|
'Nothing, nothing but Figaro,” Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart reported in 1786, characterizing the reception for his opera The Marriage of Figaro. To many lovers of classical music as well as more casual listeners around the world, Mozart’s delighted words echoed particularly sweetly in 1991, the bicentennial of his death. In this article from Collier’s Year Book, classical music expert David Wright traces Mozart from his days as Europe’s child wonder through his modern legacy as one of music’s central figures. Wright explains the lulls in Mozart’s popularity, and why his music once again dazzles audiences as it did two centuries ago.
By David Wright
In the climactic scene of Mozart's Don Giovanni, a statue of the man Don Giovanni killed comes to life and attends a fateful dinner at the Don's house. In 1991 something similar happened to the pale plaster bust of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that used to sit on the piano in your piano teacher's studio. In the old show-business expression, it now 'has legs.'
 |
|
Also on Encarta |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Thanks partly to an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie and partly to changing fashions in lifestyles and music, the music of Mozart has invited itself into our homes as never before. Not that Mozart didn't taste celebrity during his lifetime—'Here they talk about nothing but Figaro,' he wrote from Prague when his opera was running there. 'Nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro. No opera is drawing like Figaro. Nothing, nothing but Figaro.'
If Mozart could be moved to such raptures by a few thousand people in a neighboring city whistling his tunes, how would he react to today's worldwide Mozart-mania? Especially during 1991, with the world commemorating the bicentennial of Mozart's death in 1791, the music in our compact disk players, supermarket aisles, and downtown concert halls and opera houses often seemed like 'nothing, nothing but Mozart.'
The object of all this adulation was born in the Austrian hill town of Salzburg on January 27, 1756. Salzburg, ruled by a prince-archbishop appointed by the pope, could hardly have been considered a musical capital at the time, but it could boast at least one musician of international reputation: Leopold Mozart, a talented composer and author of an important treatise on violin playing. It didn't take long for Leopold to realize, however, that his 'authorship' of two gifted children, Maria Anna ('Nannerl') and her younger brother, Wolfgang, would bring him far more fame and wealth than anything he had written. Part Aristotle and part Barnum, Leopold gave the two children a rigorous musical and general education (in his whole life, Wolfgang never enrolled in a school) with an eye to bringing their musical gifts to full and early fruition—and, after successful appearances before the elector of Bavaria and Empress Maria Theresa of Austria when Wolfgang was only five, to making them the toast of Europe.
|
|
Also on MSN |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Everywhere the Mozart family went—and they did go virtually everywhere, traveling almost continually between 1763 and 1766, pausing briefly in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, spending 6 months in Paris and 15 in London—it was the tiny Wolfgang who held everyone's attention, interrupting a game of hobbyhorse with a court retainer to solve the most devilish problem of counterpoint the court composer could devise. In London the scientists of the august Royal Society interviewed, examined, and tested the child, and finally pronounced him an authentic prodigy of nature. The devout Leopold delighted in stumping the high priests of his rationalistic era. 'I owe this to almighty God,' he wrote. 'If it is ever to be my duty to convince people of this miracle, it is so now, when people are ridiculing whatever is called miracle.'
So it is partly to Leopold that we owe the vision of 'divine Mozart' that has proved so persistent over the centuries. But this pint-sized demigod was also a very hard worker, and (as all great composers are) exquisitely receptive to musical ideas in the air around him. In London he was befriended by Johann Christian Bach, who was then far more famous than his father, Johann Sebastian, and whose light, clear style galant became an enduring influence in Mozart's works. Subsequent trips to Vienna and Milan introduced Wolfgang to, respectively, the string quartets of Joseph Haydn and the melodic wealth of Italian opera, with important consequences.
But, despite the acclaim of Europe's capitals, it seemed as though all roads led back to Salzburg. Ten years of near-constant travel and angling for a prestigious post left the Mozarts back where they started, in the employ of a provincial archbishop with at best a passing interest in music. Leopold suspected, probably rightly, that other musicians' jealousy had prevented their installation at an important court. … Isolated in Salzburg, Wolfgang—as Haydn would later say of his own 30 years' service at the country estate of the Esterházy princes—was 'forced to become original.' While drawing a salary as the archbishop's Konzert-meister—not as lofty a post as it sounds—Mozart supplied symphonies, dances, serenades, and divertimentos for court occasions and masses and other liturgical music for the cathedral. His first authentic masterpieces date from this time, when he was in his late teens: Symphonies No. 25 in G minor (K. 183) and No. 29 in A major (K. 201)—both of them now hair-raisingly familiar from the soundtrack of the movie Amadeus—as well as the five violin concertos, all composed in 1775.
No longer a child prodigy, Wolfgang Mozart continued to take long leaves of absence in search of composing commissions and a better job. On a trip with his mother to Mannheim, Munich, and Paris in 1777-1778, Mozart hobnobbed with famous musicians and gave brilliant concerts on both violin and piano, but—to his father's continual exasperation—he neglected the noble patrons who could actually get him money and a position. His love was rejected by the soprano Aloysia Weber, and worst disaster of all, his mother died suddenly in Paris.
But his visit to Munich had not been wasted. In 1780 he was invited to compose an opera for the carnival season there. He went there to conduct some of the rehearsals and performances of Idomeneo—now considered his first mature opera—and, in the process, stretched the six weeks' leave the archbishop had granted him to four months. Summoned to his employer's side in Vienna in March 1781, Mozart picked a fight with the archbishop and resigned, resolving to try his luck as a free-lance musician in the Austrian capital.
Going it alone was a radical thing for a musician to do in those days, but then the 'enlightened' Vienna of Emperor Joseph II was full of radical ideas. (Leopold Mozart took a dim view of the move and continued to write letters from Salzburg, full of warnings and advice, until his death in 1787.) Theaters, orchestras, and opera houses thrived, catering to both the aristocracy and the culture-hungry middle classes. … [Mozart] married Constanze Weber, sister of Aloysia; she eventually bore him six children, four of whom died in infancy.
Throughout his 'golden years' in Vienna (as the musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon has called them) Mozart continued to correspond with his father and sister in Salzburg, and with his wife and Viennese friends when he was traveling. No other major composer has left such a voluminous record of his daily life and his responses to it. In some ways, these are the letters of a typical young man of any era, proud of his successes, addicted to pranks and dirty jokes and verbal horseplay and parties and billiards, defensive about his father's criticisms, vain about his appearance (although he was, by most accounts, rather short, pale, and unprepossessing), spontaneous and affectionate. …
Mozart's various enterprises in Vienna were mostly successful. In 1782, his first opera for Vienna, The Abduction From the Seraglio, moved audiences to such raptures that the emperor (a Mozart fan himself) was required to intervene, regulating the number of encores so that the show wouldn't run all night. In 1786 there was 'nothing, nothing but Figaro' in Vienna almost as much as in Prague. The librettist of The Marriage of Figaro, Lorenzo da Ponte, collaborated with Mozart on two more hits, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte. The Magic Flute renewed Mozart's reputation with the audience for German-language singspiel. Mozart's own subscription concerts were, during the mid-1780s at least, sold-out affairs that brought him a generous income; for a particularly successful period of two years, he could hardly compose piano concertos fast enough to satisfy his novelty-loving public, turning out six masterpieces in this genre during 1784 alone.
When neither he nor other virtuosos were performing his works, the picture became more clouded. The same qualities that we treasure in his music—its vitality (even volatility), abundance of melodies, intriguing detail, sonic and harmonic originality, and emotional richness—made it strong stuff for the amateur musicians who bought published music in that era. Even some professionals struggled with it: 'He is indisputably a great original genius,' the composer Dittersdorf said, 'and I have never yet found anyone who possessed such an astonishing wealth of ideas. I wish he were not so lavish with them. He leaves his hearer out of breath: ... in the end none of these real beauties can be preserved in the memory.' Despite efforts to simplify his style for the home music market, Mozart was never able to sell much printed music, and so he had only his teaching fees to tide him over during the long months of work on his next opera.
After Symphony No. 35 (the 'Haffner') of 1782, he wrote no symphonies for performance in Vienna, although music lovers in Linz and Prague commissioned two masterpieces, Symphonies No. 36 and 38, respectively. The great final trilogy from the summer of 1788, Symphonies No. 39, 40, and 41 (the 'Jupiter') seems to have been written on speculation, for some unknown future occasion. The Viennese tired even of his concertos after 1786, at which point his financial troubles began in earnest.
Unlike his anxious, miserly father, Wolfgang was determined to enjoy money while he had it, and so despite considerable success as a musician he was often caught short. The abject, plaintive tone of his letters to friends and Masonic lodge brothers, apologizing for not paying back the last loan and at the same time requesting another, makes for painful reading. He and Constanze were often sick; her treatments and many trips to the healing baths in Baden were an especial drain on their finances.
Nevertheless, by 1791 things were looking up for the 35-year-old composer. Superb works, such as the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, and the motet 'Ave verum corpus,' K. 618, flowed from him again. Opera commissions came from Prague for La Clemenza di Tito and from Schikaneder's German theater in Vienna for The Magic Flute, promising renewed applause and income. A particularly remunerative commission came from a certain Count Walsegg, a musical dilettante who liked to order works from professional composers and pass them off as his own. On this basis, Mozart agreed to write a Requiem for the count's late wife, dealing with him entirely by messenger so that the count's guilty secret wouldn't be divulged.
Soon after he conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute on September 30, 1791, Mozart's health began to fail. It seems likely—although there will always be room for medical speculation and conspiracy theories—that overwork induced a recurrence of the rheumatic fever that had brought him down on several previous occasions, going back several years. It appears that Mozart now began oscillating between lucidity and delirium; he took the count's messenger for an emissary from beyond the grave, commanding him to write his own Requiem, and at times he believed that his musical rivals had poisoned him. He worked on the Requiem until the afternoon of December 4, even singing portions of it with friends who had come to visit him. He died at 12:55 a.m., December 5, 1791.
Mozart was buried outside Vienna in a mass grave (such graves were often used for commoners at the time). He did not die in obscurity, but as one of the most admired (if 'difficult') composers of his age, departing at the height of his fame, with two successful operas fresh in the public's memory. His funeral at St. Stephen's Cathedral, and later memorial services in Vienna and Prague, attracted large crowds of mourners.
Constanze Mozart, whom some writers have accused of frivolity and poor management of the composer's household, showed considerable resourcefulness in keeping her family together after the loss of their livelihood. … Whatever her character may have been as a young woman (Leopold—not surprisingly—had a poor opinion of it), we owe much of what we know about Mozart, and probably the survival of many of his actual works, to Constanze's efforts.
The year before Mozart's death, the musical lexicographer Ernst Ludwig Gerber wrote of him in the Historical-Biographical Dictionary of Musicians: 'This great master had from his early acquaintance with harmony become so deeply and inwardly intimate with it, that it is hard for an unskilled ear to follow his works. Even the skilled must hear his things several times.'
Does this sound familiar? Similar complaints have been aimed at 'great masters' from Beethoven to Brahms to Wagner to Schoenberg. But where Mozart is concerned, this passage contains two important insights. First, the elements of Mozart's musical style were present 'early,' literally from his childhood; he acquired them on his many journeys with his family. (The one exception is the influence of J. S. Bach, whose music Mozart didn't encounter until 1782.) His music resists classification into 'periods,' except to the extent that he composed different kinds of music for the archbishop's court than for public concerts in Vienna. The development of his style shows few of the sharp turns, spurts of innovation, and retrenchments that characterize the history of Beethoven's works, for example; rather, there is a continuous process of deepening, refinement, and enrichment. The airy divertimentos and serenades that he composed in Salzburg for festive occasions are melodious, buoyant, sensitively scored, skillfully woven with countermelodies, and full of surprises. So are the great operas he composed for Prague and Vienna. The difference is simply one of degree.
Although his development was generally a continuous process, Mozart did make one notable leap forward, beginning with his study of the fugues of J. S. Bach. He wrote several fugues himself (Constanze, he said, was especially fond of them), then took what he had learned into one of his most ambitious projects, six string quartets that he labored over for two years and eventually published as a group, with a dedication to Haydn, in 1785. …
Later that year, Mozart took that 'knowledge of composition,' that new mastery of musical counterpoint, and applied it to a still larger form of counterpoint: the operatic stage. Every note, it seems, of The Marriage of Figaro carries in its duration and tone color and relationship to the notes around it a psychological insight into the characters and situations of the story; at the same time, one vast yet coherent scheme of changing keys governs the emotional flow of the entire four-hour drama. 'There is,' the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade has written of Figaro, 'a heart in every beat, and vice versa.'
Needless to say, not all these marvels are revealed on a single hearing of this or any Mozart work. Which brings us to Gerber's second insight, a complaint that might as well be a compliment: one must 'hear his things several times.' Better to say one can hear his things several times without exhausting them! In fact, for music lovers, Mozart's works become lifetime companions, revealing new aspects of themselves as the listener's own experiences (musical and otherwise) accumulate and deepen.
Even Mozart's contemporary detractors suspected there was more to him than met the ear; in 1788 the critic Adolph von Knigge wrote about The Abduction From the Seraglio, 'The resolutions alternate too fast with the discords, so that only a skilled ear can pursue the harmonic process. Yet O! all composers should be in a position to commit such faults!'
Mozart knew about these criticisms but was too confident in his chosen path to fret about them. A possibly apocryphal story has the emperor greeting Mozart after the Vienna premiere of The Abduction as follows: 'Too fine for our ears, and an immense number of notes, my dear Mozart.' And Mozart replying: 'Just as many notes, Your Majesty, as are required.' We know that Mozart wrote to his father from Vienna and said this about the piano concertos he was composing: 'There are also passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less discriminating cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.'
It's fitting that this epigram, which describes so much of what Mozart wrote, should have been penned in connection with the Vienna piano concertos, that string of over a dozen masterpieces that are as much the children of Figaro as that opera was of the 'Haydn' string quartets. Each concerto is a minidrama in three acts, with soloist and orchestra as amiable antagonists engaged in lively action and sparkling or amorous dialogue. Today we tend to take for granted this conception of the solo concerto—thanks to the works of Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and the rest—and forget what a radical departure Mozart made from the Baroque concertos of Bach and Vivaldi.
Despite the immense influence Mozart exerted on the young Beethoven, and through him on the whole 19th century, opportunities to hear his music became rare during the Romantic era. Don Giovanni, the Symphony No. 40, and other brooding, minor-key works remained in the repertoire, since they seemed satisfyingly 'modern' to audiences of the time. Conversely, some listeners (Tchaikovsky among them) sought out Mozart's music as an escape to a lost 'golden age,' when all was fairy-tale grace and elegance. Around this time idealized portraits of Mozart, dressed like some character from a Viennese operetta, began to appear on boxes of chocolates, and plaster busts of him began sprouting on music teachers' pianos. …
But a full-blooded appreciation of Mozart's achievement never died out entirely. The first massive, scholarly biography of him was published by Otto Jahn in 1856. Six years later, a multitalented aristocrat named Ludwig von Köchel, trained in botany and mineralogy rather than music, nevertheless changed the face of music scholarship with his Chronological and Thematic Catalogue of the Complete Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, the first time in history that a researcher attempted to list, date, and describe every piece a major composer ever wrote. Working with an incomplete assortment of music manuscripts and other documents, many of which bore no date, Köchel produced a remarkably accurate catalog, assigning 'K.' numbers from 1 (for a keyboard minuet Mozart composed when he was five) to 626 (for the Requiem).
His catalog has been revised five times since then to reflect later scholarship, but his original 'K.' numbers remain the customary means of identifying Mozart's works in print. For most listeners in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, the full breadth of Mozart's output, its meaning in the context of his times, and the details of his life remained esoteric matters, of interest mainly to scholars. A few dozen favorite works were played over and over, and reverent bows were made toward the bust on the piano. It was not until the 1970s, really, that the statue began to walk.
The first stimulus came from the recording industry, whose explosive growth in the 1970s gave it an insatiable appetite for 'new' repertory. Hundreds of Mozart works received their first recordings and were heard worldwide by connoisseurs and by people who had never been to a live concert.
The publication in 1977 of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's 'psychobiography' Mozart coincided with the sudden growth in popularity of the 'original instruments' movement in musical performance. The goal of both was the same: to achieve a more 'authentic' encounter with Mozart the man and the musician. …
Amid all these efforts at authenticity, a fanciful conception of Mozart suddenly appeared that swept all before it in the public mind. Peter Shaffer's 1982 play Amadeus approached the phenomenon of Mozart through the tormented mind of his real-life rival, the composer Salieri; an effective piece of theater, it made provocative points about the nature of artistic genius. Remade as a Hollywood film in 1984—brilliantly directed by Milos Forman, skillfully acted, especially by F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce in the title role, with a beguiling mixture of realistic and surrealistic costumes and sets—Amadeus won a basketful of Academy Awards and convinced millions of moviegoers that Mozart really was the giggling, foulmouthed clod of the character Salieri's feverish fantasies.
Some onlookers were dismayed at this sudden shift in Mozart's personal reputation, but in the age of lip-synched bad-boy superstars who are famous for 15 minutes, a lot of other music fans felt they had finally discovered their Mozart. They tuned in to public television to see Mozart operas directed by the gifted and imaginative Peter Sellars—a celebrity in his own right who cultivates the image of a giggly latter-day Amadeus—set in the locations of modern American mythology: a diner, Trump Tower, and the South Bronx.
A 'relevant' Mozart? To be sure! Mozart has always been relevant, if his ability to seize people's emotions and express the inexpressible is any measure. Despite Amadeus, no single image of Mozart came into firm focus in the bicentennial year of 1991. Our understanding of him is too individual and subjective for that; each of us creates and cherishes the Mozart of our dreams.
Therefore, in 1991 musicologists gathered in symposiums around the world to finger the precious manuscripts one more time and delve into the mystery of 'dots and strokes'—the two different ways Mozart indicated a staccato touch in his keyboard music. Mozart lovers who have kept their plaster busts and dust them daily had abundant opportunities to sit in concert halls and in front of television sets and hear Mozart's music in silent reverence. For only $195, nostalgic collectors of snuffboxes and candy tins could wrap their Mozartkugeln in a silk scarf from Hermès decorated with pictures of instruments, pages from the scores of The Magic Flute and Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and a portrait of the divine Wolfgang himself.
Vienna's theaters were, of course, humming with Mozart in the spring and summer of 1991, while the annual Salzburg Festival (which, after all, owes its existence to him) mounted an all-Mozart season in July and August, staging all seven of the 'mature' operas. Britain's Glyndebourne Festival also put on all of those operas except The Abduction, and commissioned six wind serenades—a genre indelibly associated with Mozart—from British composers, one to precede each opera. San Francisco and London, both centers of early-music activity, each offered month-long Mozart events involving scholars and artists of all stripes, one called 'Mozart and His Time' and the other 'Mozart Now.' Youthful or incomplete Mozart operas also found a new place in the sun.
In New York the Mostly Mozart Festival, begun in 1966 as a 'lite' summer substitute for the city's weightier year-round fare, became the tail that gleefully wagged the dog of its founding organization, Lincoln Center. …
Meanwhile, the recording industry invited everyone not just to hear but to own everything Mozart wrote. You can select one at a time from the vast array of CDs and tapes that takes up 30 pages of small print in the Opus record catalog—or, with one chunk-chunk of the credit card imprinter, you can own the Complete Mozart Edition issued by Philips, Mozart's entire output preserved in 45 volumes, 180 compact disks in all. …
Are the commercialism, boosterism, and sensationalism that have accompanied the Amadeus boom disservices to Mozart's art, or just the first steps on a learning curve that leads to profound appreciation? If musicologists learn to tell the dots from the strokes, or reproduce the varnish that was used on Mozart's violin, will we derive more benefit from his music? Do our fantasies of nostalgia or amour or the divine enhance his music, diminish it, or not affect it at all? Such are the questions that the imperfect must ask as they grope to understand the perfect. Mozart will survive his bicentennial, as he has everything else.
About the author: David Wright is program annotator of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York. His articles and program notes on classical music appear throughout the United States.
Source: 1992 Collier’s Year Book.
Appears in
Symphony; Vienna; Music, Western; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus; Concerto; Opera
|
Hotmail
Appears in