Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Shuffling Off!  Musicians are human, and humans die, often with works in progress.  These unfinished works form a tantalizing “what would have been”.  Sometimes they are finished by crafty folks who aim for the double bar.  Sometimes it is interesting to listen to them as they remain, a fascinating window into the creative process of a genius, cut short by the mortality we all share.

Shuffling Off, Day 4 – Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I fear the Mozart Requiem is a piece I will never really be able to hear with “fresh ears”.  What I mean is that it is so laden with emotional, conceptual and aesthetic baggage from my personal history that I am always hearing it through a bunch of overlapping lenses.  First of all, it was the centerpiece of one of the earliest classical concerts I remember attending.  This occurred just as I was developing an interest in classical music so it has something of a cherished place in my mind, saturated with the enthusiasm and majesty of the experience, even if it was a community orchestra and choir.  In preparation for that concert the piece was considerably talked up by music teachers as an immortal masterpiece and transcendent listening experience.  Similar baggage has been overlaid from performing the Requiem, and hearing similar enthusiasm from conductors and fellow performers.  This is of course not to deride a wonderful masterpiece, which it certainly is, but I do wonder if a listener, having been cleansed of his preconceived notions, and comparing the Requiem to a handful of Mozart’s other late works, say his last piano concerto, the Magic Flute, the Clemency of Titus, his Masonic Cantata, or his quintet with glass harmonica (see this post), would favor the Requiem in any particular way.  Perhaps he would, but I still have to wonder.

The other major culprit which is responsible for having layered considerable psychological baggage about the experience of the Mozart Requiem, baggage that is incredibly difficult to shed, is the movie Amadeus.  Now, if you are a faithful reader, you may remember earlier references to this film (like here and here) and if you do then you know I am a fan and typically recommend it.  This is still true.  But I would take care to warn prospective viewers of Amadeus of the resulting associations they will forever carry with the Requiem, no matter how hard they try to escape, and in spite of the more or less commonly understood fact that the central premise of the film, Antonio Salieri’s intense jealousy and intended murder of Mozart, is most certainly legendary and apocryphal.  Still, it is easy to be swept away by the crackling drama of the film, and the Requiem serves as a cohesive focal point around which to stage it.

(!Spoiler Alert!) In Amadeus Salieri, mad with envy for Mozart’s superior musical aptitude, eventually seeks every opportunity to sabotage him professionally and, eventually, to hurt him personally, even plotting his murder (it is reported that Salieri had confessed to this on his deathbed, possibly due to the senility of old age).  The final scenes, in which Mozart’s death appears imminent and Salieri manipulates his way into his inner circle, are bathed in the music of the Requiem, indeed they focus on its composition as Salieri takes dictation from the muse of Mozart.  In the film the narrating Salieri, years later, reveals that it was his plan to murder Mozart (or let him die – this is not quite clear) and then to pass off the Requiem as his own in honor of his deceased friend, finally recognized for the sublime art he has longed to create since beholding Mozart’s befuddling powers.  To facilitate the commission, Salieri dons an imposing cape and mask to hide his identity during all transactions surrounding the Requiem (in the film it is a reference to Wolfgang’s strict father, Leopold – see this post – the evocation of whom has dramatic psychological effect on the younger composer), claiming to represent a wealthy patron.  He comes so close to seeing his plan through that he can taste it, but Mozart dies too soon and Salieri later is shown at his funeral, supremely frustrated by what could have been…  In scenes leading up to the finale we see other depictions of Mozart and Salieri together, for example at the Magic Flute, where Salieri compliments the work.  That the terse dramatization is fiction is obvious, but fascinatingly there are a handful of truths, both explicit and thematic, present within the twists and turns of the plot.

Salieri and Mozart were acquainted, even familiar.  Generally it is thought that Salieri regarded Mozart well, although there are speculations that he attempted to frustrate the career of the younger composer, understandably if at all sensed his powerful position as director of the Habsburg opera was at all threatened by the young upstart.  These are difficult to substantiate, however.  Mozart would have served Salieri well as a creator, so long as he did not become a competitor.  There is evidence of their mutual admiration, and it is true that Salieri attended The Magic Flute, as well as other works by Mozart, and was complimentary.  Two other elements ring true, although their stories are at once more banal and simultaneously more fascinating (in my opinion) than those the high drama of Amadeus.  

That Mozart transacted exclusively with a mysterious veiled figure representing a wealthy patron is true.  An Austrian nobleman named Franz von Walsegg had an odd penchant for taking credit for various composers’ creations.  He would commission them anonymously, copy the parts into his own hand without the true composer’s name, and have his house musicians perform them.  He always made sure to get complete rights over the commissioned works in order to avoid the possibility of trained ears hearing them elsewhere; the composers probably didn’t care as long as they received their due, which was always generous.  Apparently his house musicians knew what was up, but didn’t let on, either out of affection or pity.  As a side note, I sometimes wonder if it is more fulfilling to be extremely secure financially, with little in the way of creative legacy, or to be impoverished and leave a substantial creative legacy.  The story of Walsegg gives clear indication of the longing one may experience with the former.  And in hindsight, few would switch places with him, whereas at present few may switch places with Mozart who was practically Walsegg’s inversion.  Anyway, Walsegg’s young wife had died in 1791, almost a year before Mozart, and the aristocrat sought a musical Requiem mass to claim as his own and present annually on the anniversary of her death, hence Mozart’s commission and dealings with the anonymous agent.  Incidentally, Mozart’s untimely death in the middle of his work on the Requiem put Walsegg in a tricky spot given Constanza’s legal and financial machinations.  You can read more about the details of that fascinating story here:

http://www.salieri-online.com/mozreq/pg1.php

That Mozart may have had something of a secretary during his work on the Requiem is also based in fact.  It was not his archenemy Salieri as Amadeus suggests (exaggerating both his intimacy and enmity with Salieri), but a composer named Franz Xaver Sussmayr.  With ambitions to write Italian opera, Sussmayr had studied with Salieri, and after this became something of a friend and apprentice to Mozart.  The two traveled together and Sussmayr, perhaps among other efforts, is recorded to have written much of the dry, extensive recitative of Mozart’s penultimate stage work, the Italian serious opera The Clemency of Titus.  This stands with Idomeneo (see this post) as Mozart’s finest contributions to the genre; his most famous operas are German or Italian comedies.

It is thought that, given Sussmayr’s intimacy with Mozart, he was privy to much of the process that yielded the Requiem.  Constanze, eager to collect the balance of Walsegg’s invoice, tapped him to complete the Requiem.  Exactly how much of the final work is Mozart and how much is Sussmayr is difficult to discern, but certain movements are clear enough.  The opening Requiem is the only movement completed in full by Mozart.  Others remained unfinished, or unorchestrated, while others were not composed at all, and so Sussmayr wrestled with a variety of tasks through his process of completion.  It seems certain to say that Sussmayr composed the Agnus Dei from scratch.  The following movements, which close the mass, use material from the beginning, certainly by Mozart.  Can you tell the difference between Sussmayr and Mozart?

 

It is difficult for me to listen past all of the lore, legend, and personal associations with Mozart’s requiem and hear the purity of the music underneath, but if I tried, I might say that it is illustrative of the near superhuman transparency and elegance which characterizes all of Mozart’s late works.  The opening bars of the Requiem are sublimely orchestrated, and the vocal entrances convey loss and awe given the eternal journey ahead which Mozart would have regarded through a very Catholic lens as he prepared to make it himself.  Sometimes I wish I could wipe all of the baggage from my mind, unsee Amadeus, and discover the Requiem as a more or less anonymous work of his late years in order to make a fresh evaluation free of influence.  Alas, that is not the world in which we live, and I simply have to be content to roll the legends and the drama which surround the story of a flawed man but great composer into my experience of the Requiem, his unfinished masterpiece.

—

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More Syndication, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you love Mozart (and probably even if you don’t), then I’ll wager you’ve seen the film Amadeus.  And if you haven’t, you should.  I’ve written about many of the merits of the film in this post, so go ahead and read that one if you require further persuasion 🙂  The film dramatizes the years of his professional life, that is, the time during which he held a professional post in Salzburg and then freelanced in Vienna, roughly the second half.  Naturally, a life like Mozart’s, even as brief as it was, would have been filled with considerable detail that a story like Amadeus must boil down.  The scope of Amadeus is Mozart’s final 15 years, starting with his rather dramatic resignation from the service of the Salzburg prince-archbishop, and dramatizing the political machinations and artistic productivity of his remaining years, spent mostly in Vienna.  Of course much of the fun of Amadeus is that central story which features the mad plotting of court composer Antonio Salieri to thwart and eventually murder (whether he actually does this, or accidentally inspires him to work to death, is unclear in the film) the young and threatening composer out of jealousy, but this is considered by most historians to be a contrivance, even though Salieri apparently went mad later in life and admitted to the crime in his delirious state.

It was during his employment under the prince-archbishop in Salzburg that Mozart began to take his first strides toward composing mature music and he soon became restless with the provincial character of his hometown, especially since its economy could not support a stable venue of opera, to which he was drawn.  If you have seen Amadeus, then you know this, as the operas provide significant set pieces in the film’s production and benchmarks by which the plot is paced.  His Viennese drama begins with the Abduction From the Seraglio, proceeds through The Marriage of Figaro, takes a personal turn with Don Giovanni, and ends with the bizarre and mysterious Magic Flute.  This quartet gives a fine sampling indeed of Mozart’s best operas, covering as it does two German singspielen and two Italian comedies (although from the scene chosen to represent Don Giovanni, you could be forgiven for missing that opera’s generally comedic nature).  

But there’s another type of opera which Amadeus leaves out completely.  It is one that occupied Mozart’s operatic mind for significant periods of time, all throughout his life, and allowed him to develop major skills as he crafted them: Italian serious opera, also known as opera seria.  While it is true that you will today find Mozart’s opera seria produced much less frequently than the four which appear in Amadeus, there are two particularly fine examples from his years of maturity, and a handful from his formative years as well (check out Mitridate, King of Pontus and Ascanio in Alba, composed when he was 14 and 15 years old, respectively – they both contain much fine music).  From the end of his life, composed at the same time as The Magic Flute, is The Clemency of Titus, a rather dry and lofty, serious drama, which essentially holds to what can seem like an endless succession of recitative and arias.  If you’re into that kind of stuff, as I am, you can find plenty to like there.  But, if you find the stodgy, stiff opera seria formula boring (which is many people, I’m sure), you will probably do better to explore a rich and colorful serious Italian opera from right around the middle of Mozart’s life, Idomeneo, King of Crete.

Idomeneo does score a brief, passing reference in Amadeus.  As Emperor Joseph’s cabinet discusses the possibility of commissioning an opera from Mozart, Baron von Swieten speaks admiringly of having recently seen a performance of Idomeneo:

…to which Count Orsini-Rosenberg shoots back:

Or, if you want to see the exchange old school…

And so the rest of the film is essentially set up in this exchange, with Mozart’s champions and antagonists playing a human tug-of-war which ultimately batters and bruises him.  Incidentally, that last comment by Orsini-Rosenberg has become a rather famous encapsulation of the criticism of Mozart’s detractors as summarized by the film.  Do you think there may be any truth to their observation, or were they merely defensive?  It’s become something of a trope, even beyond Amadeus and you see it pop up in some unexpected places…

Whatever opinions of Idomeneo may have been, it is a notable opera in Mozart’s history, considered by pretty much anyone who knows his music to be his first mature opera.  And it is a splendid opera, alive with variety, vivid music, and spectacle.  It will always take a back seat to The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, simply because of the stiff artifice of its conventions, but Mozart works within them so creatively that it really stands out of its genre.

One tidbit about Mozart’s life that Amadeus leaves out is his visit to Paris, shortly before he left Salzburg for Vienna.  While in Paris, he surely would have taken in some of the recent and fashionable operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck.  Gluck was a Bohemian who found success in Vienna and Paris as an opera composer.  He is one of those figures that musicians learn about for his innovative spirit, a spirit which influenced scores of subsequent composers, but whom most non-musicians have probably not heard of.  Gluck managed to successfully take the operatic models which existed during his lifetime, synthesize the best parts of each, and distill the whole mix into a dramatic form of unprecedented focus and power.  The singing is basically Italian arias, with considerably less ostentatious ornamentation than was typical, a vice for which Italian singers were notorious, and the spectacle is French, but it serves the drama in a way that it never did in Lully’s operas (see this post).  The divertissements in Gluck’s operatic shows developed and deepened the story with magnificent force.  In addition to all of this, Gluck anticipated the spare, homophonic textures which would dominate European music in the coming years, relieving listeners from the busy counterpoint of Bach and Handel.

Gluck made his mark on music history, even though he is largely unknown outside of music history circles.  Idomeneo is clearly Gluckian in its structure, clarity, and power; Italian arias, French spectacle, and forceful dramatic clarity, but all done at Mozart’s level, which was a step beyond Gluck.  Gluck tends to be brilliant, but scrappy; Mozart is grace personified.  But there is obviously a congruence of spirit between Gluck’s reform operas and Mozart’s Idomeneo.  I bet Mozart saw Gluck’s Armide, written in 1777, when he was in Paris.  Gluck includes this bold, sparkling, and sharp-edged chaconne in the fifth act, as Armide’s minions dance for her bespelled lover, Renaud:

If you want to compare that to the passacaille Lully wrote for his setting of the same libretto almost a century prior, listen to this.  It is quite a different animal:

While it’s just one echo of Gluck’s operatic art in Idomeneo, Mozart included a chaconne of his own, and that’s notable because as far as I can tell it’s the only chaconne he ever wrote.  And it doesn’t quite sound like one either; I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was a chaconne if I didn’t know, but if you do, you can kind of hear it.  It has a triple meter propulsion and a succession of interesting gestures, woven together into a kind of variation form, all clothed in Mozart’s orchestral splendor:

By this time, the chaconne and passacaglia were losing favor.  Gluck probably represents the last generation of composers who would have used it without any irony or anachronism.  In Mozart it has the feeling of being almost a neo-chaconne, as if he was looking back and writing it with his own twist.  During the time of Mozart and his contemporaries, the chaconne would fall out of favor, making way for the theme and variations concept, which is found in so much of their instrumental music.  But it is intriguing that Mozart saw fit to leave his mark on the chaconne as only he could in the colorful and fascinating Idomeneo, which represents his summing up of all the different currents of serious opera in Europe, a fitting graduation piece to cap off his apprenticeship as he prepared to dive headlong into his maturity as a composer.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 3 – Adagio and Rondo K617 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

While it is not the most controversial or significant debate raging within the circles of musical academia, there is some question as to who authored this 5-movement string quartet:

 

It’s an odd, quirky, spirited little piece, and full of bizarre features.  While it has been arranged for more typical performance practice, the original concept of this quartet is to be played entirely upon open strings in scordatura tuning, which means that the string instruments have been tuned unconventionally.  Some notable essays in scordatura exist from composers like Saint-Saens (see this post), J.S. Bach, and Gustav Mahler.  Usually, it is applied in order to add some kind of novel and evocative color to a composition.  But in this quartet the application of scordatura seems to have a different aim – it is essentially a gimmick in order to facilitate a clever performance challenge.  The open strings of the instruments are tuned to cover all of the notes of the F major scale, some in multiple octaves, so that all of the content of the score may be played on only open strings, no left hand fingering necessary.  Performing this quartet then must feel akin to playing in a handbell choir in which players work carefully with their neighbors to construct melodic lines, pieced together between all of them  Given this understanding, the stilted, quirky nature of the piece becomes more understandable.

So, who wrote this piece, and why the debate?  The primary confusion arises due to the many scores in existence throughout Europe.  Most of them don’t agree on the authorship.  Some attribute the work to Haydn, some to Pleyel, still others to Ferrandini (of whom I had not heard before learning of this).  And then there is the oldest extant copy which attributes its composition to someone we’ve all heard of, but probably wouldn’t expect to hear of in this context, Benjamin Franklin.  Some speculate that during Franklin’s travels to Paris, where this copy of the score was discovered, he might have come up with this clever novelty to shake things up in the salons there.  The problem is that it is not written in his hand.  Not a deal breaker by any means, but a copy in Franklin’s hand would be much more of a smoking gun.

Still, based on what I know (so take it for what it’s worth) I find the hypothesis that Franklin is the composer to be convincing.  First, the quartet is written for the rather unconventional ensemble of 3 violins and cello, as opposed to the much more typical ensemble of 2 violins, viola and cello which serve as the configuration for all of Haydn’s quartets.  The only other piece I know of for this ensemble is the Canon and Gigue by Johann Pachelbel (see this post).  While Haydn was known for his clever tricks (see this post), his execution tended to be more artful and less self conscious.  And the quartet breathes with a rough, earthy quality that I often associate with the hymn singing and professional composers of early America.  The quartet has an odd quality to its intonation, familiar to anyone who has spent time listening to certain a capella styles.  All of these signs, in my estimation, point to Franklin who had printed several collections of hymns during his career as a printer.  I also suspect that a quartet like this would have been Franklin’s ideal solution in order to engage in the sophisticated musical culture of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment.  An enthusiastic dilettante, he knew he could not compete in purely musical terms, and so he set out to create a puzzle and solve it, thereby gaining credibility within the European salons.  That’s my best guess anyway.

Benjamin Franklin is the kind of polymath about whose resume it is possible to learn more and more and never exhaust its resources.  The quirky string quartet is not the only way in which he engaged with the art of music.  The other one, and his primary claim to fame among musicians, is as the designer and builder of a musical instrument.  During a visit to London in the early 1760s, Franklin had heard a virtuoso playing crystal wine glasses, filled with different amounts of water to create a spectrum of musical pitches.  Fascinated, Franklin decided to apply his genius for invention to the creation of a sturdier and more efficient system for musical glass players to use.  The result, known variously as the glass harmonica or armonica, arranges glass bowls on an axle, ordered from lowest to highest somewhat like a piano keyboard, spun by a foot pedal like that of a sewing machine, so that the player’s fingers may remain stationary and stimulate multiple simultaneous notes more easily than they can with a set of wine glasses.  Later models featured a water trough which kept the glasses moist.

The first virtuoso of the glass harmonica was Franklin’s English friend Marianne Davies, a multi-instrumentalist.  She and her sister, soprano Cecilia, toured Europe and helped Franklin’s instrument to gain notoriety, with composers everywhere contributing scores.  There exist works for the glass harmonica from Beethoven, Donizetti, Saint-Saens and Richard Strauss, among others.  As the Davies sisters performed in Vienna they introduced the glass harmonica to another musical family, the Mozarts, and the most famous of them would become the first notable composer to leave a notable work for the instrument.  It’s actually one of his last, a slow, sublime, haunting movement and companion rondo for an unconventional chamber ensemble of glass harmonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello.  Composed during his last year of life, the writing demonstrates Mozart’s breathtaking command of orchestral color.  The instrumentation is revealed to be far from accidental, with the timbres of the carefully-chosen soloists complementing the eerie aura of the glass harmonica with astounding precision and imagination:

 

 

The glass harmonica had something of a heyday, and then faded into obscurity.  I think the reason for this is its lack of versatility.  The composers of Europe, while fascinated by its strengths, seemed to understand that it could only ever achieve status as an impressive novelty, and that it is poorly suited for the demands placed upon a first-class soloistic instrument.  The glass harmonica is really only capable of producing one kind of sound, and there is little possibility of varying attacks, which severely limits its expressive variety.  Still, the glass harmonica lives on as an impressive testament to Benjamin Franklin’s polymath accomplishments, revealing the heart and soul of one of America’s most important founding fathers.

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Classic Haikus, Day 1 – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Classic Haikus!

Folks, I’m on Spring Break.

Enjoy these concise poems

On great classic hits…

 

Classic Haikus, Day 1 – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

Did Wolfie re’lize

this fluffy serenade would

be his best-known tune?

 

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Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias!  Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries.  Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music.  While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable.  Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique.  This week we examine examples from across history.

Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 5 – Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you love Mozart (and probably even if you don’t), then I’ll wager you’ve seen the film Amadeus.  And if you haven’t, you should.  I’ve written about many of the merits of the film in this post, so go ahead and read that one if you require further persuasion 🙂  The film dramatizes the years of his professional life, that is, the time during which he held a professional post in Salzburg and then freelanced in Vienna, roughly the second half.  Naturally, a life like Mozart’s, even as brief as it was, would have been filled with considerable detail that a story like Amadeus must boil down.  The scope of Amadeus is Mozart’s final 15 years, starting with his rather dramatic resignation from the service of the Salzburg prince-archbishop, and dramatizing the political machinations and artistic productivity of his remaining years, spent mostly in Vienna.  Of course much of the fun of Amadeus is that central story which features the mad plotting of court composer Antonio Salieri to thwart and eventually murder (whether he actually does this, or accidentally inspires him to work to death, is unclear in the film) the young and threatening composer out of jealousy, but this is considered by most historians to be a contrivance, even though Salieri apparently went mad later in life and admitted to the crime in his delirious state.

It was during his employment under the prince-archbishop in Salzburg that Mozart began to take his first strides toward composing mature music and he soon became restless with the provincial character of his hometown, especially since its economy could not support a stable venue of opera, to which he was drawn.  If you have seen Amadeus, then you know this, as the operas provide significant set pieces in the film’s production and benchmarks by which the plot is paced.  His Viennese drama begins with the Abduction From the Seraglio, proceeds through The Marriage of Figaro, takes a personal turn with Don Giovanni, and ends with the bizarre and mysterious Magic Flute.  This quartet gives a fine sampling indeed of Mozart’s best operas, covering as it does two German singspielen and two Italian comedies (although from the scene chosen to represent Don Giovanni, you could be forgiven for missing that opera’s generally comedic nature).  

But there’s another type of opera which Amadeus leaves out completely.  It is one that occupied Mozart’s operatic mind for significant periods of time, all throughout his life, and allowed him to develop major skills as he crafted them: Italian serious opera, also known as opera seria.  While it is true that you will today find Mozart’s opera seria produced much less frequently than the four which appear in Amadeus, there are two particularly fine examples from his years of maturity, and a handful from his formative years as well (check out Mitridate, King of Pontus and Ascanio in Alba, composed when he was 14 and 15 years old, respectively – they both contain much fine music).  From the end of his life, composed at the same time as The Magic Flute, is The Clemency of Titus, a rather dry and lofty, serious drama, which essentially holds to what can seem like an endless succession of recitative and arias.  If you’re into that kind of stuff, as I am, you can find plenty to like there.  But, if you find the stodgy, stiff opera seria formula boring (which is many people, I’m sure), you will probably do better to explore a rich and colorful serious Italian opera from right around the middle of Mozart’s life, Idomeneo, King of Crete.

Idomeneo does score a brief, passing reference in Amadeus.  As Emperor Joseph’s cabinet discusses the possibility of commissioning an opera from Mozart, Baron von Swieten speaks admiringly of having recently seen a performance of Idomeneo:

…to which Count Orsini-Rosenberg shoots back:

Or, if you want to see the exchange old school…

And so the rest of the film is essentially set up in this exchange, with Mozart’s champions and antagonists playing a human tug-of-war which ultimately batters and bruises him.  Incidentally, that last comment by Orsini-Rosenberg has become a rather famous encapsulation of the criticism of Mozart’s detractors as summarized by the film.  Do you think there may be any truth to their observation, or were they merely defensive?  It’s become something of a trope, even beyond Amadeus and you see it pop up in some unexpected places…

 

Whatever opinions of Idomeneo may have been, it is a notable opera in Mozart’s history, considered by pretty much anyone who knows his music to be his first mature opera.  And it is a splendid opera, alive with variety, vivid music, and spectacle.  It will always take a back seat to The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, simply because of the stiff artifice of its conventions, but Mozart works within them so creatively that it really stands out of its genre.

One tidbit about Mozart’s life that Amadeus leaves out is his visit to Paris, shortly before he left Salzburg for Vienna.  While in Paris, he surely would have taken in some of the recent and fashionable operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck.  Gluck was a Bohemian who found success in Vienna and Paris as an opera composer.  He is one of those figures that musicians learn about for his innovative spirit, a spirit which influenced scores of subsequent composers, but whom most non-musicians have probably not heard of.  Gluck managed to successfully take the operatic models which existed during his lifetime, synthesize the best parts of each, and distill the whole mix into a dramatic form of unprecedented focus and power.  The singing is basically Italian arias, with considerably less ostentatious ornamentation than was typical, a vice for which Italian singers were notorious, and the spectacle is French, but it serves the drama in a way that it never did in Lully’s operas (see this post).  The divertissements in Gluck’s operatic shows developed and deepened the story with magnificent force.  In addition to all of this, Gluck anticipated the spare, homophonic textures which would dominate European music in the coming years, relieving listeners from the busy counterpoint of Bach and Handel.

Gluck made his mark on music history, even though he is largely unknown outside of music history circles.  Idomeneo is clearly Gluckian in its structure, clarity, and power; Italian arias, French spectacle, and forceful dramatic clarity, but all done at Mozart’s level, which was a step beyond Gluck.  Gluck tends to be brilliant, but scrappy; Mozart is grace personified.  But there is obviously a congruence of spirit between Gluck’s reform operas and Mozart’s Idomeneo.  I bet Mozart saw Gluck’s Armide, written in 1777, when he was in Paris.  Gluck includes this bold, sparkling, and sharp-edged chaconne in the fifth act, as Armide’s minions dance for her bespelled lover, Renaud:

 

If you want to compare that to the passacaille Lully wrote for his setting of the same libretto almost a century prior, listen to this.  It is quite a different animal:

 

 

While it’s just one echo of Gluck’s operatic art in Idomeneo, Mozart included a chaconne of his own, and that’s notable because as far as I can tell it’s the only chaconne he ever wrote.  And it doesn’t quite sound like one either; I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was a chaconne if I didn’t know, but if you do, you can kind of hear it.  It has a triple meter propulsion and a succession of interesting gestures, woven together into a kind of variation form, all clothed in Mozart’s orchestral splendor:

 

By this time, the chaconne and passacaglia were losing favor.  Gluck probably represents the last generation of composers who would have used it without any irony or anachronism.  In Mozart it has the feeling of being almost a neo-chaconne, as if he was looking back and writing it with his own twist.  During the time of Mozart and his contemporaries, the chaconne would fall out of favor, making way for the theme and variations concept, which is found in so much of their instrumental music.  But it is intriguing that Mozart saw fit to leave his mark on the chaconne as only he could in the colorful and fascinating Idomeneo, which represents his summing up of all the different currents of serious opera in Europe, a fitting graduation piece to cap off his apprenticeship as he prepared to dive headlong into his maturity as a composer.

 

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Really Clever Music, Day 1 – Table Duet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Really Clever Music!  All lovers of music respond to its mysterious ability to move them, often describing its effect as soul-deep.  Unlike any other art, music most directly communicates emotions and passions extremely convincingly, and that is why it is so loved.  But music works on another level as well, an intellectual one.  Due to its highly mathematical and systematic nature it can be created to satisfy and delight from an entirely different angle.  This angle is often missed in listening because it is usually much easier to see and comprehend this aspect through analysis and score study.  Every piece this week is written by a very clever composer who was able to craft a beautiful piece of music while, at the same time, manipulating the musical medium in a surprising way that may be discovered upon analysis, almost like an easter egg.

“New” Music, Day 1 – Table Duet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I’ve been composing music off and on since my junior year of high school, 1997.  Had there been a bachelor’s degree in composition at my undergraduate university I would have easily taken one, and I did receive a master’s degree in composition.  The bodies of work created during each degree are about as different as can be, owing to the aesthetic climates of each culture.  I enjoyed some success as a freelance composer in the years following my master’s degree, which afforded me valuable experience writing for different ensembles, events and levels of difficulty.  I have found myself composing less in recent years than before, and would probably consider writing something new if the right commissioning opportunity presented itself, but my time is demanded by other obligations.  Another reason I don’t write much anymore is that I never quite developed the technique to do it fluidly without thinking.  And this is not to say that writing music is ever easy, because I don’t think it is, but I am acquainted with composers who are able to sit at a table and write music without requiring any kind of musical instrument to validate their sonic choices.  I never quite attained that level of fluency.

And it’s actually not as rare as many people think.  I know it probably seems like some kind of mystical ability to those who have never tried it and have little concept of the process of writing music, but many musicians are capable of doing it.  And it depends on what you’re writing; I could write in certain styles without hearing what I’m doing more easily than others.  Also, it’s not an all-or-nothing thing, and anyone can get better at writing without having to hear it.  If you’ve done any singing or keyboard training, then you know your ear cannot help but to be refined by those processes.  Many professional musicians simply take that to higher levels.  I often tell students that there is a musical space in their minds that can be developed and deepened just like linguistic and mathematical spaces.  It is in this space that musicians imagine pitch relationships, rhythm, harmony, polyphony, form, and orchestration, and all musicians have developed it to some degree.  Many of the music theory, analysis, ear-training, and keyboard classes musicians take in colleges and conservatories are designed to help them write and read music more quickly and accurately, and they all work by developing some aspect of that musical space.  After a basic music theory class any diligent student should be able to compose, albeit in a somewhat limited stylistic palette, without needing to hear what they are doing.

When you are reminded of the supreme mastery represented by writing music solely in one’s mind, you probably think of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  And you would be right to do so.  Among professional musicians his level of imagination and control was probably about as high as you could ever hope to find.  But I’ve heard of many great musicians who demonstrated the ability to create masterful music without hearing it.  Franz Schubert found his creative muse while sitting at a desk, and he wrote hours of music that way.  Beethoven encouraged his students not to write at the piano, despite the stories you may have heard of him sawing the legs off of his own piano and pressing his increasingly useless ears to the floor in a desperate effort to hear what he was pounding out.  Those stories of Beethoven may be romanticized; it is good professional advice to write as much as possible without checking the sound.  Several times Hector Berlioz, and other prominent French musicians, entered to win the prestigious Prix de Rome, a prize awarded to composers, painters and architects by the French government featuring a saucy grand prize of a year’s worth of paid study in Rome.  Part of the finalist process was to compose some kind of piece in one night, locked in a room with just a table, pen and paper.  Bach, I would imagine, had a very fine line between improvising and composing; I wouldn’t be surprised if he could improvise much in the manner that he composed, and his rate of production at certain times in his life would all but have necessitated this kind of facility.  So it’s actually pretty common for composers to be able to work without resorting to a musical instrument in order to test their sonic choices; all composers can do it somewhat, and some composers are masters at it.

But, again, you’ve probably heard stories of Mozart’s legendary abilities to conceive of and orchestrate entire works in his head.  This may very well have been true; I’ve read in a couple places that the real story is probably a little more nuanced, but it’s probably pretty close to the truth, so well-developed and precise was Mozart’s mental musical space.

If that wasn’t true, at least to a certain extent, then we wouldn’t have memes like this one:

Mozart’s astounding imagination allowed him to manipulate musical structures in his mind and execute some clever games indeed.  Listen to this cute little duet for two violins.  It has a secret, but we’ll explore that in a bit.  For now, just listen to it:

Nice little piece, right?  But, like I said, there’s a secret.  Watch this performance for a hint:

Did you figure it out yet?  Let’s look at the score:

Do you see it?  There are treble clefs on both sides of each staff, but the one on the right is upside down.  This little piece is often referred to as the “table duet”.  It’s written to be read from one side by one player and from the other side by the other player, reading from the “bottom” of the top player’s page (truthfully, this piece doesn’t really have a top or bottom, because each side is both, depending on your perspective).  All the notes reflect around the middle staff line.  In other words, all the bottom line Es become top line Fs in the other part.  And both parts meet in the middle.  Astounding right?  And it sounds completely balanced, natural and harmonious, even though it follows that strict rule.  How could you execute such a thing?  I don’t know, but Mozart was able to, probably doing most of the working out of the harmony and proportions in his imagination.  

As a matter of practical consideration, this piece also offers a clever peculiarity: only one musical part is needed, as long as the performers are happy to face each other and read off of a table below and between them.  I think that visual element added by this arrangement is as much a part of this piece, and others like it, as the musical realization.

So yes, Mozart was on a whole ‘nother level with his musical imagination.  While accounts such as those are prone to romantic exaggeration, this astoundingly clever musical puzzle is evidence of the superlative heights of his mental musicianship.

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Caffeinated Music, Day 4 – Cosi fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

This week’s theme is…Caffeinated Music!  The satisfying and enormously popular beverage known as coffee migrated to Europe from the Middle East through Venetian trade routes late in the 1500s.  Initially met with suspicion for its origins, coffee nonetheless wasted no time in winning over Western culture, boasting countless devotees within a century and inspiring plant after plant of coffee house establishments, which remain centers of philosophy and culture to this day.  Numerous artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and other influential Europeans consumed coffee in awe-inspiring quantities, often prepared through elaborate and eccentric rituals.  Every piece this week was written by or inspired by a great coffee drinker.

Caffeinated Music, Day 4 – Cosi fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Once coffee caught hold within European culture, drinkers of the beverage quickly began to discover its positive effects, both as a psychotropic stimulant and as a social lubricant.  Many of us know well the pleasures of coffee conversation, and countless are the friendships kindled, philosophies developed, and business transactions closed within the comforting embrace of the coffee meeting.  The social aspect of coffee drinking undoubtedly accounts significantly for the success of the coffee house business model, which is centuries old by now.  How many names have been gossiped about, how many mysteries of the universe unraveled, how many jokes have amused patrons within the coffee house?  And how many harebrained schemes hatched?

It is one such scheme that serves as the plot of one of the most beloved comic operas of all time.  And the plot is hatched during the opera’s opening scene, set in a coffee house.  The opera is Così fan tutte with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Premiered in 1790, just 2 years before his untimely death, it is one of Mozart’s last operas, and the third of a trilogy composed to libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, who provided texts for many composers of Italian opera in Vienna at that time, the first two being The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni (for more about Don Giovanni, see this post).  Da Ponte had knack for tailoring his words to the strengths of the individual composers for whom he was writing and for this reason Mozart was keen to collaborate with him.  All three operas of their collaboration flow effortlessly and feature vivid character development.  Così fan tutte is arguably the most trivial of the trilogy, but it nails its comic tone and is, simply for this reason, worthy of the other two.

It is also a cynical commentary on the nature of women, almost bitingly so.  In the opening scene two military officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, are talking about how faithful their fiancees are.  A dirty old man named Don Alfonso (who is creeping around the cafe, or something; it’s never exactly clear what he’s doing there) overhears them and takes issue with their evaluation of the ladies.  He makes a bet with them that he can demonstrate their lack of faithfulness as long as they do exactly what he says, and they hatch a plan to pretend to be called off to war, and then attempt to seduce each other’s fiancee while disguised as Albanians.  Maybe it’s best if you don’t think about that too much.  I mean, would you go along with all that even if it seemed likely that you might win?  Long story short, Don Alfonso’s plan does indeed demonstrate their faithlessness and, right as the ladies, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are about to marry the Albanians, the plot is revealed.  Everyone has a good laugh, with pardons all around, and life goes on.  That sounds plausible right?  Can’t you just imagine yourself or any woman you know being totally cool with that kind of manipulation, even having bet upon the outcome?  Yeah, no problem.  I’m sure it happens all the time.  And I don’t think we ever learn who Don Alfonso is or why he’s involved in any of this.  Well, like I said, don’t think about it too hard and just enjoy the comedy.  Because, thanks to the finely-tuned comic sensibilities of da Ponte and Mozart, it is pretty funny.

But it’s significant that the opening scene is set in a coffee house.  It’s hard to imagine a plot like that being hatched anywhere else, isn’t it?  The coffee houses that opened in Europe starting in the 1650s, like the Persian models upon which they are based, quickly became community centers, attracting people for conversation, news, culture, and business.  There really isn’t a better setting for a scene like this, nor is it possible to imagine a better operatic scene to set in a coffee house:

While he’s not the first composer to come to mind in considering the great coffee fiends of Classical music, Mozart is said to have enjoyed it and benefited from its stimulating effects, often paired with its frequent companion, tobacco.  It is recorded that he completed the entire orchestration of his Clarinet Concerto’s rondo finale while drinking a cup of black coffee and smoking a satisfying pipe of tobacco.  For much of the information about coffee and Classical composers I am indebted to a fascinating article on the subject by music historian, John A. Rice.  You can read that article, which includes this account of Mozart and others, along more of his writings, here.  Rice speculates that the astounding productivity of Baroque and Classical composers is due in large part to the prevalence in their culture of highly stimulating vices including nicotine, coffee, and yet another popular hot drink that makes an appearance in Così fan tutte.  And I’m not talking about tea.  It’s a beverage that would probably evoke an image in your mind not exactly like its eighteenth century version, but has morphed into something else in our time.  Watch this scene from a little later in the opera.  This is the first appearance of the ladies’ maid, Despina, who is eventually recruited to help execute Don Alfonso’s deceptive scheme.

Despina was singing about chocolate.  But I bet it wasn’t hot chocolate like we tend to imagine.  Our contemporary hot chocolate, more often than not made from instant powder, is actually more closely related to a kind of drink more authentically made by melting a chocolate bar.  The chocolate Despina is talking about is kind of like coffee, but made from cacao beans instead.  This method is related to a similar practice by the Mayans which yielded a drink called xocolotl, for which the conquering Spanish developed a taste and imported to the European continent.  Chocolate, like coffee, inspired the establishment of chocolate houses, and different kinds of chocolate beverages, which came to be flavored and sweetened in various ways, were often served alongside coffee drinks in homes.  The chemical compounds of each drink are slightly different, but each stimulating in their own ways.

Così fan tutte is not the only opera by da Ponte and Mozart in which coffee and chocolate drinks make an appearance.  The final scene of Don Giovanni’s first act depicts a party in the title character’s ballroom to which he invites some of the local folk, aiming for new conquests.  Part of his package to disarm them is an assortment of delicacies including coffee and hot chocolate.  Watch the scene here; the references to hot drinks are very close to the beginning:

Mozart and his contemporaries wrote serious operas too, but focusing as they did on mythical figures like gods and legends, they do not include touches of the culture popular during the days of their creation.  Da Ponte’s comic libretti are fascinating in that they provide glimpses into the fashions of his day, including these references to the intoxicating beverages that had swept across Europe over the preceding centuries, winning creative devotees of all kinds, including the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Music for The Hunt, Day 2 – Hunting Symphony by Leopold Mozart

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt!  In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall.  It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters.  Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries.  If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.

Day 2 – Hunting Symphony by Leopold Mozart

The phenomenon of the child prodigy remains mysterious and poorly understood.  Naturally there are countless parents who would love to crack the code, and also just as many parents, if not more, who would certainly not wish to live life with their child as a prodigy, or simply would not be interested to push them hard enough to reach that level.  But however you feel about it, I’m sure we can all agree that it is a rare and fascinating thing.

Apparently there are a only small handful of disciplines in which child prodigies are usually found, but look at this list on Wikipedia and you see that the only two disciplines with child prodigy clubs large enough to feature their own lists on the site are music and chess.  Spoiler: the music list is considerably longer.  Considerably.  That’s one of those Wikipedia lists that you can really get lost in, endlessly clicking from article to article.  And, whose is the image at the top of the child prodigy article, representing them all, regardless of discipline?  Of course, the most iconic child prodigy in all of history, and he was a musician.

What is it about music that has made it such fertile soil for child prodigies to take root?  Why are musical prodigies so fascinating?  I’m not entirely sure, but maybe it has to do with music’s universal appeal (only a small handful of people could truly appreciate the contributions of a mathematics prodigy, for example), the remarkable complexity of mature musical expression, and the magnetism that results when tender little children are somehow able to execute feats of artistry that combine breathtaking technique with the maturity of an “old soul”.  Only music seems to of capable of delivering those qualities in a way that most everyone can understand and appreciate.

So, how is a child prodigy formed?  Is he born or cultivated?  Or both?  Like so many other discussions of aptitude and gifts it I’ve always found that it inevitably boils down to the classic nature vs. nurture debate upon which it is ultimately impossible to issue a clear verdict.  Of course we all sense that a result so complex and detailed MUST be a combination of the two.  Still, is it possible to posit that one may weigh more heavily in the determination?  I don’t know (sorry!), but I would be very interested to know how many children on that list spent their early years in the company of accomplished musicians, family or otherwise.  Perhaps there is some kind of special neural wiring that makes precociousness possible (I think there must be), but if that seed is not planted in the right soil the plant simply cannot take root.  Or to put it another way, how many people are born with the right “circuitry” but simply do not find themselves placed in the midst of the right environment with support system sturdy enough to develop their gifts?

I once heard someone say that it is easy to forget that Mozart was raised by one of the greatest violinists in Europe and that he would have heard his daily fiddling, even in utero.  I found that comment thought-provoking.

Personal side note/tangent: my lovely wife, Heidi, has played the cello in a symphony orchestra during the pregnancies of both of our sons, and during both periods of gestation participated in orchestral works with loud, raucous finales.  She said that she could feel both of them go wild inside the womb during those full-boar symphonic moments.  I kind of wonder if that has had any effect on them.  She is certain that it has.

Thanks for indulging me on that.  Now, back to Mozart.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father, Leopold, was an ambitious, multi-faceted professional musician working within the structures of the classical patronage system, supplying works for both court and chapel.  He played violin and wrote pedagogical manuals for the instrument (some of the best in history, in fact).  He was also a prolific composer and, as such, was well acquainted with the guidelines of harmony, counterpoint and orchestration.  Can you imagine having such a resource at your fingertips during the early years of your development?  And not only that, Leopold had the drive to apply constant and exacting discipline to his young son’s musical studies and development, coaching his instrumental technique and interpretation, correcting his voice-leading errors, guiding his aesthetic sense.  That is indeed great fertilizer to help a child prodigy take root.

While a small handful of Leopold’s luminous contemporaries (his own son included) elevated the conventions of the classical style to inspiring and timeless art, Leopold and most of his other contemporary musicians were crafting works that, while not necessarily sublime, were indeed competent and charming.  Any of Leopold Mozart’s surviving works will fit that bill, and some of them have even entered the modern concert repertory.  I notice the works that do tend to have a touch of novelty about them.  While there are numerous trio sonatas, courtly dances, theater pieces, symphonies, concertos, church works and others in his catalog, I imagine most of them would come across as rather dry and forgettable.  And as musicologists advance their careers by debating the respective merits and chronology of Leopold’s concert works, you can probably live quite happily without ever hearing about that.  If you experience music by Leopold nowadays it will probably have some kind of programmatic twist.  He obviously had an inventive side and could apply it to amusing effect.   Here’s a great example:

This playful Hunting Symphony for 4 horns and string orchestra is largely shaped by Leopold Mozart’s penchant for musical “naturalism” (his term), which essentially means he was happy to supplement the typical instruments of the ensemble with less common musical sounds in order to convey the story or image at hand.  This Hunting Symphony with its gunshots predates Tchaikovsky’s much grander application of the same idea in the ubiquitous 1812 Overture by more than a century.  There are some other works from Leopold that exhibit a similar “naturalism”.  His Toy Symphony features parts for toy instruments in addition to the professional ones, yielding a sound that is sort of like a toy sophistication.  And his raucous Peasant Wedding includes parts for folk instruments like bagpipes, the dulcimer and hurdy-gurdy, in addition to pistol shots.  I’m not aware of anyone else during the eighteenth century deploying overt effects like this in their musical works.  I guess you could say that Leopold was ahead of his time in that respect.  Coordinators for performances of both Tchaikovsky’s 1812 and Leopold’s Hunting Symphony have had to figure out how to create those effects, if not relying on actual live ammunition, although sometimes they do!  Check out this recording:

I imagine the gunshots in Leopold’s Hunting Symphony are usually performed by percussionists on the slapstick, although you could probably do something with cap guns for memorable visual effect.  And there’s another fun “naturalistic” element that Leopold calls for in this piece.

The orchestral writing in Leopold Mozart’s symphony is rich with all the effective devices of the day, drawn from the great centers of Mannheim, etc. including the rockets, sighs and whatnot, strung together to create a rhetorically satisfying even if not particularly memorable musical experience.  After Leopold began to sense the musical gifts of his son and daughter (Wolfgang’s sister Nannerl was no musical slouch and was Wolfgang’s traveling and performing companion during their early tours of Europe) he realized that his gift to mankind would not be his own productivity, but fostering theirs.  In spite of everything that is known about Leopold’s fraught relationship with Wolfgang, largely the result of denying him a childhood, I have to commend the maturity of that decision, which demonstrates remarkable humility.  Had Leopold instead chosen to neglect his son’s development and continue to focus on his own output the entire Mozart family may very well be lost to music history, or survive only as a negligible footnote.  Thanks to Leopold’s shift in activity, one that effectively ended his own creative career, the world can enjoy the resulting works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as they are.  Granted, whether that extraordinarily rich and beloved body of work is worth the pain and imbalance of Wolfgang’s life that came from his upbringing is certainly debatable, but that’s a discussion for another day.

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Music for Foodies, Day 4 – “Gia la e Mensa a Preparata” from Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful Blog is…Music for Foodies!  Every piece of music this week deals with food or dining in an interesting way.  Fill your belly, listen to great music, and discover something new in the process…

Day 4 – “Gia la e Mensa a Preparata” from Don Giovanni  by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Is eating a comical act, or deadly serious?

How about some pheasant for our main course?  Let me explain…

Have you ever seen the movie Amadeus?  It’s the 1984 film based on Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name which chronicles the rumored rivalry between the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri set against the backdrop of Viennese court life in the 1780s.  You should definitely watch it if you haven’t already.  

And if you ever come across a production of the play, go see it.  It’s a rare treat, and different enough from the movie to provide a distinct experience.  You can also find a copy of the script and read it, which is interesting too.

But the easiest way to consume that story is to see the marvelous film.  It has everything!  A riveting and engrossing story, great actors who bring the characters to life in multiple dimensions, beautiful costumes and set designs that evoke the atmosphere of eighteenth century Vienna and, of course, a wall-to-wall score packed with examples of Mozart’s wonderful music, which is sometimes played on screen and at other times used like film music to accompany the action without an obvious onscreen presence.  All of the music on the film’s soundtrack is by Mozart or his contemporaries; there was no composer hired to provide additional music, which I think was a great choice.  You get to hear examples from all sorts of different genres of Mozart’s production including symphonies, sonatas, church music, divertimenti, concertos, solo piano works and more.  There’s also a number of scenes that illustrate his legendary and almost mystical creative process as he improvises, develops ideas at the keyboard, and composes on paper.  But I think the real stars of the soundtrack of Amadeus are the scenes from Mozart’s operas.  They seem to form the major set pieces of the film, as if the movie is build around them, and they can stand on their own as decent stagings of great operatic scenes.

Amadeus focuses on the last decade of Mozart’s life, from about 1780 – 1791, which he spent in Vienna, and marked by his true maturity as a composer (such as it is – had he lived longer he probably would have developed even more, which is difficult for many of us mere mortals to imagine).  Mozart wrote enough masterpieces during that one final decade of his life to make the careers of at least 3 other composers, and maybe more.  The operas that dot the last decade of his life, starting with 1782’s Abduction from the Seraglio (or, depending on who you ask, 1781’s Idomeneo) and ending with 1791’s Magic Flute, remain, to this day, some of the finest in existence and are still performed widely today on operatic stages all over the world.  This brilliant handful of operas is characterized by elegant music, a keen sense of drama and pacing, penetrating psychological development of the characters, and a masterful intermix of tragic and comic elements.  This last part is unusual during a period of opera production in which the two modes of dramatic expression tended to be segmented.  In many of Mozart’s greatest operas we experience both tragedy and comedy combined most convincingly, and in more or less equal measure.  Don Giovanni of 1787 is a great example of this.  Watch this scene from Amadeus:

Electrifying, isn’t it?  Top notch opera production and film making.  This is the penultimate scene of Don Giovanni, and you can hear Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri narrating throughout about how he read the ghost of Mozart’s father into the opera as he watched it.  But if you could see the context around that scene within the greater opera you might be more inclined to understand Salieri’s narration as the storytelling device that it is, not really true and simply in service to making the film feel more dramatic.  Because, you see, Don Giovanni is actually a comedy.  Does that surprise you?  If this is the only scene you ever see then I’ll bet it does, because it doesn’t feel very comedic.  But there’s another 3 hours of the opera that you’re missing.  Oh, and we were about to have dinner, weren’t we?  Here’s the scene from Don Giovani that precedes the one you just watched in Amadeus:

That’s a much different feeling isn’t it?  Don Giovanni is Mozart’s telling of the Don Juan story.  The libretto of the opera constantly pulls back and forth between the depravity of its title character wreaking havoc in people’s lives (murder, seduction, home-wrecking) and the reaction of his conflicted and long-suffering servant, Leporello, who can be seen in the previous seen scurrying around to serve Don Giovanni his luxurious dinner.  Leporello provides the bulk of the comedy in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.  He is the basso buffo, or “comic bass” and it is his reactions and generally simple manner throughout the tragic wake of Don Giovanni’s adventures that serve to lighten the mood.  Even Leporello is complex, because in spite of his simplicity, his moral compass is much more finely tuned than Don Giovanni’s and his reactions constantly reveal that.  And, sometimes he’s just funny.  Did you catch the comedy in this last scene?  It’s all centered around Leporello envying Don Giovanni’s dinner and sneaking a choice cut of pheasant off his master’s plate, which happens right around the 3:00 mark.  Don Giovanni notices that it is gone, but instead of calling him out he makes poor Leporello sweat by asking him to talk and whistle for him even though he knows that his mouth is full.  This scene is right before the climactic finale you watched in Amadeus where the Commendatore, murdered by Don Giovanni in the opening scene, crashes the banquet and drags Don Giovanni to hell to pay for his deeds.  It’s an amazing contrast, but Mozart handles the switch with a deft hand and it never feels incongruent.

One more thing about this scene…  Did you notice Don Giovanni’s tafelmusik?  Yes, he has tafelmusik!  (See Day 1 of this week for more about that).  The finale of Don Giovanni always features an onstage wind band that plays music during the banquet.  When music in movies has an on-screen source it is called “source music”, and this is Mozart anticipating the technique of cinematic source music by more than a century.  And musical selections of the onstage band are notable.  The band in Don Giovanni plays instrumental arrangements of arias from other operas that were popular around the time Don Giovanni was written.  The band starts playing at about 1:00 in the previous clip and Leporella exclaims “Bravi, Cosa Rara!”  Cosa Rara is an opera by a contemporary of Mozart’s named Vincente Soler and this would have been a little inside joke to Mozart’s audiences.  Now, watch starting at 3:46.  This is another piece, actually an aria from Mozart’s own opera The Marriage of Figaro.  Don Giovanni remarks disdainfully “Ugh, this song I know only too well!” and Mozart’s depricating self quotation frames the comic scene involving Leporello’s stolen piece of pheasant.  This scene indicates to me that Mozart must not have taken himself too seriously and indeed, if his copious correspondence is any indication, he did not.

I hope you enjoyed that delicious main course.  Oh, and one final tidbit FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY.  One problem for American audiences who enjoy opera is that many of the best ones are in foreign languages like Italian, French and German.  A modern solution is to provide subtitles, which films often do.  And in recent years modern technology has allowed opera theaters to very helpfully broadcast translations during live productions on stage.  In searching for a production of Don Giovanni’s final scene with subtitles I discovered this…(ahem) unconventional…staging that is appropriate for mature audiences only.  Consider yourself warned…

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