Mozart: Rational revolutionary
Stephen Brown on ‘the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears’: explosions of invention within a tightly structured geometry
When J. S. Bach died in 1750, his widow asked their sons what she should do with his old manuscripts. Sell them for scrap, was their advice. It wasn’t out of disrespect for their father; it was just that his music seemed completely out of date. one of the sons, Johann Christian, became a particularly important figure in the development of the new Classical style, and influenced Mozart in rejecting the overwhelming polyphonic density of the Baroque in favour of clarity of line and simplicity of structure. In a not unrelated event from the same year, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the essay that made him famous, his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and the Sciences, arguing that their influence was malign and corrupting. He too wanted to erase the past.
Erasing the past can be perilous, especially for those in danger of being erased. But for eighteenth-century culture, the results were generally good. The painter Jacques-Louis David was shaken from pretentious neo-Baroque swirlings to the clean geometry of the Oath of the Horatii.
“Oath of the Horatii” (Le Serment des Horaces) by Jacques-Louis David, 1784
Women were freed from wearing heavy skirts draped over baskets strapped to their bodies in favour of the kind of simple high-waisted shifts familiar from Jane Austen adaptations. In the political sphere the results were mixed: the United States got both a Senate and a rationale for slavery. All these elements followed Rousseau in harking back to the days before the decadence of the Roman Empire. Music had no such past to hark back to, since no one (then or now) had the faintest idea of what Roman music sounded like. Instead, composers (including Rousseau himself) looked to folk song and nursery rhyme to find sources for a style free from the weight of tradition. A nice illustration is Mozart’s theme and variations “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman”, familiar to the English-speaking world as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. He presents the tune in utter simplicity, then through a series of twelve variations demonstrates how such simplicity can flower.
A more familiar instance is the A major piano sonata, K. 331, conveying the musical sense of the word “rational” in its reliance on an utterly transparent series of ratios. Phrase answering phrase, two shorts followed by a long, and so on, contrast followed by return.
And then, within this tightly structured geometry, an explosion of invention, as idea follows idea, each seemingly fresher and more original than the last.
This is the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears. His music is so balanced, clear, rational in its order, especially in comparison to the music that has come after, that it is easy – for performers as well as listeners – to miss the drama. Which is why we have to turn to the one place where drama cannot be ignored: opera.
Beethoven thought Don Giovanni magnificent but morally flawed. Art “ought never to permit itself to be degraded to the position of being a foil for so scandalous a subject”. This didn’t stop him from writing a set of variations on the duet “Là ci darem la mano” (or indeed from borrowing from that most licentious of arias, Leporello’s “Catalogue”, for one of the Diabelli variations). The duet is between Don Giovanni and the servant girl Zerlina. There we’ll take hands, he says, referring to his nearby palazzo. There you’ll tell me yes. The melody is appropriately sweet and gentle, and the orchestra follows with a gently affirming phrase.
Affirming? you might ask – isn’t it just a conventional rounding off of the melody? To understand the orchestra’s response, compare it with another instance: Donna Elvira’s furious cries from later in the opera, The traitor! The bastard! where the orchestral answers are unmistakably delighted trickles of laughter, absolutely undercutting everything she says.
Back to the duet, where Zerlina replies that she’s tempted but – and here her melody flies up, out of its established pattern – this might just be a trick. Giovanni switches from coaxing to insisting, his melody no longer gentle, now angular – Zerlina wavers, as her melody wavers around a single note. Giovanni senses her weakening, comes on stronger – she wavers some more – and we’re back to the opening phrases of both music and lyrics, but this time Zerlina’s waverings follow directly upon Don Giovanni’s insistence until the two voices are overlapping and then the wavering phrase repeats three times, each time a third lower, as she admits to giving in.
At which point Don Giovanni knows he’s won, and simply says “Let’s go! Let’s go!” And then, in what to me is an utterly marvellous moment, Zerlina comes in on top of him, with the highest, strongest notes she has yet to sing: “Let’s go!” (A production really attentive to the nuances of the score will show Giovanni somewhat taken aback at this sudden enthusiasm.)
And off they go, at least vocally, singing in harmony, no longer having time for the relaxed two beats to the measure but in six, to “ease the pain of an innocent love”.
Moment by moment, phrase by phrase, the music catches and projects the mutability of their relationship. In fact, the listener who doesn’t know a word of Italian can follow the progress of the seduction – willing though it is – from the music alone. This is the quality – a quicksilver shifting of mood – which opera makes obvious, but which we must listen for in Mozart’s instrumental music.
I don’t want to exaggerate. Mozart is as capable of sustaining moods as he is of shifting them. But even within the confines of a piano sonata there is more drama than may at first be evident. The problem for the performer is that if you project the drama too graphically you risk destroying the balance and equilibrium of the style; if you don’t project the drama at all, you risk submerging it in niceness. The piano sonata K. 333 in Bb major is a case in point. It is structured according to the favourite Classical pattern of three movements, fast-slow-fast. We could talk about how Mozart casts the first movement in sonata form (exposition of two themes in contrasting keys; development; recapitulation of the two themes in the home key) which would show how he is like every other composer of the period, or instead zoom in on a small detail, to try to see what makes him different. Let’s focus on a couple of bars – the second statement of the second theme.
It begins with a dignified kind of announcement, which is followed by a diffident response, thinner in texture, syncopated in rhythm. The first idea confident, the second shy. Let me mis-compose the passage for comparison.
In Mozart’s version, the tension in the contrast between the two ideas energizes the succeeding measures of the passage. My version is correct but inert.
The slow movement, as has often been noted, is like an aria, and its tone of regretful resignation is one that could easily be assigned to Rosina, the Countess from Le Nozze di Figaro.
The middle section stirs to life with harmonic and rhythmic instability, before returning to the opening melodies, now coloured and ornamented like the return sections in an aria from a Baroque oratorio. Mozart was not totally disrespectful of tradition.
The last movement is where his powers of invention are most exuberant. It is, like most Classical-period last movements, in Rondo form, which means that it keeps rounding back to an initial theme. In this case the initial theme starts with that most common of Classical idioms: the outline of the home-key chord.
It is astonishing to me how often this occurs in Classical music, and how such a simple device can be a springboard to invention. Mozart repeats the idea in varied form often enough to get it into our heads, and then gives a contrasting theme,
followed by a stuttering closing melody
that leads back to the initial theme and its companion, which this time, instead of closing, flows into a new theme in a minor key.
So far, so conventional, and the listener of the day would probably be expecting a return to the opening theme. Instead, we’re presented with a little march. To be played piano, but with dotted rhythms and a military backbeat – unmistakably a march. Again, we expect a cadence, but the march breaks off in mid-phrase, returning us to the opening theme, this time itself in a minor key. The stuttering pedal tone appears in the left hand, then in the right, and then we’re finally back to the opening theme presented exactly as we heard it first. And its companion appears just as we heard it first, but soon takes off in a new direction, first with the fullest and deepest chords we’ve heard thus far in the sonata, and then in a series of virtuosic runs. The stuttering closing theme comes back and one would expect it to finish off the sonata, but suddenly the piano part gets heavy and orchestral, leading to a big chord voiced in a way recognizable to anyone who has listened to classical-period concerti: as the introduction to a cadenza.
This is totally out of the ordinary for a sonata, but there it is, even marked as such in the score: cadenza in tempo. Exactly how should one interpret the “in tempo” part of that phrase? Strictly in time, thus obscuring all the fitful stops and starts the cadenza presents? Or merely more in time than the typical cadenza? At any rate, it is a typical cadenza, bringing back bits of thematic material and heading them towards a virtuosic climax which ends with a rarity – a seventeen-beat bar, just one long teasing wait for a return to the opening theme, which finishes out the movement.
In other words, beneath its balanced and rational appearance, the movement is alive with twists and turns and unexpected events.
It was inevitable that, after Mozart died, at the height of his powers, at the age of thirty-five, his figure would be enveloped in myth.The myth-making itself represents a kind of contradiction — legends don’t accrete about poor unappreciated musicians who die unrecognized and unmourned. That was, though, the core of the Mozart myth, wrapped up in the symbolically miserable weather of his funeral. “The day of his death was a dark cold day”, as Auden said of Yeats. Except it wasn’t. Legend made it rainy, even stormy; researchers took the trouble to look up Viennese weather records: pleasant and mild for the season. Researchers have also been active with financial records. Unlike Schubert, who shoved songs into drawers unplayed, Mozart wrote to fulfill commissions. Simply adding up the various fees for his prodigious output of work tells of a financially successful career. The mystery may lie in how he went through all the money he made. He was in debt when he died, and his letters begging loans are uncomfortable to read, but the family never lacked for servants.
Whether his father, Leopold, exploited his talent is arguable. Mozart was from an early age the family’s main breadwinner, surely not a healthy situation for a child. He spent that childhood travelling to the great courts and cities of Europe, achieving a kind of intellectual and artistic education not available at the small court of Salzburg where Leopold was employed. From his father’s perspective, all this touring was supposed to make Mozart fit for a court appointment, as well as to advertise his talent in the appropriate places. In the event, the exposure made him spectacularly unfit for the subservient position of court musician. Aware of his own worth as measured against his so-called betters, he could not be other than an independent musician.
The question of social status is central to Mozart’s career. Haydn thought that working for Prince Esterhazy was ideal. His material wants taken care of, an orchestra and singers at hand, the great and the good regular visitors to drawing room concerts: what was not to like (apart from wearing the Esterhazy livery)? A well-attested episode has Mozart summoned from a successful tour in Munich to be part of the entourage of Archbishop Colloredo, his and his father’s employer in Salzburg, to aid in the celebration of the accession of Emperor Joseph II. Mozart arrived in Vienna on the morning of March 16, 1781, played on a concert in the afternoon, and at a lunch afterwards was seated with the servants. Below the valets, but “at least I sat above the cooks” he wrote sarcastically. He soon quit — there was a physical altercation — to go freelance. It is dangerous to conflate art with biography, especially with a genius like Mozart, who had a great actor’s ability to slip into the souls of his characters, but it is not accidental that master-servant relationships figure largely in his operatic collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, and especially in the creation of the character of Figaro. It was Mozart who suggested to Da Ponte that they turn Beaumarchais’s play into an opera.
Beaumarchais made The Marriage of Figaro with stock characters but gave them depth through the force of their challenge to the existing order. He has Figaro say: “Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born – nothing more! For the rest – a very ordinary man!” Later in the passage, Figaro asks “Pourquoi ces choses et non pas d’autres? – Why these things and not others?” a line that resonated in revolutionary France. Napoleon thought the play forecast the revolution. And Beaumarchais’s revolutionary credentials were impeccable — he ran arms to the American revolution, still in progress as the play was being written, and barely over when it was first produced in 1784. The Mozart and Da Ponte collaboration followed on that first production with amazing speed, going up almost exactly two years later, on May 1, 1786. Their audience, then, knew what Da Ponte and Mozart were getting into. Joseph II was never going to tolerate explicit revolutionary language, and Da Ponte softened it considerably in devising his libretto. But Mozart deepened it again with his music, giving three dimensions to two-dimensional characters by granting them real-life emotional complexity. Instead of political force, they get emotional depth, and as real people, their fates once again acquire political force.
The opera starts in medias res, as was Da Ponte’s habit. Figaro and Susanna, valet and maid, on the morning of their wedding day, are bickering like a couple that’s been married for years. Figaro smugly surveys the room they’ve been granted by Count Almaviva, Susanna admires her hat; it only takes a few bars before they are both admiring her hat. As to the room, it is part of the Count’s plan deviously to reassert his droit de seigneur over Susanna. Why don’t you like the room? Figaro wonders. Because I am Susanna and you are a dolt, she replies. And he is spurred to the number which spells out the new attitude to the old order, “Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino”: If you want to dance, little count, I’ll call the tune. Up to a certain point, the aria could seem cute or teasing, as Figaro even goes through a couple of different dance rhythms to illustrate how he’d like to control the Count. That point is Figaro’s second “Sì!” unmistakably vituperative, vehement and not at all a joke.
A wonderful letter from Leopold back to Mozart’s sister Nannerl in Salzburg conveys the chaos and energy of the Mozart household at just about the time he would have started work on Figaro:
Your brother made 559 gulden at his concert, which was unexpected, because he is simultaneously giving his six subscription concerts at the Mehlgrube [casino], which have more than 150 patrons, each of whom pays one souverain [13.5 gulden; bringing gross revenue for the series of more than 2,000 gulden, or about three times Leopold’s own yearly salary]. In addition to that, he has often been playing in the theatre at other concerts… We never arrive back home before one A.M., and I never get up before nine. We have lunch at two or half-past two. What lousy weather! Every day there are concerts, more and more students, music, and copying. Where can I escape? If only the concerts would end. It is impossible to describe the hustle and bustle. Your brother’s pianoforte has been moved at least twelve times from his house to the theatre or to someone else’s house. He has had a large pedal piano made [an additional keyboard, played with the feet], which goes under the body of the piano and is about two feet longer and extremely powerful. And each Friday this has been carried to the Mehlgrube and also to the respective residences of Count Zichy and to Prince Kaunitz …
This is Mozart’s revolution: not political but personal. He was nobody’s servant, he took his commissions where he found them, writing and playing for aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, and the general public as well. It is the social revolution in miniature, the unleashing of creative energy too long trapped under a rigid class system. And what energy: symphonies, sonatas, concerti, chamber works, operas both seria and buffa. He wrote masterworks in every genre. Had film scores and jingles been available, he would have written those too. I can’t think of another composer who even approaches this kind of breadth. Suppose he had lived out the Bible’s three score and ten: he and Beethoven would have shared the Viennese musical scene for another thirty-odd years. You can’t help wondering what that competition would have produced.
One of the legends about Mozart I believe to be true is that he composed his music in his head, doing all his correcting, adjusting and improving there, so that when he came to write the music down, it was already set. He would play at his billiards table in a distracted fashion while composing, but could carry on a conversation while committing notes to paper. Evidence for the truth of this aspect of his legend comes from contemporary witnesses (unreliable) and the look of his manuscript scores, which present virtually no corrections.
Mozart ‘s Marriage of Figaro, the beginning of Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete”, handwritten manuscript score. © Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy
The other legend I would like to believe has him lying in bed in what would prove to be his final illness, watch in hand, humming along to the melodies of The Magic Flute in their order of occurrence at the packed-house performances taking place at the Theater auf der Wieden, a scarce half-hour’s walk away.
Stephen Brown is Emeritus Professor of Music at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of The Sense of Music, 1988, has produced three jazz albums and, most recently, a musical setting of James Joyce’s Giacomo Joyce. All the audio clips above are performed and recorded by him.