PMF Program Notes - August 8, 2006

Church Sonata
Concerto for Clarinet in A Major, K. 62
Piano Concerto No. 20 :: Symphony No. 34 in C

Sponsored by the Ralph & Genevieve B. Horween Foundation

Among the least remembered of Mozart’s apparently limitless musical talents was that of organist. He was trained from infancy by his father in violin and composition and clavier, and the ready access to the churches of Salzburg that Papa Leopold enjoyed as an employee of the archiepiscopal musical establishment allowed Wolfgang to transfer his keyboard skills easily to the organ. When Leopold first displayed his seven-year-old son to Vienna as harpsichordist, violinist, composer and organist, the boy was greeted with wonder and good cheer: he bounded into the lap of Empress Maria Theresa, threw his arms around her neck, and delivered a kiss to the imperial cheek. Mozart regularly tried out the local organs on his tours to France, England and Italy during the following years, and he exhibited enough skill to be offered the post of organist at Versailles in 1778. (Mozart, longing for the opera house, and for a sweetheart, Aloysia Weber, whom he had met on a stop in Mannheim while journeying to Paris, turned the job down. His father was furious.) Sandwiched in among the many tours and job hunts of his early years were Mozart’s stints as concertmaster, violin soloist, keyboard accompanist, organist and composer of sacred, entertainment and theatrical music in the household of the Salzburg Archbishop, Count Hieronymus Colloredo. Though he acted frequently as organist for the Salzburg services, his only works for the instrument are the seventeen so-called “Epistle Sonatas” that he composed between 1772 and 1780. (At the end of his life, he wrote a few pieces for a “mechanical organ,” a glorified music-box devised by a Viennese clockmaker.)

In the traditional Catholic service, the Epistle is a reading from the letters of St. Paul or other apostles in the New Testament. This item is followed by the Gradual and Alleluia, and then by the reading (Gospel) on which the sermon for the day is based. Archbishop Colloredo’s taste in Masses, like that of Maria Theresia at her court in Vienna, was for equal parts pomp and brevity, so in Salzburg, Mozart’s Sonatas — the pomp — were played immediately following the Epistle, at the same time as the priests quickly chanted — the brevity — through the next two items. The Sonatas had to be brief and entertaining, and Mozart met those requirements perfectly. These compact works, all in major keys, are cheerful and melodic, and require the participation of violins, cellos and basses (violas, for reasons that have never been discovered, were not then given a separate part in the Salzburg cathedral orchestra); three also call for a modest complement of winds and timpani. In form, they follow the familiar (though compressed) Classical sonata structure, and in style, they call for the organ to act variously as background continuo instrument, balancing partner to the ensemble (K. 263, 1776) or full-fledged soloist, with even the opportunity for a cadenza (K. 336, 1780). Despite the purely functional nature of the “Epistle Sonatas,” Mozart composed them with care and meticulous craftsmanship. They call to mind a passage in a letter that he wrote to his father while fulfilling a bothersome commission for some flute concertos in 1778: “Of course, I could merely scratch away at it all day long: but such a thing as this goes out into the world, so it is my wish that I need not be ashamed that it carries my name.” Mozart, it seems, was congenitally incapable of writing bad music.

Organ and orchestra are equal partners in the Sonata in C major, K. 263, trading phrases and moving collegially in tandem. The piece occupies a compact sonata form, with a festive opening theme, a delicate subsidiary subject pronounced above a wavering accompaniment, and a succinct central development section.

The K. 336 Sonata is really a vest-pocket concerto for organ, with the string ensemble relegated to a purely accompanimental function and the soloist allowed an opportunity for a cadenza just before the close.

Mozart, the man, continues to puzzle and to fascinate. Peter Shaffer’s brilliant play and movie, Amadeus, portrayed the composer as an insensitive, foul-mouthed, puerile lout roaring through Vienna raising envy, tempers and women’s skirts while dispensing masterpieces like a gum-ball machine. While each of these strains did indeed run through Mozart’s personality, they do not account entirely for his character, as Shaffer would seem to have us believe. Mozart’s relationship with the man for whom he wrote the Clarinet Concerto is only one example refuting the playwright’s view.

Mozart harbored a special fondness for the graceful agility, liquid tone and ensemble amiability of the clarinet from the time that he first heard the instrument as a young boy during his tours, and later wrote for it whenever it was available. During his years in Vienna, he was especially impressed by the technical accomplishment and expressive playing of the clarinettist in the imperial court orchestra, Anton Stadler. Stadler was a Freemason, and, when Mozart joined the fraternity, the two musicians became close friends. Those last years of Mozart’s life were ones of stifling poverty, ill health and family problems that often forced him to go begging for loans from others, especially another fellow Mason, Michael Puchberg, who earned many laudatory footnotes in the closing pages of the composer’s biography for his generosity. It says much about Mozart’s kindness and sensitivity that he, in turn, loaned Stadler money when he could, and even once gave him two gold watches to pawn when there was no cash at hand. The final accounting of Mozart’s estate after his death showed that Stadler owed him some 500 florins — several thousand dollars at today’s rate. Stadler also came out of the friendship with far more than just some of Mozart’s silver. In addition to the flawless Clarinet Concerto, Mozart wrote for him the Clarinet Quintet (K. 581), the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Viola (K. 498), the clarinet and basset horn parts in the vocal trios, and the clarinet solos in the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The Clarinet Concerto started as another piece apparently intended for Stadler — a work for basset horn (alto clarinet), strings, two flutes and two horns that was sketched as early as 1789. When Stadler conferred with Mozart about the solos in Tito, it seems that he encouraged him to revise the sketch into a full concerto for his instrument.

The Clarinet Concerto was the next-to-last work that Mozart completed, followed before his untimely death in December 1791 by only the Masonic Cantata (K. 623) and the unfinished Requiem. The Concerto’s beauty, grace and deep emotion mark it as one of his supreme masterpieces. Only the greatest creator could have balanced music of such limpid, effortless formal perfection with the incipient Romantic sensibility pulsing beneath the work’s surface, a quality that Friedrich Blume noted imparts “the impression of consummate equipoise and proportion.” The first movement is an exquisitely sculpted sonata-concerto form throughout which the dark, sensuous sound of the clarinet is carefully integrated into the orchestral texture. The simplicity of the theme and structure of the following Adagio belie the emotional depth of its music. The rondo-finale not only maintains the spirit of gaiety associated with that form, but also brings to it an entire world of feelings, by turns cheerful and somber, effusive and introverted. This wonderful Concerto embodies the words of the renowned pianist and Mozart specialist Lili Kraus, who stated in a New York Times interview of several years ago: “There is no feeling — human or cosmic — no depth, no height the human spirit can reach that is not contained in Mozart’s music.”

Composed in 1785.
Premiered on February 11, 1785 in Vienna, with the composer as soloist.

The year 1785 marked an important turning point in Mozart’s attitude toward his work and his public, a change in which this D minor Concerto was central. When he tossed over his secure but hated position with the Archbishop Colloredo in his native Salzburg, he determined that, at age 25, he would go to Vienna to seek his fame and fortune as a piano virtuoso. He found both, at least for the first few years, during which he gave a large number of “Academies,” instrumental and vocal concerts that were popular during the Lenten season, when regular theatrical and operatic activities were prohibited. His concertos for these Academies winningly satisfied the Viennese requirement for pleasantly diverting entertainment, and they were among the most eagerly awaited of his new music. His success in 1784 may be gauged by the length of the subscription list for his concerts, which included more than 150 names representing the cream of the local nobility: eight princes, one duke, two counts, one countess, one baroness and many others of similar pedigree.

The D minor Concerto of 1785 must have puzzled the concert habitués of Vienna. This new and disturbing work, from a composer who had previously offered such ingratiating pieces, did not conform to their standard for a pleasant evening’s diversion. Instead, it demanded greater attention and a deeper emotional involvement than they were prepared to expend. Mozart’s tendency in his later years toward a more subtle and more profound expression was gained at the expense of alienating his listeners. His aristocratic patrons were not quite ready for such revolutionary ideas, and it is little surprise that when he circulated a subscription list for his 1789 Academies, it was returned with only one signature. It is no thanks to Vienna that Mozart’s most sublime masterworks — Don Giovanni, the G minor Quintet, the Requiem, the G minor Symphony, this D minor Concerto — were created.

The first movement follows the concerto-sonata form that Mozart had perfected in his earlier works for piano and orchestra, and is filled with conflict between soloist and tutti which is heightened by enormous harmonic, dynamic and rhythmic tensions. The second movement, titled “Romanza,” moves to a brighter key to provide a contrast to the stormy opening Allegro, but even this lovely music summons a dark, minor-mode intensity for one of its episodes. The finale is a complex sonata-rondo form with developmental episodes. The D major coda that ends the work provides less a light-hearted, happy conclusion than a sense of catharsis capping the magnificent cumulative drama of this noble masterwork.

This sparkling Symphony was composed in August 1780, during the last year of Mozart’s “Salzburg Captivity,” as the frustrated young musician dubbed his position as composer, violinist, pianist and orchestral leader in the archiepiscopal musical establishment of his home town. He felt belittled and confined in the provincial town, knowing that he had the talent to conquer the musical world, but unable to find a suitably important post from which to launch the attack. In January 1779, he returned from a long, disappointing job hunt that had taken him as far as Paris, where his mother died, and Mannheim, where he was jilted by his first serious love, but had produced no position. He reluctantly resumed his duties in Salzburg while longing constantly for something greater, especially something that would allow him to create operas.

Shortly after completing the Symphony No. 34, Mozart wrote Idomeneo on a commission from Munich and went to oversee its production. He overstayed the original six-week leave of absence granted by Archbishop Colloredo by nearly two months, however, and there were bitter feelings on both sides at his return — Mozart railed against the degrading, unbearable post (he overstated his case); Colloredo censured the insubordinate employee. The final break came at an interview in May 1781, when Mozart hurled invective at His Eminence, and His Eminence kicked Mozart — literally — out of the room. Mozart immediately settled in Vienna, returning only once to his home town during the remaining decade of his life.

The C major Symphony (K. 338), written just nine months before he resigned his Salzburg post, shows Mozart’s uncanny ability at synthesizing the musical styles of his time into a work that would please the particular audience for which it was composed. (Virtually everything that Mozart or any of his contemporaries wrote was for a specific occasion; composed, essentially, on commission. “Inspiration” entered music with Beethoven.) He tempered the progressive tendencies he had come to admire in the Mannheim composers — refined part-writing, independent treatment of the woodwinds and horns, delicacy of detail, use of crescendo and decrescendo, contrast of piano and forte — for the conservative tastes of his Salzburg audience, who preferred the old-fashioned three-movement symphony (lacking the minuet increasingly popular elsewhere) and a certain opera buffa style characteristic of the earlier Italian sinfonia. Such was Mozart’s mastery, even at the age of 24, that he could juggle these contemporary idioms with inimitable panache. “The musical ideas are mostly the current coin of the time,” noted Eric Blom of the C major Symphony, “but their treatment is in the nature of ironical commentary. Mozart loves the musical clichés of his century and at the same time laughs at them up his sleeve, and never more wittily than in this little but captivating and very finished symphonic work.”

It is not known when the Symphony was performed in Salzburg, though it was probably played soon after the work was completed on August 29, 1780. Shortly before Mozart’s break with Archbishop Colloredo, in May of the following year, this piece was apparently heard again on the Vienna Tonkünstler Society concert of April 3, 1781. (Program listings of the time were frustratingly vague, referring to such a work as this simply as “Grand Symphony by Herr Mozart.”) Joseph Bonno, Imperial Court Conductor and Composer and director of the Society, had taken a liking to the young Mozart, and decided to give his young colleague’s career a boost by performing one of his symphonies and allowing him to play some piano solos on the Tonkünstler program. The Society was an organization of professional performers devoted to the support of retired musicians and their families. The player-members contributed their services to four benefit concerts a year, which were held during the Church holiday seasons, when theatrical productions were forbidden. Because all local performers were morally bound to participate, a large ensemble, such as the ninety-player group heard at the April 1781 concert, could customarily be assembled for these events. Mozart was delighted with the performance that they gave his Symphony. A week after the concert he wrote to Papa Leopold, “The Symphony went magnifique and had all possible succès — forty violins played — the wind instruments were all doubled — ten violas — ten double-basses, eight violoncelli and six bassoons.” For an outdoor concert in Vienna’s Augarten on May 26, 1782, Mozart again revived the Symphony, adding to it a minuet movement (K. 409) and expanding the scoring to include flutes. The work is usually heard today in its original three-movement form.

The structure of the opening movement is essentially sonata-allegro, with a martial proclamation as a main theme and a teasing little strain for contrast. In its formal subtleties, however, the movement is as close to the Italian opera overture as to the newer German symphonic sonatas of Haydn. As with the overture form, it lacks the usual exposition repeat, has a development section based on new material rather than on previously heard themes, and extensively elaborates the exposition melodies on their return in the recapitulation. To the formal prototypes, Mozart brings an incomparable blend of suavity and harmonic daring, with the interplay of light and shadow that is an integral part of his best scores. Of the mood of this movement, with the wealth of emotional resonances engendered by its melodic sculpting, deft scoring and subtle shifts from major to minor, G. de Saint-Foix wrote in his study of the Mozart symphonies, “The whole is primarily heroic and brilliant: but how strongly one feels that Mozart was scarcely ever capable of writing a movement that was simply and solely heroic and brilliant!”

The Andante Mozart provided for the Symphony was “the richest slow movement he had as yet produced, and which he did not often surpass in subtlety,” assessed Sir Donald Tovey. The movement was originally for strings only, but when Mozart added bassoons to the scoring he not only strengthened the bass line but also imbued the music with a burnished, moonlit sonority. So taken was Saint-Foix with this haunting nocturne that he found in it “a delicacy and emotion ... never paralleled, even in the work of Mozart.”

The rollicking, sonata-form finale could well serve as the introduction to some farcical opera buffa. The 19th-century Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick heard in this music foreshadowings of the more boisterous moments of Figaro and Così fan tutte, while Eric Blom perceived here a preview of the comic stage character that Mozart created in his 1782 The Abduction from the Seraglio: “Osmin already peeps out of it,” wrote Blom. The rhythm of this moto perpetuo movement recalls the tarantella, the traditional Italian dance whose violent motions (producing copious perspiration) were said to expel the venom from the body of a tarantula bite victim. Nothing quite so threatening lies behind this finale, however, which serves simply to bring this delightful Symphony to a spirited close.