wikipedia, which does a pretty good job with them.

• theme: a fairly small structural section in music. In the Classical era they were typically eight or sixteen measures in length and always ended with some form of cadence
• motif: a brief group of notes that can be used in various ways and are usually repeated. The da-da-da-dum that begins the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven is a good example as is the three measure idea that begins this symphony
• sequence: device where a motif is repeated at a different pitch
• cadence: the most important structural device in tonal music. Cadences are in three major varieties: the perfect authentic cadence, the V7 to I that ends all Classical era pieces and most major sections. Weaker cadences are the half cadence, I to V and we also encounter deceptive cadences, V to vi.
• canon: a canon is a texture in music where one voice closely imitates another. The schoolroom example is "Row, row, row your boat" where each subsequent voice is an exact repeat of the first. But there are more complex examples like this one, where the imitating voices are a fourth and sixth below and a half note later. There is a fascinating canon by Bach where the imitating voice is four measures later, a fourth lower, upside down and in note values twice as long!!
• tremolando: a texture where a note is given a rapid reiteration
• modulation: in tonal music, the notes are organized into keys. The key of A major, for example, uses the notes found in the A major scale. Tonal music often uses the device of modulation where the music moves to a different key. It is a bit like shifting gears
• turn: a very commonly used four note motif where a note is spun out by first giving the note above, then the note, then the note below and then the note again

I think that is all the technical terms I used!

Now go back and listen to that opening theme again. Then listen to the whole movement. That delightful opening theme returns later on in the movement.

Just a final note: I said that Classical themes were typically eight or sixteen measures long and that is true. But of course the great composers like Mozart are NOT typical. This opening theme has two big phrases: the first is twelve measures long and the second is twenty measures long. Also, the prominent use of the falling octave interval is very unusual for a classical theme. You might also note how extremely parsimonious the basic motif is: there is literally nothing there except the octave drop and the lower neighbor note. Here is another performance of the symphony:

UPDATE: I just have to add that Mozart was all of eighteen years old when he wrote this symphony.

Mozart: Symphony No. 38 in D major, K. 504 "Prague"

I've just been listening to the later Mozart symphonies and it has to be admitted that, compared to Haydn, when it came to the symphony Mozart was a bit of an underachiever. He only wrote forty-some while Haydn wrote one hundred and six and where Mozart wrote one symphony nicknamed "Paris", Haydn wrote six. Mozart wrote a symphony for Linz and another for Prague, but when Haydn went to London, he wrote twelve. Also Haydn was remarkably consistent: even from the earliest symphonies he adopted the four-movement form and continued it throughout his output. Quite a few of Mozart's symphonies are in the earlier three-movement Italian sinfonia form that was a slighter variety, suitable as an instrumental interlude in an opera or oratorio. Some of them feel a bit as if he had knocked them off in a day.

But all that being said, Mozart, in a number of late symphonies, achieved heights that Haydn could not quite match and even Beethoven could rarely equal. Among these is the Symphony No. 38, nicknamed the "Prague" symphony as it was first performed there in early 1787. First let's listen to it and then we will dig into it a bit. This is the Vienna Concentus Musicus, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor:

I particularly like Harnoncourt's Mozart (and Schubert and Beethoven) because it is both rhythmically incisive and strongly expressive. He takes about ten minutes longer with this symphony than do most others, thirty-seven minutes as opposed to between twenty-five and twenty-nine minutes, and one of the reasons is that he repeats, not only the exposition of the opening allegro, but also the development and recapitulation, which is not marked to be repeated in the score. But it works, so why not--we can certainly stand to hear it again.

Like many of the later Mozart symphonies, though not the last two, this one begins with a dramatic adagio introduction:

This, while rhythmically energetic, just outlines the tonic. Immediately after, Mozart starts tonicizing some other keys, like B minor:

This is V6 to i in B minor. Then the same in E minor (flutes, oboes and bassoon):

Then V4/2 to I in G major:

Other keys he visits are D minor and B flat major before settling on A major, the dominant of D, which sets us up for the allegro in the tonic. This immediately suggests the subdominant, G:

Every major theme in this allegro makes use of syncopation; here it is quarter, half, quarter and then there is this variation with, again, the offbeats stressed:

A strong, repeated note theme makes an appearance:

And then this contrasting theme, which seems to grow out of the repeated-note one:

There are some slinky chromatic figures and the return of some earlier themes, but that along with some passage and cadential work, takes us to the end of the exposition.

Since this post is already pretty big, with a lot of scary musical examples, I think I will just stop here and let you discover how Mozart develops these themes in the rest of the movement. After he does that, the opening theme returns in the tonic key, which takes us into the recapitulation.

What is marvelous about this, and much Classical period music, is the fluidity, grace and adroit use of different keys to create a spontaneous sounding, but highly organized piece of music.

Let's listen again. This is  René Jacobs and the Freiburger Barockorchester with quite a brisk version:

Footnote: Sometimes before doing one of my drive-by analyses of a Classical era piece I have a look at what Charles Rosen has written on it, but other times I prefer to just start from scratch. In this case I had quite forgotten that Rosen did a brilliant analysis of this movement in his Sonata Forms (pp 202 - 220) where he quotes nearly all of the first movement as a musical example. I recommend highly reading it for a detailed look at just how truly magnificent this movement is. Rosen calls it "Mozart's most massive achievement in the symphonic genre--a work which unites grandeur and lyricism as no other..."

Mozart: Marriage of Figaro, Act II, Finale

Like all classical musicians I had heard so much about Mozart that I started to glaze over every time I heard his name. But unlike most classical musicians, as a guitarist, I had virtually no opportunity to play his music apart from briefly learning the mandolin so I could accompany an aria in Don Giovanni.

But a while back I noticed that I had almost no Mozart on my CD shelves so I decided to fill the gap. The Complete Mozart was available at an amazingly low price so I ordered it. I did a quick browse through the discs--which took a few months since there are 170 of them! But now I am just completing a second, more thorough listening. The operas come last and I am just about to listen to Don Giovanni. A few days ago I listened to The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze de Figaro in the original Italian).

I also read a couple of biographies of Mozart, one execrable and one quite good. As I recall, in one passage in the quite good one the author writes that every couple of months, for most of his life, Mozart would write a work of true genius. He names a few, like the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra or the Quintet in G minor, or the Linz Symphony.

One of the real failings of the very successful film of Mozart's life, Amadeus, is that his genius is underrated if anything. When you say that every couple of months he wrote something of real genius this means that every couple of months he wrote something that was as good if not better than what most composers manage once in their lives. If that. Stravinsky wrote one astonishing piece of music in his life: the Rite of Spring. Shostakovich perhaps two. Beethoven wrote perhaps four or five. Bach a dozen or so. But Mozart wrote something devastatingly astonishing every couple of months.

I ran across one of these feats of genius in the Marriage of Figaro. Act II (of four acts) ends with a twenty minute finale, as was common in the opera buffa. Mozart precedes this with a little duet:

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Then the Finale itself starts with a trio:

Followed by a quartet:

Followed by a quintet:

And finishing, almost unbelievably, with a septet in which there are seven different characters on stage simultaneously, each with different lyrics to different melodies and rhythms:

Here is what Charles Rosen had to say about it:

The tour de force of this new conception of musical continuity in drama as an increasing complexity of independent units is the famous second act finale, which moves from duet, through trio, quartet and quintet to septet in a magnificently symmetrical tonal scheme.

I couldn't possibly sort it all out for you today, but Paul Zweifel has done a beautiful job of giving the background and sorting out the plot for you here. Oh yes, and the whole thing is structured by being in sonata form: exposition, development and recapitulation.

Here is just that final septet, with subtitles in English:

And here is the whole of Acts 1 and 2 from the 2006 Salzburg Festival:

Why Mozart is Considered a Child Prodigy

I've been listening, off and on, to the complete Mozart lately (170 CDs!) and keep running across interesting stuff. I finally got to the operas and was amazed to discover that, not only did Mozart write 22 operas, but he started when he was a mere lad of eleven years. Unlike eleven-year old slackers who might only write one opera, he actually wrote two. His first, in German, titled "Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots" is sometimes termed an oratorio, but as there are stage directions, it is best classified as a "sacred play with music." This was premiered in March of 1767. His second opera of the year, composed to a Latin text, was Apollo et Hyacinthus, in three acts, premiered in May of 1767. Then, of course, he went on to write two more operas when he was twelve. The first is a one act comic singspiel (meaning with spoken dialogue) in German, titled Bastien und Bastienne. There was an unconfirmed premiere in October of 1768. He followed this up with La finta semplice, an opera buffa to an Italian libretto. This is a full, three act opera in 558 pages of score. This was premiered in May 1769.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned, Mozart was born in January, 1756.

Now if you are thinking that these were some sort of stunt with the music actually being written by his father, an established composer and violinist, not at all. Even years before this, Mozart was already correcting his father, rather than the other way around. Yes, by age eleven probably and certainly by age twelve, Mozart was a fully accomplished opera composer who had already written operas in three different languages. These are not "student" works of dubious accomplishment, but quite acceptable operas. Certainly they are not at the level Mozart would achieve later in life, no Don Giovanni or Magic Flute, but perfectly decent operas.

The opening theme of the overture to Bastien und Bastienne is very similar to the opening theme of the Eroica Symphony by Beethoven:

And here is La finta semplice, the whole opera, but with the recitatives omitted. Barbara Hendricks (Rosina), soprano; Siegfried Lorenz (Don Cassandro), bass; Douglas Johnson (Don Polidoro), tenor; Ann Murray (Giacinta), soprano; Eva Lind (Ninetta), soprano; Hans Peter Blochwitz (Fracasso), tenor; Andreas Schmidt (Simone), bass; Kammerorchester "CPE Bach", conducted by Peter Schreier.

The list of composers who were accomplished enough to write full-length operas at age eleven or twelve is a very short one indeed. There is only one name on that list:

Mozart

Two Musical Diversions

Classical music is supposed to be something serious. It is, after all, High Art. You have to dress up and sit quietly while other very well-dressed people render, with great exactitude, the Profound Thoughts of Great Composers. And sure, there is certainly a fair amount of truth in that. For a few concerts, at least. But this blinkered view of classical music is far from complete. A great deal, probably most, classical music is, and is intended to be, simple (or not so simple) diversion. A relief from the worries of the day. A delight and pleasure.

As examples, I want to introduce to you two of my favorite pieces by Mozart. By happenstance they are both called, by him, divertimenti, though they are very different pieces. The first he wrote in his youth, in Salzburg, where he was in the employ of the archbishop, in between two visits to Italy, where he was given great honors and exposed to the best of Italian music. We don't know what the occasion was, but the just-turned-sixteen years old Mozart wrote three divertimenti for strings, each with three movements. Most divertimenti from this period have, as we will see, more movements, but 18th century composers were not too fussy about following that sort of rule.

My favorite is the third one, K. 138 and it begins like this:

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This is an eight-measure sentence that isn't quite typical. What Mozart could do, even as a very young composer, is compose a seemingly endless flow of beautiful, balanced, fresh and delightful melody. Perhaps this is a consequence of his Italian journeys. The movement that I love the most is the meltingly beautiful Andante, the second movement:

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The phrase that really stands out is not the conventional first one (eight measures, but at this slow tempo probably best seen as two periods, the first ending on the tonic and the second on the dominant). No, it is the next eight-measure sentence with its heart-breaking Corelli seconds that catches the ear. It ends with a full cadence in the dominant followed by a five-measure extension using a repeated cadential formula. The last movement is a sparkling Presto.

Let's listen to the whole piece. This is Ton Koopman conducting the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra:

The whole piece is, in that performance, just a bit over 13 minutes long. Much later, towards the end of his life, Mozart wrote another divertimento that, while it does follow the typical divertimento format of an opening and ending allegro with two slow movements interspersed with two minuets and trios, in all other aspects completely transcends the genre. For one thing, instead of being for winds or mixed ensemble, it is for string trio, very nearly the first string trio ever written. It is also a formidably long piece, not much short of an hour in length. Each of the first two movements, an allegro and an adagio, is as long as the whole Divertimento K. 138. But it is not a complex piece, with excessive virtuosity or dense textures. It has the simplicity of great maturity, as if the music had been distilled down to its essence. It was written in 1788, the year of his last three symphonies and the "Coronation" Piano Concerto. Here is the beginning:

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I just posted a performance of this the other day, but I didn't say anything about it. We don't know anything about the circumstances of the composition, but it is dedicated to a fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg, from whom Mozart frequently borrowed money when he was short. In his book The Classical Style Charles Rosen comments on this piece that after showing his mastery of writing for the string quartet in the years 1782 to 1786 Mozart went on to expand the scope enormously in the two great string quintets of 1787, then with this piece he does something no other composer except Bach really succeeded in: mastering how to concentrate musical texture into only three voices. As Rosen says, this string trio really stands above all others and offers a model, in its transference of the multiple movements of the divertimento into a piece of chamber music, for the late quartets of Beethoven, which often exceeded the standard four-movement layout. Without further discussion, let's listen. The performers are François Fernandez, violin; Ryo Terakado, viola; Rainer Zipperling, cello:

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the name of this second divertimento! It is the Divertimento, K. 563 in E flat major.

The Amazingly Young Mozart

We all know, at least I talk about it a lot, how remarkable Mozart was. He was able to write the hundreds and hundreds of pieces he did because, even though the died at the very young age of thirty-five, he still had a thirty year composing career. Yes, he began composing at age five. Probably just weeks after he first climbed up on the piano bench. Sure, the early pieces are just little minuets, but pretty good little minuets.

At that age most of us are still trying to master the proper use of the fork. His first symphony came at age eight:

When the rest of us were learning how to ride a bike. When Mozart and his father embarked on an extended tour of Europe for three years, when Mozart was between seven and ten years old, one of the things that they did was give public exhibitions of Mozart's uncanny skills. He would show up, sit down at the piano and offer to sight read any piece of music. In London he was reported to have sight sung an Italian aria while simultaneously reducing the orchestral score and playing it on piano. At eight years of age. Without seeing it with your own eyes it is hard to imagine the impact of this. But we can try. Watch this clip from Amadeus:

First of all, the characters are all rendered a bit stereotypical for the sake of creating an entertaining farce. The Emperor was likely a rather more formidable person than is depicted here: he was after all the absolute ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Also, all the musicians, including Salieri, were highly skilled professionals, not the bumblers depicted. Another misstep is Mozart's reaction to anything having to do with Italy. He spent a lot of his formative years there and spoke Italian very well. I'm sure that, when greeting Italian maestros of music, he would have responded in Italian and he certainly loved Italian opera! He wrote a lot of it! But where this clip really falls down is in the levels of skill it displays. In reality, Salieri's march would have been a far more accomplished one. But the supposed demonstration of musical memory and compositional skills Mozart shows here are far too rudimentary. Imagine him doing something a hundred times more skilled. And now, imagine him doing it at nine or ten years old!

All that Mozart's character does in this scene is correct a clumsy 6/4 harmony (I think he replaces it with a vi chord?) and then just adds some rudimentary melodic decoration which he repeats in octaves. Then he adds some Alberti bass and turns it into a different piece. I'm sure that Mozart age eight could have done better!! Here is the Andante K. 15, written when Mozart was eight and a much better piece than Salieri's march:

So, now, replay that whole scene from the movie in your mind, but instead of Mozart being a fully-grown man of perhaps thirty years, imagine he is eight years old.

That is what is so remarkable about Mozart. He seems to have been a fully mature musician from his earliest years.

When he was ten years old he wrote a quodlibet in seventeen movements, the last of which is a fugue for orchestra:

As his father wrote to him once, "Wolfgang, you can imitate anything."

Young Mozart

I doubt we will ever get over our fascination with the very young Mozart. A recent concert in London began with Mozart's first concert aria, composed in London at age eight while on a nearly three-year tour of Europe with his father, and ended with another aria composed just after he left London, at age nine. I've been listening to all the Mozart symphonies lately and I'm up to number 30--and he still isn't out of his teens! The Symphony no. 30 in D major was composed in 1774, when he was just eighteen. But never mind that, let's listen to that first concert aria composed by Mozart, aged eight. Here is "Va, dal furor portata," K21:

And no, his father didn't "help" him with it. Even at eight, Wolfgang was a more accomplished musician than his father. A witness to some of Mozart's feats in London:

Daines Barrington who, fascinated by Mozart’s presence in London, compiled a report for the scientific Royal Society after setting the eight-year-old an apparently impossible musical task. The child “showed the most extraordinary readiness of invention”, read Barrington’s report; in singing an unknown Italian duet and simultaneously sight-reading the orchestral parts at the harpsichord alongside his father, Mozart not only “did full justice to the duet” but also pointed out and corrected his father’s mistakes.

Now sight-singing an unknown melody while simultaneously sight-reading the accompaniment on keyboard is not an impossible task: in fact it is an element of musical training found in a number of methods including Paul Hindemith's Elementary Training for Musicians. But if the accompaniment is orchestral parts that you have to reduce at sight AND if you are just eight years old, yes, that's pretty impressive! Mind you, he did even more astonishing things on a trip to Italy a few years later. He transcribed, from memory, a whole complex piece for eight voices by Allegri, after hearing it once. The piece is about ten minutes long. Now that is the most extraordinary feat of musicianship I have ever heard of. I'm sure they left it out of the movie Amadeus because it would just not be believable!

Now let's hear that other concert aria, composed when he was nine years old. This is "Conservati fedele" for soprano and orchestra:

No, I don't think there has ever been a musical genius to equal Mozart. It is a very good thing he started so young, because he only lived for thirty-five years...

Concerto Guide: Mozart Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D minor, K. 466

As I mentioned last week, the two great concertos K. 466 and 467 are a bit akin to the two last symphonies of Mozart, no. 40 in G minor and no. 41 in C major. Unlike later composers, Haydn and Mozart both used minor keys fairly rarely and pieces in minor tend to have a special intensity. There are only two piano concertos in minor out of the over twenty that Mozart wrote: this one and K. 491 in C minor. Similarly, out of the over forty symphonies from Mozart there are only two in minor, the 40th and the 25th, both in G minor.

It was the D minor concerto along with a few other remarkable works like the 40th symphony and Don Giovanni that created the mythic persona of Mozart that the 19th century was so enamored of. As Charles Rosen says:

It is one of the fullest realizations of that aspect of Mozart which the nineteenth century quite rightly names 'daemonic', and which, for so long, made a balanced assessment of the rest of his work so difficult.

Because the daemonic is just one side of Mozart, a very complex figure.

This concerto is not necessarily a greater composition than many others from around this time, but it does have considerable power, some of which has to do with an impeccable control of rhythmic impetus. The very opening has considerable punch with its French overture like upbeats and syncopated accompaniment:

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When this orchestral theme returns, this time joined by the solo piano, we see another rhythmic layer added in the sixteenth notes in the piano:

And soon the harmonic tempo quickens as well with the one harmony per bar changing to two:

There are a host of other details in this passage that include a stacking up of wind entrances, doubling of rhythmic values in the violins and violas, and movement of the sixteenth notes to the left hand of the piano. This is all done in a subtle, overlapping manner but the general effect is that of a building excitement. It might not be too far-fetched to see this kind of passage as being the model for the famous "Rossini crescendo".

Let's listen to this first movement performed and conducted by Mitsuko Uchida. The passage I was excerpting above appears around the 3:49 mark:

Another very revealing comment by Rosen, found in his The Classical Style p. 233 is:

No concerto before K. 466 exploits so well the latent pathetic nature of the form--the contrast and struggle of one individual voice against many. The most characteristic phrases of the solo and the orchestra are never interchanged without being rewritten and reshaped: the piano never plays the menacing opening in its syncopated form, but transforms it into something rhythmically more defined and more agitated; the orchestra never plays the recitative-like phrase with which the piano opens, and which it repeats throughout the development section.

He is referring to this passage, when the solo piano first enters:

This comes at the 3:16 mark in the above performance.

Instrumental solos prior to this, whether in concertos by Vivaldi or Bach, or even in symphonies by Haydn, were really about simple musical contrasts of dynamic, texture and timbre. They carried little or no existential weight. Often they were written as a compliment to a gifted soloist, enabling them to show off their virtuosity. But as we see in this concerto particularly, Mozart went far, far beyond these simple contrasts and goals. The introverted entrance of the piano is itself a contradiction of the normally virtuosic role of the piano soloist that we are used to even in previous concertos by Mozart. Instead, the significance of every musical detail becomes more than merely musical in a technical sense. It was this that the Romantics loved and responded to in Mozart. There is a dramatic intensity to this music that is rather a new thing in instrumental forms. This came naturally to Mozart who was, uniquely, also the master of opera.

After this concerto by Mozart and ones by Beethoven that were obviously inspired by this kind of heightened dramatic treatment, the concerto form was forever altered. This concerto was a favorite of Beethoven who not only played it himself, but composed a cadenza for it (as Mozart did not leave one). This concerto was premiered on the 10th of February, 1785 and, as we learn from a letter from Mozart's father, Leopold, may have been played with no rehearsal! Mozart only recorded the completion of the work in his journal on the same day.

Let's listen to another performance of the piece. Here is Malcolm Bilson on fortepiano: