Mozart's Birthday Flow

I sometimes teach a class on jazz appreciation, and one of the first things I tell my students is that our goal is to appreciate the music, not to understand it. And there is no way to come to an appreciation of music except by listening to it. Music scholars love to examine scores, of course, and discuss innovative approaches to sound, but that has absolutely nothing to do with getting to know the music. Music is sound, not notes on a page, and the parts of the brain that take in these two types of thing are entirely different.

It isn't easy to convey in words music's sometimes subtle, and often inexplicable appeal. That's why music critics dwell at such length on biographical and technical issues. Various adjectives and catch-phrases can steer us toward pieces similar to others we already know and love, and the algorithms of music streaming services do the same thing. "If you liked this, then you might like ...."  In the end, the only way to start "digging" the music is to keep listening to it. And there's no guarantee that the appreciation--the emotional connection--will never come.

It being Mozart's birthday, I got to thinking about how easy it is to overlook the depths of his compositions, because we're dazzled, and perhaps bored, by its always graceful surfaces. Two things stand in our way, I think. First, it ought to be pointed out that many of Mozart's works are largely froth. They may be pleasant to listen to while chopping onions or playing dominoes but there isn't all that much going on. 

Beyond that, we need to recognize that passionate intensity, disgruntled rage, and lugubrious moaning are not the only emotions worthy of our interest and affection. Mozart gives us a measure of such stuff—just think of the finale of Don Giovanni or the almost Beethovian Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 for solo piano. But the most unusual and distinctive quality to be found in his work, I think, is a glowing and vibrant melancholy that arises more than occasionally from the midst of those seemingly "typical" passages of formal late eighteenth-century court music.

And the quality that seals the greatness of Mozart's expressiveness, while preventing any of it from getting too far out-of-hand, is its ineluctable flow. Or, to put it another way, in Mozart everything sings.

My interest in Wolfgang's work dates back to my college years. I was a big fan of Stravinsky and Prokofiev in those days. I had purchased an LP of David Oistrakh playing Prokofiev's 2nd Violin Concerto, but it didn't take me long to notice that I preferred the B-side: Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto. I could whistle it for you now, though I haven't heard it in years. (Better not.) 

Since then I've expanded my range of exposure quite a bit, and a few years ago I even purchased a budget forty-volume set of CDs devoted to Mozart's works, which has allowed me to explore the Piano Concertos and other, more obscure, compositions, performed adequately by a catch-all of ensembles including the Strings of Zurich, the Südwestfunk Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden, and the Noordhollands Jongenkoor and Koorschool of the Grote of St. Laurenkerk. This ample set puts me in mind of the Vox boxes and the Murray-Hill collections of my college years.

Earlier today I gave the 3rd Violin Concerto another listen. Still delightful, and the adagio would serve well on many a romantic film soundtrack, along the lines of Elvira Madigan. What next? I've become partial to the piano trios in both modern and pianoforte versions. Susan Graham singing arias? The truly brooding String Quintet in g minor, K. 516? Or better yet, one of Mozart's two later string quintets, with which I'm not so familiar. The clarinet quintet? (A gem.) The so-called "dissonant" quartet in d minor? 

Perhaps the work that best conveys Mozart's flow—his ability to move a variety of voices ahead coherently while retaining a strange and wonderful freedom from the weight of musical architecture—is the Prague Symphony (#39). We often hear it said that the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth offers the pinnacle of musical "development." I beg to differ. To me that opening movement sounds halting and repetitive, as if the composer couldn't figure out how to continue the thought, and therefore returned to his opening statement, only LOUDER.

I had always assumed that my preference for Mozart's 39th was idiosyncratic. After all, it receives less attention by far than the two symphonies that follow. But just now I opened Alfred Einstein's classic work on Mozart (c. 1945)  to the relevant passage and came upon this astute remark.  

"After the elo­quent tension of the slow introduction—how proudly it begins and what conflicts lie behind this apparent assurance!—there comes a move­ment saturated with polyphony, even though the naive listener would not be aware of it. The thematic material, stated in the first thirty-five measures, seems quite heterogeneous, and yet it forms a wonderful unity."

This is exactly the sublime unity of disparate elements—the development within freedom—that I was trying fitfully to describe. A few paragraphs later Einstein makes another important point.  

"For the de­velopment section he reserves a feature of increased intensity: canonic treatment. This development section is one of the greatest, most seri­ous, most aggressive in all Mozart’s works. In it, characteristically, the second theme cannot take part, but must remain untouched. The slow movement is marked only ‘andante’ again, but what a deepening of the concept andante is here! This is no longer a mere intermezzo be­tween two animated movements; it has its own inner animation, and it embodies the most complete combination of a singing quality and polyphonic character."

These enthusiastic, if somewhat technical, phrases don't actually summon the music, but I would hope they'd make you want to go and hear the music.

Einstein's book isn't the kind you'd read cover to cover, but before the day is through, I'll probably pull Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart off the shelf.  It's a book-length meditation rather than a straightforward biography, carrying some of the flow and hidden logic that animates Mozart's greatest works. 

Now I have it here beside me. Opening it at random, I come upon a passage in which Hildesheimer takes Theodore Adorno to task for criticizing the conductor Otto Klemperer for retaining the final sing-song didactic scene in his recording of Don Giovanni.

Of course, any scene coming after what is probably the greatest scene in all opera will be a letdown, but the idea that a work has to end with its dramatic high point is just as great an aesthetic error as the one Adorno rebukes Klemperer for.    

I guess that's not such an interesting example. Without much effort I hit upon the author's criticism of those who glibly make use of Mozart's letters and other documents to advance their theories about who he actually was.

The mas­tery of means which made [Mozart] the greatest and most mysteri­ous musician of all time also stood him in good stead in his verbal statements. He had at his disposal a tremendous syn­thetic-emotional range, with which he could assume many shapes or hide himself entirely, and he employed the whole range without hypocrisy, but also without any compunction about objective truth. When writing, he assumed one of his many personae. He wrote as he saw himself, as he wished or ought to have seen himself, as he had to or sought to appear to others, and as he imagined that others imagined him. But his own words give us no sure way of knowing him as he was.

And while I'm engaged with Hildesheimer, I'm thinking that Mozart's Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments might be just the thing to cue up on the hi-fi. Poking around online I came upon a wonderful display of the original score in Mozart's hand at the Library of Congress. You can take a look here.

Some scholars suggest that the inclusion of a "notturno" movement in this elaborate serenade might indicate it was written for an outdoor performance by torchlight. A pleasant thought on a gray January day. 

Zug Zug the Caveman

With six inches of snow on the way, we went down early this morning to see Zug Zug, the caveman encased in a block of ice that appeared suddenly in the neighborhood a few days ago. It's only a fifteen minute walk from our house, but we drove down before breakfast, planning to beat the crowds and maybe take a stroll through the woods or across the golf course.

Artist Zach Schumack was commissioned to create the life-sized figure for a trade show a year ago. Since then it's been standing in his garage. That seemed like a waste, so he convinced the  Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board to grant permission to relocate it to one of the city parks. The Bassett Creek Gorge in Theodore Wirth Park, on the western edge of the city, was an inspired choice for the new site. It's wooded, there's a delightful creek running nearby, yet it's easy to reach on foot from the parkway, and the golf course parking lot isn't that far away.

Schumack's motive for putting his caveman on exhibit al fresco was to encourage people to get outdoors, stretch their legs, and get some fresh air. In that he succeeded. An article appeared about Zug Zug in the Star-Tribune a few days ago, and since then parking has sometimes been hard to find nearby. By mid-afternoon cars are often parked illegally all the way up the parkway to Golden Valley Road and beyond.

There was no one in sight when we arrived. I was impressed by the sophistication of the sculpture. Zug Zug doesn't photograph well. He isn't encased in ice but in a plexiglas box sitting on a sturdy plinth. It's only when you get close that you can see, through the translucent box, the richness of detail—the boots, the furs, the hair. He looked cool, but he also reminded me of something out of an old Time-Life book.

Then I heard a kingfisher rattling off in the distance. The creek was frozen where we were, but there were some rapids just upstream, also a beaver dam and some wide, reedy pools.

It's hard to get around the fencing protecting the golf course in the summer, but nowadays you can simply walk under the bridge on the ice. Which we did. As we walked across a snow-covered fairway beyond we heard a downy woodpecker drumming, a white-breasted nuthatch beeping, a chickadee gurgling, a robin clucking. A jogger ran by in the woods above us. We passed piles of dead buckthorn that had been flattened as part of a clean-up effort, and copses of living buckthorn, full of sinister black berries, right alongside. At one point we came upon a tree at least a foot in diameter that a beaver had brought down fairly recently.

I've never seen a beaver in the creek, though I've seen a few mink over the years.

 

Five Days in the Woods

Castle Haven. How many years have we been coming up here on New Years, as a Christmas present to ourselves ? I don't know, but we could measure it in decades. Today most of the cabins here are modern, but they're still knotty-pine woodsy. The quilts on the wall were stitched by the owner's mother, I think. And the small painting of the big lake hanging by the bathroom door, to judge from the initials on the bottom, was done by the current owner herself.

On the North Shore, your "cabin in the woods" is likely to be only nominally in the woods. At best, the scene is dominated by the vast openness of the lake: the sky, the clouds, the infinite variety of waves—or ripples— on the water's surface.

Our cabin is only a few feet from the shore of the lake. We come here to ski, to cook, to eat, and to read.

The forecast was for cloudy weather, but we had blue skies and tremendous stars at night.

Everything was coated with frost on the way north, starting with the swampy country in Lino Lakes, just north of Minneapolis. A luminescent morning. The white glow on the branches varied as the cloud cover changed, as if someone had spun the dial of a celestial rheostat back and forth.

We stopped at a wayside rest near Mora, vacant except for seven hunters in camouflage, none of them wearing masks. It's hard to figure what they were hunting this time of year. Squirrels? 

I've always been intrigued by the Cloquet Cutoff. Though the term seems to be going out of style, I heard it many times as an adolescent. It refers to Highway 33, which branches off of I-35 at the Black Bear Casino (a recent addition to the landscape) and takes you to Cloquet rather than Duluth, and on to Virginia, Lake Vermilion, Ely, and even International Falls.

Along the way you pass such lesser outposts as Canyon, Cotton, Aurora, Cook, and the turnoff to the Shangri-La of Meadowlands. When I was young, we almost always went that way to my mom's home town of Virginia or to the family cabin on Lake Vermilion. Nowadays we almost always head for Duluth and on to either a North Shore destination or the BWCA.

But on our recent trip we decided to veer left on the "cutoff" past Cloquet to the Sax-Zim Bog, just north of Meadowlands. It's long-since become an international birding "hotspot," though I can assure prospective visitors that if you want to spend a few hours driving down totally deserted snow-covered gravel roads in the dead of winter, this place is for you.

Hilary and I are supporters. I even carried my "certified Bog Buddy" card in my wallet, in case someone wonders why I wasn't dropping a "Jackson" into the tip jar at the visitors' center. I "gave" at the office.

But all this is entirely beside the point. On our way to Meadowlands we came suddenly upon five vehicles on the shoulder—trucks and SUVs—and we pulled over, too.

"What  are you looking at?" I whispered to the young woman with binoculars wearing an immaculate white stocking cap.

"Great Gray Owl," she replied tersely, without looking my way. I was tempted to ask her, "Where is he?" But to judge from the parallax of the camera-scopes set up on the shoulder nearby he couldn't have been more than forty feet away. Finally I saw him, right in front of me, just beyond the highway ditch, but very well camouflaged.

It's more fun if you spot him yourself, but it's an impressive bird all the same.

Evening grosbeaks

I won't detail our other adventures—grosbeaks, redpolls, Canada jays, etc. We visited several black spruce bog walks and looked at hundreds of chickadees intently without ever seeing a "boreal" version. More than once we heard, "There was one here 15 minutes ago."   

We swooped into Duluth from the north on highway 53 past the metropolis of Twig, down, down, down the hills past four or five iterations of Sammy's Pizza, various health clinics and snow-mobile trailer outlets, an airport, a county jail, and a federal detention center. Churches. Liquor stores. None beautiful, all resting firmly on the billion-year-old Duluth complex. I Think.

A short detour on Woodlawn Avenue to the Mont Royale supermarket for fresh fish. And ketchup. (For the pasties.)

The sun was low and at our backs as we continued up the shore, no frost here on the trees, but blue water, and a single ore boat silhouetted out on the lake near the canal.

Here at our cabin, we "ignite" the gas fireplace, pour ourselves a glass of wine, fry the fresh whitefish we picked up in Duluth, boil the potatoes, and look around for the pepper and salt. What? No salt?    

At dinner we listen to some blowsy ballads by Archie Shepp and Mal Waldron, followed by Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon singing duets from La Boheme.  We're enjoying the true taste of whitefish and Yukon gold. Lots of butter. (Tomorrow we'll drive up to Beaver Bay and buy some salt.)