The English Mozart Ensemble

Mozart by Dr. Timothy Jones

Chapter one: Mozart’s Musical Education: Part 1

Arguments about whether genius is born or made have proved a source of lively contention in Mozart biography. Partisan approaches to the nature/nurture debate have tended to distort the picture of Wolfgang’s musical and creative developmen Dr. Timothy Jones, author of Mozart t, but a consensus has emerged about the importance of his musical education. Leopold Mozart had a Europe-wide reputation as a teacher, following the publication of his violin treatise in 1756, and he dedicated the best part of twenty years to the education of both his surviving children. Wolfgang had one of the longest, as well as the most intense, periods of formal musical instruction undergone by any great classical composer. Moreover, the role of pedagogue was one that Leopold found hard to relinquish, and he was still giving his son instructive advice about his music well into the 1780s when Wolfgang was at the height of his Viennese success.

What forms did Mozart’s musical education take? In what ways did it stand out from commonplace musical pedagogy of the time? What effects did it have on his development as a composer, and how far is it possible to untangle the complex web of connections between Mozart the pupil/apprentice and his mature work? In the broadest sense the education of a composer in the second half of the eighteenth century was concerned with four main strands: the craft of writing music; the mastery of musical rhetoric; the development of taste; and the practicalities of developing and sustaining a career.

Rarely were all four of these strands balanced in the education of any one individual. For many musicians by far the most time and effort was spent on the first of them, a formal training in the acquisition of craftsman-like skills. In addition to the rudiments of theory and music notation this entailed a thorough grounding in the conventions of harmony and counterpoint, and simple instructions for elaborating this basic ‘stuff’ of tonal music into the contemporary ‘galant’ style with balanced phrases and the clear rhythmic and tonal punctuation of cadences. For many German musicians of Mozart’s generation this meant intensive study of strict species counterpoint as codified in Fux’s great treatise Gradus ad Parnassum (1723) and a strong grounding in the harmonic practice of figured bass (which they would have been able to study through C. P. E. Bach’s Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen of 1753). Mastery of harmony and counterpoint allowed composers to control the syntactic tensions in their music (the ebb and flow of consonance and dissonance), regardless of the specifics of thematic content, and it ensured maximal smoothness in the moment-by-moment continuity of their music, an essential component of contemporary styles.

Equally important was the study of musical rhetoric: how to think up an idea, how to develop it coherently, how to arrange the disposition of different ideas within a piece, how to manage musical form, and what might be termed musical decorum – how certain types of idea and modes of development suited different genres and styles of music, what was appropriate to a symphony and what to a sonata, what to liturgical music and what to serious opera, and so on. If the study of harmony and counterpoint produced skills in handling the bedrock of tonal music, its technical basis and substrate, then the teaching of musical rhetoric enabled composers to shape the expressive surface of their music – how to turn a striking melody, how to embellish and elaborate ideas, how to dramatise a musical argument: in short, how to draw a listener’s attention and sustain it. In practice this aspect of musical education could be accomplished via several routes: studying exemplary pieces; completing exercises of short dance movements which introduced the student to simple formal principles and developmental techniques that could later be elaborated in more complex forms; applying variation processes to pre-existing models; and, at the most sophisticated level, by developing the student’s skills in improvisation. The art of improvisation was perceived to be especially important since it demonstrated the musician’s inventiveness with regard to developing expressive musical ideas, their arrangement into a ‘narrative’, and their relationship to music’s harmonic/contrapuntal substrate. In addition, the best improvisations were prized for their expressive immediacy and flexibility, for quixotic changes of mood and style. Such extempore skills were seen to signal the high levels of expressive eloquence that were also deemed necessary in the more considered context of fixed musical composition. In sum, at a technical level eighteenth-century compositional instruction aimed to develop a musician who could produce pieces that were syntactically and rhetorically coherent, better still polished, and at best compelling.

The acquisition of technique was regarded as only one side of a composer’s training in the second half of the eighteenth century. Much importance was attached to the question of taste. Without being sidetracked into the complex eighteenth-century philosophical debates about the nature of taste, it is worth noting that there was disagreement at a fundamental level as to whether taste was innate or could be acquired. Could taste, whether innate or acquired, be developed, and if so, how? There was little sense in contemporary writings that taste is susceptible to the same sort of formal instruction as technique. If taste and judgment could be developed, then it was almost as if through a process of osmosis by constant exposure to what was held to be exemplary, by a sharpening of the critical faculties in response to what was not good, and through the gradual build up of that most precious of commodities – experience. For this reason, a fledgling composer was largely on his own when it came to matters of taste; nevertheless, it was obviously advantageous to be in a situation which helped the osmosis along, enabling him to hone his critical skills and to judge critical and popular reactions to as wide a range of repertoires and styles as possible. For if a composer was to establish and sustain a successful career he had to be able to negotiate the difficult balance of both satisfying the taste of musical connoisseurs and meeting the expectations of popular demand.

At a more mundane level the sustainability of a composer’s career relied not only on his judgment and taste but to a larger extent on his efficiency in networking. The ways in which he established and developed contacts was necessarily vital in securing salaried posts, commissions, publications, regular performances, and the balance of what we might now describe as a ‘portfolio career’, including teaching and performing as well as writing. It might determine where and in what field he worked: whether in liturgical music or opera, chamber music for an elite or instrumental music for the ‘mass’ market, as a travelling virtuoso performer-composer or settled in a salaried post attached to a large household. So the nature and scope of a composer’s network of contacts could have the most profound effect on what sort of composer he was and could fundamentally shape his output. For most composers a network of contacts was something that had to be built over time. A lucky minority born into a well-established musical family grew up with at least the nucleus of such a network. Due to the efforts of his father and the extraordinary reception of his remarkable talent, one individual had an unprecedented wide range of contacts before he entered his teens.