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."
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.
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