If Mozart Had Had Better Health Care….
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 8:15 pm
This article was published in the New York Times in 2006, it is a very good piece so I thought I might post it here.
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: September 17, 2006
POOR Mozart, who died at 35, must have inherited at least the potential for longevity from his parental gene pool.
His father, Leopold Mozart, died at 67, a ripe old age in an era when rampant illnesses claimed the majority of European children in infancy. Sadly, Mozart’s indomitable mother, Anna Maria, died at 58 while in Paris, having contracted viral infections and a severe fever during an arduous trip with her rambunctious, opportunity-seeking 22-year-old son. Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, who had also been a musical prodigy, died in 1829 in Salzburg at the impressive age of 78, having well outlived her husband, an officious Austrian prefect and two-time widower with five children, who resented their stepmother.
Mozart’s death in 1791 was probably caused by streptococcal infection, renal failure, terminal bronchial pneumonia and a matrix of other illnesses, some dating from his childhood, when the Mozart family spent years touring Europe to show off the boy genius and, to a lesser extent, his sister.
Imagine how different music history would have been had Mozart lived to Nannerl’s age. He would have died in 1834, having outlived Beethoven by seven years and Schubert by six. Would Beethoven’s symphonic adventures have turned out as they did had Mozart remained his contemporary?
Think of this. A wizened old Mozart might have been in the audience in 1829 when the 19-year-old Chopin, during a short visit to Vienna, performed his first work for piano and orchestra, Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
Then again, the towering impact of “Don Giovanni” on young composers like Chopin might not have been the same had Mozart lived to write more operas. How many more? Well, this summer the Salzburg Festival presented productions of all 22 of Mozart’s works for the stage, written over a span of 23 years, roughly one a year. Add 43 years to Mozart’s life, and do the math.
To spin the fantasy further, might Mozart have altered his low opinion of musical culture in Paris (“I am living among brutes and beasts as far as Musique is concerned,” he wrote to his father from Paris in 1778) had he lived to hear Berlioz’s astounding “Symphonie Fantastique” in 1830?
All of this is of course pure speculation. Yet like Mozart lovers everywhere, I’ve been hearing a lot of his music in this Mozart year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, and two trends in the later works, two paths Mozart seemed to be exploring, jump out at me.
One suggests where Mozart was heading as an opera composer. By the time of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così Fan Tutte,” the three masterpieces he wrote with his librettist sidekick Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart had become a master of the theater. Among other achievements, in these works he transformed the comic-opera genre into a vehicle for sublime, complex and profound dramas. That Mozart so deftly balanced comic and tragic elements in these works is wondrous enough. What stands out more is the emotional ambiguity that comes through in scene after scene, thanks to Mozart’s uncannily elusive music.
No critic better expressed this ambiguity than the composer Virgil Thomson, who summed up “Don Giovanni” in a 1940 article for The New York Herald Tribune headlined “Mozart’s Leftism.” Commenting on Mozart’s attitude toward his characters, Thomson wrote: “The balance between sympathy and observation is so neat as to be almost miraculous. ‘Don Giovanni’ is one of the funniest shows in the world and one of the most terrifying. It is all about love, and it kids love to a fare-ye-well. It is the world’s greatest opera and the world’s greatest parody of opera. It is a moral entertainment so movingly human that the morality gets lost before the play is scarcely started.”
Yet having attained such mastery, in the last months of his life Mozart composed two rather makeshift operas. Admittedly “La Clemenza di Tito” was a rush job, written to fulfill a commission Mozart could not afford to turn down: the celebrations in Prague on the occasion of Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia. Returning to the opera seria genre for the first time since “Idomeneo,” composed a decade earlier, Mozart and his collaborator, Caterino Mazzola, adapted a 1734 libretto by Metastasio that had already been set some 40 times. Mozart was so frantic to finish “Clemenza” that he subcontracted the writing of the keyboard-accompanied recitatives to another composer, most likely his junior colleague Franz Xaver Süssmayr.
Then there was “Die Zauberflöte,” a happy but hectic collaboration with the theater impresario and actor Emanuel Schikaneder, who conceived the work and wrote the text. Schikaneder had taken charge of a sort of people’s theater in suburban Vienna. He wanted Mozart to write a singspiel, a lighter genre of opera with spoken dialogue. Yet he also wanted the show to be elevated and classy. These were just two of the seemingly opposite goals for this operatic fairy tale.
Schikaneder asked Mozart to compose music suitable for stage tricks and special effects, from the monstrous serpent that would appear and be killed in the opening scene to the trials of fire and water that Prince Tamino and his beloved Pamina would endure at the work’s conclusion. Naturally, Schikaneder made up the big, goofy, scene-stealing part of Papageno, the bird catcher, for himself. On top of it all, Mozart and Schikaneder, who were Masons, decided to plant thinly disguised evocations of Masonic rituals into the opera. To all of Schikaneder’s requests Mozart said, essentially, “Sure, sure, whatever you want.”
Having written three perfect operas with Da Ponte, why did Mozart so willingly sign on to “Clemenza” and “Zauberflöte,” projects that involved such compromises up front? Because by this point he was so thoroughly confident of his skills as a composer for the theater that he knew he could cut through any dramatic shortcomings and expose the emotional cores of the characters.
“Clemenza” may have a thrown-together quality, and “Zauberflöte” is a mishmash. But it doesn’t matter, as I learned once again this summer. Last month I attended the fanciful new production of “Zauberflöte” at the Salzburg Festival, elegantly conducted by Riccardo Muti, a performance that conveyed the work’s deeply spiritual essence. And recently I have been enjoying a new recording of “Clemenza” on the Harmonia Mundi France label, with René Jacobs conducting the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and a splendid cast, a performance that fully captures that opera’s ingenious strokes and affecting nobility.
No doubt if Mozart had lived a couple of more decades, he would have found tragic epics and sophisticated domestic comedies alike as subjects for operas. Still, by the time of his death he had become a pragmatic man of the theater, a true collaborator. I bet that he would have relished the challenge (not to mention the commission fees) of working on projects that involved significant compromises, much like Handel before him and Verdi after. Or for that matter, Gershwin. I would be just as eager to hear the bawdy entertainments Mozart might have written for Schikaneder as I would his operatic adaptation of “Othello.”
The other compositional trend in Mozart’s late works is harder to grasp and difficult to describe. It involves his increasing preoccupation with motifs and the technique usually called motivic development.
Motivic development, which reached a zenith in Viennese Classicism, allows a composer to generate an entire score from a small pool of motifs, the little components that make up a theme or a phrase. These components can be a cell of pitches, a snippet of a melody, a short rhythmic figure.
Haydn, a supreme master of this technique, taught it to his student Beethoven, who adapted it to his own ends. Most listeners do not consciously follow the development of motifs in a Haydn string quartet or a Beethoven symphony. Still, it is the brilliant use of this technique that makes, say, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, despite its constant mood swings through four long movements, come across to the listener, however subliminally, as an integrated and inevitable whole.
Composing music this way did not come naturally to Mozart. He had an intuitive gift for melody, a keen ear for searching harmony and a hard-won but complete mastery of contrapuntal writing that allowed him to tuck intricate, multivoice passages into his operas, even in the midst of some bustling comic ensemble. Yet he was by nature a man of the theater. His piano concertos come across like operas for instruments, as do many of his piano sonatas. Generating a string quartet or a symphony through the technique of motivic development took a special sort of focus and effort.
This, to me, explains the self-effacing tribute Mozart wrote for the title page of the remarkable six string quartets that he dedicated to Haydn in 1785. These works, he wrote, were “the fruit of long and laborious labor.”
Why were they so especially hard to write? The popular image of Mozart as some sort of uncouth conduit for music of the divine is nonsense. He was the hardest-working composer who ever lived. His wife, Constanze, warned him that he was working himself to death, and she was right. In these quartets he honors Haydn by trying to match the master’s expertise in the tough technique of motivic development, and it cost him.
Some such quest may also explain why, in the summer of 1788, Mozart worked simultaneously on his last three symphonies: No. 39 in E flat, No. 40 in G minor and No. 41 in C (“Jupiter”). Though there is some scholarly dispute on the matter, these works seem to have been composed neither on commission nor for a guaranteed performance. Why did he undertake them? Again, my guess is that he wanted finally to come to terms with this matter of motivic development.
His work paid off. Almost every bit of the G minor Symphony, for example, can be heard as emanating from the motifs that make up the first phrases of the first movement: the repeated, sighing half-step, which sinks from E flat to the dominant pitch, D; the sudden leap up a minor sixth to B flat, from which the theme creeps down the scale in staggered bursts that hew to the short-short-long rhythmic motif that runs through the main theme and, eventually, the entire symphony.
These matters are difficult to describe in words. The point is that for all its tumultuous shifts, this symphony sounds inexorable and of a piece from beginning to end. Mozart worked long and hard to make it so.
I think I can imagine where Mozart was heading as a theater composer. But with this business of motivic development and the symphony he was just getting started. What a loss. Forget reaching his sister’s age. If only he had made it to 50.