The Music of Mozart: An Appreciation
by David Schildkret
| Text © 2008 David Schildkret.
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other published/presented work
please credit David Schildkret, ASU School of Music, and Music Director,
Mount Desert Summer Chorale (also include the URL of this web page).
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Mozart's music captivated me as a child. Nearly half a century later, I cannot recall how it
sounded to me then, but I vividly recollect the impression it left—that it still leaves. It
was sheer love at first hearing, and I knew very early on that I wanted to keep hearing it
as much as possible. That is partly why I became a musician.
The music of Mozart is deeply emotional, highly logical, perfectly proportioned, and
affecting. Naturally, I wouldn't have described it that way as a boy, but I must have
been attracted to some of those qualities. Moreover, I found Mozart himself
fascinating: the tale of the boy-genius who dazzled all Europe enthralled me. The main
thing, though, was the music, which is always stunningly beautiful. When you hear our
performance of "Laudate Dominum" I think you'll agree: who else writes such exquisite,
limpid melodies?
I was a teenager when I first saw a live opera performance, an amateur production
of The Marriage of Figaro. I was entranced. When the Countess sang her first aria,
"Porgi amor," I thought that I had never heard anything more heartbreakingly beautiful—
and then she sang "Dove sono". One of the painful tasks in choosing this year's
program was selecting one of those pieces over the other! "Dove sono" is memorable
not only for its exquisite melodies, but for Mozart's subtle characterization of the
Countess. When you read the text, it looks like a straightforward outburst. If I were
setting those words to music, I would probably focus on the Countess's anger and her
resentment of her philandering husband: she maligns his lying tongue, denounces his
ingratitude and cruelty, and holds him responsible for her humiliating position as she
seeks the help of her maid to thwart him. What wonderful stuff for a tantrum! But
Mozart chooses another tack, and immediately we realize that it is perfect: he
emphasizes her sorrow, her loss, and her nostalgia for happier times. The effect is
unbearably poignant. We hear and respond to the many layers of emotion, even if we
are not consciously aware of them or able to articulate them—indeed, they go beyond
words. Here is another of Mozart's gifts: he can paint lifelike, complex portraits that are
as insightful and personal as any picture by Rembrandt. He does this not with paint, but
with notes.
Mozart's Countess is a convincing depiction of a rejected woman instead of a
cartoon harpy because he perceives her deepest, most intensely passionate feelings
and, through his music, tempers and refines them. We feel the profound undercurrents
without the embarrassment of hysterics. This skill is magnificently evident in
Ch’io mi scordi di te,
where dignity and restraint keep powerful emotions in check. This gives
scope for the imagination and has engendered some juicy gossip: Mozart wrote the
piece for Nancy Storace, the singer who first played the role of Susannah in Figaro. He
presented it to her as a kind of going-away present when she was leaving Vienna to
make her home in London. She sang it at her farewell concert, with Mozart playing the
solo piano part. As in "Dove sono," the text is emotionally charged, but the music is
controlled, yet touching. Is it possible that there was something more between Mozart
and Storace than friendship? Biographers have often speculated that this might be so,
but it cannot be proved or disproved—and Mozart's music provides no hint of the truth.
In the next century, Wagner would make no secret of his passion for his patron's wife,
Mathilde von Wesendonck. The Wesendonck Lieder, Die Walküre, and Tristan und
Isolde are all magnificent tributes to his ardor. But there is no such outpouring in Ch’io
mi scordi, for all that it is deeply moving. Mozart touches us without wearing his heart
on his sleeve.
When there is the possibility of becoming formulaic—as in the Sonata that opens our
program or the merry Regina coeli that closes the first half, Mozart transcends
convention. His happy, tripping tunes never seem trite or commonplace, because he
invests them with a combination of youthful exuberance, extraordinary elegance, and
consummate grace. Moreover, Mozart can find ways to surprise us. The structure of
the Sonata follows that of most instrumental fast movements from the second half of the
eighteenth century: a couple of tunes play in contrasting keys (exposition), get tossed
around (development), and finally come back in the main key (recapitulation). But there
is a delightful departure: in the recapitulation, the melodies that we heard in the
beginning do not return in the order we first heard them. The tune that opened the work
doesn’t begin the recapitulation—that would be predictable—instead, Mozart saves it for
the very end of the piece. It is a simple device, yet it is a masterstroke, because it
reveals two aspects of the melody’s nature; aspects it took a genius to devise and
exploit. In another way, Mozart’s application of the fast movement design (generally an
instrumental idea) to the Regina coeli is delightful and
unexpected.
The same is true of the design of "Ch’io mi scordi," where Mozart has created an
unusual treatment of the standard rondo form (see here).
So here is a fourth
quality of Mozart's music: it is inevitable yet unpredictable, both in its grand design and
in its details—the remarkable yet utterly perfect turns it takes from phrase to phrase,
measure to measure, and even note to note. At the same time that the music delights
us by surprising us, it never shocks. This is so because the music is elegant and well
proportioned, orderly and clear in its design. It is for these qualities that Mozart's style is
aptly called "Classical."
If you bring together Mozart's gift for melody, his incisive portraits, his deeply felt but
restrained expression of emotions, and his capacity for both balance and surprise, you
realize that the core of Mozart's gift was his innate sense of drama. He understood
music's power to portray conflict and feeling, and he never failed to exploit this potential.
This is evident in every aspect of his mighty Requiem, from the circumstances of its
composition to the music itself.
Though I cannot remember when I first heard the Requiem, I recall my childhood
delight in the story of the ghostly messenger commissioning Mozart to write it. He
swore Mozart to secrecy, the story goes, and returned from time to time to check on the
work's progress. Afterwards, he would mysteriously vanish. We are told that as
Mozart's health began to fail, he came to fear that he was writing his own funeral
Mass—a work he never lived to complete. Surely, such a piece must be fraught with
premonitions of death and suffused with a dark atmosphere of foreboding as the
composer confronts his approaching end.
I was a graduate student when I first noticed that this view didn't match the music
itself. While later composers would emphasize the terror of the Last Judgment
portrayed in the Dies irae, Mozart instead wrote another of his limpid melodies for the
sound of the last trumpet: the trombone and baritone combine in a lyrical duet that is
nothing so much as a lullaby. What could this mean? How could this be the work of a
man standing on the brink of his own demise? The answer is that it isn’t.
Mozart didn't know that he was dying; we know that in hindsight. He suffered a
sudden, severe illness that proved fatal, but its seriousness was not evident to
anyone—least of all to Mozart himself. The legend surrounding the work's composition
has a basis in fact, but it was skillfully elaborated by Mozart's widow, Constanze, a
brilliant businesswoman who parlayed Mozart's reputation into a considerable personal
fortune within a very short time of his death. The myth of the Mozart Requiem is the
product one of the most adroit public relations campaigns ever waged. (The truth is
stranger than fiction: Mozart was indeed secretly engaged to write the Requiem. The
commission came from a count who enjoyed passing off works by celebrated Viennese
composers as his own. His beloved wife had died, and he wished to have a Requiem to
perform in her honor—one that he could pretend he had written.)
Despite its unfinished state (it was completed by one of Mozart's students, Franz
Xaver Süssmayr, and that is the version we are performing), the work still
demonstrates Mozart's underlying sense of drama. From the austere opening that
deliberately recalls the music of Bach and Handel (the Kyrie fugue resembles "And with
his stripes" in Handel's Messiah), to the fire and brimstone of the Dies irae, to the
hushed pleas for salvation, the Requiem is picturesque and powerful. But it is not a
fearsome portrait of the life to come. Instead, it reflects the view that Mozart had
articulated in a letter to his dying father. He had heard the alarming news that his father
was gravely ill. He was hopeful that his father was recovering (he was not), and after
expressing relief that this might be so, he offers his ideas about death:
As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I
have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest
friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is
indeed very soothing and consoling. ...Death is the key which unlocks the door to
our true happiness.
So, there is no terror in the Requiem, only solace and consolation. And once we
understand this, we can hear the majesty of the Rex tremendae, we can appreciate the
reverence of the Offertory, and we can make sense of the otherwise baffling lullaby in
the Tuba mirum. It is not all sweetness and light; there is apprehension (will sin be
forgiven?) and there is darkness. In describing death as the "truest friend of
mankind... the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness," Mozart reflects the
teaching of St. Paul: to experience the joy of resurrection, we must first endure the trial
of death. And like the insightful portrait of the Countess's complex emotions in a single
aria, Mozart is able to capture the essence of Pauline theology in a work whose text
was a long-established ritual, a piece he believed no one would ever know he had
written. The count may have been thwarted in his desire to pose as a great composer,
but posterity is the richer for it.
Despite a lifetime of study, I still cannot fully explain what makes Mozart's music
great or why I love it so much. Fortunately, beauty is its own justification. Mozart's
music is powerful, elegant, dignified, and insightful, but above all, it is sublimely
beautiful. We invite you to join us in contemplating that beauty, to share
our joy in it, and to celebrate the genius who gave it voice.
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