Mozart by Dr. Timothy Jones
Timothy Jones is a pianist,
conductor and
musicologist.
He read Music at Christ Church
Oxford and wrote his doctoral dissertation on technical
aspects of Mozart's Piano Concertos. From 1992-94 he was
Lecturer in Music at St
Peter's College Oxford, and from 1994-2005 Lecturer in Music
at the University of Exeter, latterly becoming Director of
Music Programmes. Since 2005 he has been part of the
Programme Management Team at the Royal Northern College of
Music, where he lectures on Music Theory and History.
Timothy Jones is the author of 'Beethoven: The Moonlight and
Other Sonatas', 'Mozart's Viennese Piano Concertos: A
Poetics of Musical Entertainment', a new completion of
Mozart's Requiem, and academic articles on Mozart, Haydn and
Beethoven. He
also writes on Schenkerian theory and French music in the
late nineteenth century.
Introduction
Mozart then and now
Balloon basket is a pretentious party game in which
nominations for ‘man overboard’ whittle down the great
figures in any particular field until one character remains
in the basket, supreme. When composers are the topic of this
game, no doubt Mozart is often the man left aloft, after
Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, Beethoven – even Bach – have
been jettisoned. To say that Mozart is ‘the greatest’
composer is of course merely to express a matter of taste,
and therefore of no real interest other than to the person
who utters it. But to ask why Mozart has claims to be a
worthy winner of balloon basket is a more interesting
question. Why should we be interested in the man, and – more
importantly – why should we, a western culture at large,
value his music so highly? What did he have to say,
musically, to his contemporaries, and what does he have
still to say to us?
Answers to these questions are necessarily complex. Mozart
and his music meant many things to many people even when he
was alive. In the two hundred years since his death the
picture has become yet more complicated by myth making and
unmaking, the vagaries of taste and the shifting sands of
value judgements. Those who applauded early performances of
Die Zauberflöte in the autumn of 1791 must have thought that
Mozart had the common touch, a directness of expression, and
a fluency in creating memorable tunes; so thought the Prague
audiences who had taken Figaro to their hearts four years
earlier. But for cognoscenti, there was more to appreciate.
According to his greatest contemporary, Haydn, Mozart’s
strength was his incomparable combination of technique and
taste. And an admiring circle of supporters in Vienna valued
his abilities as a performer-composer and improviser,
perceiving also that his intensely expressive playing
carried over into his notated music. According to his widow,
Mozart himself was particularly proud of his church music,
especially the power of its sublime, elevated style. But
others found Mozart’s music (particularly his later chamber
music) difficult, over-written, harmonically and
rhetorically obscure. Even his own father felt the need to
warn him that his taste for rich, dense musical argument
would be disastrous commercially and ultimately
artistically.
In the nineteenth century, Mozart became Apollo to
Beethoven’s Dionysus. The master-trope of Mozart reception
was the composer as divinely inspired vessel; the
superhumanly gifted boy-man; the eternal child who poured
forth music almost in spite of himself, without a
Beethovenian creative struggle and without the concomitant
engagement with the world. Those who held this view heard in
Mozart’s music formal perfection, a serene sensibility, and
– to air the old cliché – a cool porcelain detachment.
Schumann, for instance, hear ‘Grecian lightness and grace’
in the late G minor Symphony. But there was another side to
the coin, for the nineteenth-century also recognised and
revelled in a darker, more troubling aspect of Mozart’s
creativity: the barely suppressed expressive violence of the
Commendatore scenes in Don Giovanni, the ‘Dies irae’ of the
Requiem, and in instrumental works like the D minor Piano
Concerto and the G minor String Quintet. In this tortured,
chromatic music, they glimpsed a powerful; proto-romanticism
that seemed to prefigure the artistic concerns of their own
era. So, again in the nineteenth century we see Mozart as a
figure of contradictions: the ‘lightness and grace’
counterpointed against a dark undertow.
These two basic viewpoints survived in robust health into
much of the twentieth century, despite the fact that the
growth of a ‘Mozart industry’ of abundant recordings, the
publication of good musical texts, and musicological
research was challenging received notions about the
composer. The bicentenary of Mozart’s birth in 1956 and the
development of an aesthetic for ‘period’ or
‘historically-informed’ performance styles from the early
1970s led to a more radical overhaul in our understanding of
the composer. The more we have come to know about Mozart’s
musical environment and his working methods, the more
paradoxical, the more complicated, and the slippery he and
his music have become. Yes, his music has formal perfection.
But formal perfection alone would be cold and quickly become
tedious. Mozart, however, somehow combines overall formal
perfection with paradoxical irregularities at almost all
levels in his music. The more one stares at the detail, toys
with individual gestures, mulls over the way his music is
put together and works, the more it seems to teem with
irrational energies, antagonistic forces and irresolvable
contradictions. Yet the mastery of Mozart’s manner
ultimately seems to keep these antimonies in check. Like all
late-eighteenth-century composers, Mozart dealt with
commonplace musical ideas: the use of standard melodic
shapes, stylistic ticks and harmonic patterns was the
lifeblood of classical-period music. Yet he unfailingly
transfused freshness into these ideas in a way that escaped
most of his contemporaries. Paper, ink and handwriting
studies have demonstrated that he did not always write
fluently (and almost never as fluently as the
nineteenth-century myth would have us believe). In fact,
composition seems to have become harder for Mozart as he
aged, and some scores and sketches from his thirties have
all the hallmarks of Beethovenian struggle.
So the idea of a cold, unconsciously bidden genius must go.
Instead what we must celebrate is Mozart’s human warmth, his
music’s sense of engagement, and its subtle reconfiguration
of stylistic and syntactic norms. Like Haydn and Beethoven,
he could be radical, but his music is more often fascinating
for its nuance, delicacy, inventiveness and intricacy. It
projects exemplary technical mastery coupled with subtly
subversive musical ‘substance’; an unparalleled sense of
dramatic pacing coupled with an incomparable feeling for
symmetry; the greatest of melodic gifts coupled with a happy
reliance on cliché; a startling stylistic promiscuity
marshalled in the service of the most lucid argumentation.
Above all, we must never loose sight of Mozart’s engagement
in the world. He was no divine vessel. Although mystery
inevitably lies at the heart of creativity, we can
understand much about Mozart and his music by studying his
musical environment, education, opportunities, likes and
dislikes, and how he made the most of his sponge-like powers
in absorbing and transforming the best of what he
encountered.
> Chapter one: Mozart’s Musical Education: Part 1
© Timothy Jones
copyright©EnglishMozartEnsemble2007