The man: Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart was the son of a music teacher and minor composer from Augsburg; he and his elder sister, Nannerl, were both musical prodigies. By the time Wolfgang was turned 5, he’d learnt the piano, taught himself the violin, and composed his first few works. When he was six, the famous young performers began their first international tour, playing to sell-out crowds and fascinated royalty across the continent; the four-year tour, during which the young boy amused himself by mapping and describing imaginary countries and their people and histories, was only the beginning of more than a decade of touring. Along the way, he wrote his first symphonies (beginning at the age of
and operas (beginning at 12). He was not a particularly serious-minded or studious child, but he did love music, and was aided by a near-perfect aural memory: hearing Allegri’s Miserere at the Vatican, a piece so carefully guarded by the Pope that to sneak out a performance copy was regarded as a heresy, the young boy transcribed the entire quarter-hour, nine-voice work from memory – though he did come back again two days later to double-check some of the trickier passages. However, despite his reputation as a prodigy, none of his real masterpieces were written before the age of about 17.
If he was a somewhat precocious child, Mozart was thoroughly childish man, notorious among his friends for his lack of seriousness. Our window into his character – his surviving letters – shows a man obsessed with scatological obscenities and word games (the former can be seen in such works as K.233/382d, “Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber”). In his adult life, having moved to Vienna (cultural capital of Europe at the time), the former child star struggled continually for money. He was a noted pianist, who would improvise half-hour encores, but performing tired him; he attempted to work as a piano teacher, but his pupils mostly irritated him; he attained fame and popularity as a composer, but was best loved in the provinces, and never made much money – not enough to pay for his drinking and his taste in expensive clothes, not to mention his opera-singer wife and their two children. By his mid-thirties, he seems to have stabilised (some have suggested he recovered from long-term depression), and set up some sort of Patreon subscription scheme – instead of relying on one employer, he had a circle of interested rich people each pay a small monthly fee for early access to his works.
Then he died, at the age of 35. It’s hard not to regard this as one of the greatest catastrophes in Western culture. Not only was Mozart only beginning to come into his prime – he composed masterpieces and died at an age when most composers had not yet reached musical maturity, he had recently engaged in a prolonged study of Bach, and several of his greatest works were written shortly before his death – but his death in 1791 almost eerily deprived the world of a meeting with Beethoven, who came to Vienna in 1792. Beethoven and Mozart, both difficult characters, likely would not have collaborated directly, but their coexistence would surely have spurred both to greater heights (Mozart would still have been in his Prime when he heard the Eroica). In any case, Mozart’s untimely death spurred an outpouring of belated national grief, and it is in this immediately posthumous period that both the works, and the legend, of Mozart spread across Europe.
The style: Mozart wrote in, and brought to its most perfect state, the Classical style. In its more primitive expressions (the early Galant), this was a style simple to a fault, in reaction to the excesses of the Baroque: a reliance on only three chords; simple, short, symmetrical melodies that the man on the street could hum at work the next day; a light, frothy, unchallenging quality and a reluctance to venture into minor keys or entertain even the mildest discord; a mania for satisfying climactic cadences. Mozart took that style, and the structural complexities developed by his elder colleague, Haydn, and found ways to express the depths of the human soul. The result is still by default... well, pleasant... with an insoucient jollity that comforts or irritates depending on the listener. Mozart wrote a lot of inconsequential music in that vein. But his greater works are able to juxtapose that jollity with pain – with grief, suffering, sometimes even awe and terror – in a way that transforms the pleasant matrix from frivolity into something approaching a noble resilience - and all accomplished with an air of total effortlessness. His most distinctive, irreplicable mood is found in some of his slow movements, and has variously been described as unrequitable longing, a gentle regret, or resigned forgiveness – a beauty that has led to the composer being regarded as “the Voice of God”. In technical terms, late in his career he increasingly reintroduced Baroque complications – harmonic variety, and understated counterpoint – while experimenting with more chromatic harmonies and more diverse textures of timbre. His greatest talent, and perhaps curse, was his ability to make everything – whether passionate outbursts or intellectual fugues, whether conservative or experimental – sound natural, simple, and easy, which has ever since resulted in his music being underestimated by casual music fans. To his contemporaries, he was a master both of restrained good taste, but also of an unprecedently emotional musical language. To later generations, he became a symbol of divine perfection – “there is nothing perfect in the world,” wrote one Victorian intellectual, “except Mozart”.
Unusually, due to his mercenary nature and poor time-management, much of his work was written in a hurry for a quick buck – though it’s a myth that he never needed to draft, it’s true that he was able to write at breathtaking speed, aided in his piano works by a talent for improvising on the spot. For one of his violin sonatas, for example, composed in about an hour the night before performance, Mozart had to play the entire piano accompaniment off the top of his head, not having had time to write it down. For his great opera, Don Giovanni, Mozart was out drinking with friends the night before opening night when he realised he still hadn’t written an overture: rushing back, he worked through the early hours of the morning, while his wife served him more alcohol and read from The Arabian Nights to keep him awake; the opera was finished at 7am the day of the performance, too late to be practiced, so the overture had to be played from sight on opening night.
Easy Listening: Mozart critics might contend that all Mozart is ‘easy listening’ – certainly, his career was spent proving that even great art could be easy to listen to – and as a result a huge number of his works are well-known to the public, both directly and through their extensive use in film. We might begin with some of his most famous tunes, perhaps the most popular of which
the Allegro from Eine kleine Nachtmusik – disposable froth, almost certainly written in a hurry on commission, and yet froth of highest order – once heard, impossible to forget. Similarly, there’s the
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro. Or how about the Horn Concerto No. 4, which concludes with this memorable little
Rondo? (or ‘the music from the cassette tape reading of Fantastic Mr Fox’ in my mind...).
Transitioning to a more serious side, we might take in the
Adagio from the Serenade No. 10, or the
Andantino from the Concerto for Flute and Harp (the only piece of harp music Mozart ever wrote, as he despised the instrument – and the guy who commissioned the piece never even paid up). Or the
Romance from the Piano Concerto No. 21. Or the
Adagio from the Clarinet Concerto (one of his last works)? Or perhaps
Sull’aria[/quote], or [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WNvbEUZZXo]Dove sono, from The Marriage of Figaro.
Or, turning to lighthearted, catchy, semi-comic songs, there’s
Non piu andrai from the The Marriage of Figaro, or
Se vuol ballare, from The Marriage of Figaro. Or
Papagena/Papageno or
Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen from The Magic Flute. A similar light-hearted quality, with some Orientalist spice, can be found in his well-known
Meanwhile, also from The Magic Flute, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpVV9jShEzU]Der Hölle Rache displays a darker, albeit still melodious, side, in addition to being one of opera’s legendarily difficult arias, with sustained flageolet singing. A much quieter and more complex – both progressive and traditional – sound can be found in his late motet for choir,
Ave Verum Corpus. But if that work, one of his last, demonstrates his maturity in his final year, there is something just as uniquely Mozartian in his first great work as a teenager, the flamboyantly joyous motet
Exsultate, jubilate, of which the opening movement is particularly famous.
Masterworks: It’s difficult to divide Mozart’s “masterworks” from his “easy listening repertoire”, because when he’s at his best he’s usually very easy to listen to. There is also, as with Bach, a problem of volume. Mozart turned out more lazy work than Bach did – though even that tends to be perfectly pleasant – but he was also a prolific composer able to turn his genius to any genre. He is sometimes considered music’s greatest “universal genius” – because not only did he compose in almost genre that existed in his day, but for every genre he composed pieces that are at least arguably the best, or among the best, in that genre.
In opera, I’ve already extensively linked to The Marriage of Figaro, his comic opera that flits effortlessly between humour and
emotional power – it’s the rare comic opera that’s actually funny if you find a version in a language you understand; his other comedies – The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni (the aria
Là ci darem la mano was the pop hit of its day and the basis of many homages over the following century) and to a lesser extent Così fan tutte (the reputation of which suffered in the Victorian era due to its perceived immorality; most of Mozart’s operas are in some way sexually or politically risque) – are also considered among the pinnacles of opera. [in the period 2012-2016, Figaro, Flute and Giovanni were three of the top ten most performed operas, Flute being #2, with Così fan tutte at #15]. His serious operas were less succesfull, musically and commercially, but three of them (the Die Entführung aus dem Serail, La clemenza di Tito, and Idomeneo) are still in the top 100 most performed operas. Mozart’s many concert arias and motets further establish him as one of the leading singers for the voice.
Similarly, while most of Mozarts symphonies are fluffy little pieces (the best known is the ‘Paris’), he began to draw up to the leve of Haydn with his later ‘Haffner’, ‘Linz’ and ‘Prague’ symphonies, before hitting a peak with his final three symphonies, #39-#41. The most popular is the
‘Great G Minor’, no. 40, unusual at the time for his its darkness (few previous symphonies had ended in a minor key) and its intensity. The best, however, is generally considered to be the magisterial no.41, known as the ‘Jupiter’, for which Mozart combines his genius for melody and balance with extreme technical skill and diverse musical style – most notorious is the final movement, with its five major themes and its multiple fugato sections, culminating in
a stunning fugato that incorporates all five themes. A recent poll of conductors saw the Jupiter voted the 3rd greatest symphony of all time (no. 40 was in the top twenty).
In the field of the concerto, Mozart more or less established the importance of the piano concerto as a genre, and concertos
no. 20 (dark and stormy) and
no. 21 (‘Elvira Madigan’) (light and sunny; amazingly, the two concertos were written in the same month) are among his best-known major works, and
no. 23 is pretty famous too, although many connoisseurs believe
no. 24 may be the best – really, of the 27, any of the last dozen or so will have supporters. Most of his concertos for other instruments are less heavy works – the horn concertos in particular are dashing frivolities – but the Clarinet Concerto is by far the best and best-known in that genre. Mozart’s five violin concertos were all composed as a teenager, yet are delightful perfections – the
No. 3 in particular, is often rated one of the greatest of violin concertos, with its dazzling (and surprisingly racy in portions, including an unexpected dance suddenly popping up in the middle of the finale) outer movements and tender slow movement.
Beyond the assorted motets and other short works, Mozart’s religious and choral music is found in his long series of masses, composed in his youth and his time employed by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Perhaps in part due to the Archbishop’s skeptical attitude to music – only abbreviated musical masses were permitted – these tend not to be particularly memorable, although the final two, the Coronation Mass (used frequently in European royal ceremonies in the 19th century) and in particular the jubilant
Missa solemnis have remained popular. His reputation in the genre, however, ironically rests upon two sets of sketches he never completed: the wonderful Great Mass in C Minor, which the composer abandoned partway through (yet somehow staged a performance of), and the Requiem, which he was composing when he died. The C Minor is best known for its stunning
Kyrie, in which an ominous and restless ‘Kyrie eleison’ dissolves temporarily into one of music’s most agonisingly sublime (and at the time controversially operative) arias in the ‘Christe eleison’ section; the current Pope’s favourite, however, is the less sensationalist but more vocally impressive
Et incarnatus est, originally performed by Mozart’s wife. The following
Sanctus and Hosanna are an appropriately triumphant response.
But it’s the Requiem, inevitably, with its associated mythology (the piece was commissioned anonymously, and legend has it that Mozart believed he might be composing his own Requiem; he did indeed die in the process) that attracts the most attention. It is a striking departure from previous reqiuems, injecting a decided note of brimstone and terror into the sad gentleness of previous ceremonies, and, along with its sister work by Cherubini (which scandalously introduced a giant gong into the solemn occasion) it laid the ground for a century of fiery Romantic death-masses.
How much of it is really by Mozart, however, is subject to debate. Mozart is believed to have written the opening movement fully, and to have made unorchestrated sketches in varying levels of detail of most of the first half of the mass. These were completed by his former student, Franz Süssmayr. In the view of Mozart’s widow, eager to publicise her husband’s last work and lay claim to the royalties to feed her orphaned children, Süssmayr’s filling out of the early movements was simply following the various instructions and sketches left by Mozart on various scraps of paper long since lost, and Süssmayr’s completion of the later movements (the final movement reworks Mozart’s own music from the opening) was at least guided by general ideas passed on by Mozart before his death, which do not survive in documentary form. In the view of skeptics, the decidedly less inspired second half must be entirely the work of Süssmayr, while the ‘completion’ of the first half may likewise be mostly Süssmayr. The difficulty arises because, on the one hand, it is easy to doubt Constanze’s highly questionable account of the process; but, on the other, there is reluctance to admit that Süssmayr, an extremely minor composer, could have written even the less brilliant bits of the work himself, let alone the great bits. Various modern composers have attempted their own reconstructions, but the version performed today is almost invariably the Mozart/Süssmayr version – other composers may be able to write better music than Süssmayr, but none have been able to do a more convincing Mozart impression than Mozart’s own pupil. Notable moments include the oft-quoted
Dies Irase and the remarkably-agitated
Confutatis; but perhaps the most impressive is the second movement
Kyrie; unlike in the Great C Minor, where Mozart sets the Kyrie and the Christe as contrasting sections, in the Requiem he combines both lines to create a thrilling double fugue that shows Mozart posed at a crux of musical history – combining the technical contrapuntal virtuosity of a Bach or a Handel, with the first dark stirrings of the passion and fear of a Beethoven.
Recondite Works: As with Bach, almost everything Mozart wrote (after the age of 15 or so) is technically very good; unlike Bach, much of it is, by design, not specifically interesting. He wrote an awful lot of perfectly enjoyable but rather interchangeable music: dozens of symphonies, two dozen divertimenti, a dozen serenades, dozens and dozens of individual dances, and works for everything from the
clockwork organ to the
glass harmonica. Almost all of it is nice to listen to, if you like Mozart – the man’s ability to devise appealing tunes for even his least important works is almost without parallel. There are, doubtless, hidden gems in his lesser-known pieces... but I don’t know him will enough to really direct anyone in that regard, except through trial and error.
Of all his music that has avoided mass public adoration, the most critically acclaimed work is in the realm of chamber music, where, with more humble resources, his style finds it easier to hit ‘charming’, rather than ‘irritating’. His last ten string quartets are all considered masterpieces, and the six “Haydn Quartets” (no.s 14-19) in particular are at the peak of their genre, and perhaps of Mozart’s entire oeuvre – being some of his few major works written for his own pleasure and dedicated to a friend and fellow composers (Haydn acknowledge Mozart as his superior; in turn, Mozart addressed Haydn as “Papa”, and called him his dearest friend; the two collaborated as performers in private quartet recitals), these works show Mozart in a more adventurous vein – still sublime in his elegance, and still generally good-humoured, but willing to explore harmonic, structural and melodic areas that would have been most unusual for their time, with all four pushing the boundaries of contemporary acceptibility in various ways.
Here is the second of them. Of the Haydn Quartets, Beethoven once commented that here, Mozart declared to the world: see what music I would be capable of producing, if only you were ready for it. Beethoven, of course, would go on to attempt to fulfill that prophecy himself.
Likewise, Mozart’s writing for quintet is as good as anyone’s – the
Clarinet Quintet is the best known, but many believe his best music of all is found in the String Quintets (probably the best string quintets ever, but in part because they have very little serious competition). Here he continues the exploration of sonorities, structures and emotions seen in the Haydn Quartets; best known are the bright K515 and the sombre K516.
The finale of the latter has perplexed scholars ever since – following on from a pained slow movement, it begins with almost another movement in its own right, a beautiful but sad little aria, before suddenly turning on the spot into nonchalant charm. Whether this is a trite failure to confront human suffering, or a surpreme overcoming of that suffering, is subject to some debate. The final two quintets, meanwhile, are written in a more austere style, in which counterpoint is frequent and Mozart attempts to thoroughly extract as much content from as few distinct ideas as possible;
the second movement typifies this in its theme-and-variations structure (which nevertheless Mozart shapes into something heavier, more coherent and more consequential than the typical set of variations).
At the other end of his spectrum, Mozart’s piano sonatas were mostly composed in his youth (later examples were probably for his piano students), and tend toward a more brilliant and accessible style. The best known is probably the sweet, charming, 16th, the so-called
”sonata facile”, intentionally simple for beginners to play, and consequently a mainstay of piano teachers ever since (the first movement is the famous one, but
the delicate Andante is my favourite). Close behind is the 11th – I’ve already linked to the famous
Rondo alla Turca final movement (how about a version for
“gypsy jazz style”guitar? Or if you prefer, here’s the
trumpet and orchestra version)... but the
first movement, a series of variations on a siciliana, is almost as well-known – the theme-and-variations format always suited Mozart, an invitation to his boundless imagination and impeccable grasp of style and mood. The most acclaimed of the sonatas, however, may be the 14th, one of only two written in a minor key; unusually passionate and confrontational for Mozart, particularly in its
third movement, which swerves repeatedly between anger and despair, the sonata seems to prefigure Beethoven (indeed, it shares
melodic fragments with Beethoven’s more famous ‘Pathetique’ sonata].
The 14th sonata displays at times a less common side of Mozart: his potential for overt passion, which typically shows only in flashes beneath his façade of gentility. It can also be seen in, for example, in the demonic climax of
Don Giovanni, in which the unrepentent nobleman is dragged into hell, and at moments of
the Requiem and
The Magic Flute. Nowhere, though, is this side of Mozart more clearly seen than in his 8th piano sonata (the A minor). The sonata was written shortly after the death of his mother, and his pain is heard clearly from the
distraught, distracted first movement, through the
tender, nostalgic second, through to the
Presto third movement, in which anger and agitation seem continually – beat to beat at times – at war with acceptance.
Mozart could also be an experimental, controversial composer at times – best seen in his chamber music. The most flagrant, and notorious, example of this is found in the introduction to the
“Dissonance” quartet, which several early publishers either refused to publish or unilaterally “corrected”, such was its revolutionary (or plain revolting) disregard for the laws of harmony.
But of course, serious, dissonant experimentation isn’t the essence of Mozart – even when he was being curious. For something more essentially Mozart, we can try the
Musical Joke. Possibly written in response to the death of his pet starling, the Musical Joke (or “Divertimento for Two Horns and a String Quartet”) is stunning in its apparent complete fatuousness. The music endlessly repeats near-contentless phrases, blunders from key to key and back again with no apparent grasp of how to progress elegantly or shape a larger structure. Instruments hold trills for far too long, and different instruments seem to have no idea of each others’ existence; repeat signs are put in the wrong place (leading to blaring shifts in key), the dance measures in the second movement are impossible to dance to, harmonies follow weird parallel sevenths, a violinist appears to break a string and can’t hit the right high notes, the violist repeatedly enters late, the strings in general are often out of tune, and the horn players just
play the wrong notes. Other times, they are given plain
impractical (and weird) sounds... and
these are the final notes. It is, in other words, exactly what a third-rate, unimaginative contemporary of Mozart would have composed, as played by really terrible performers. And yet not only has it been an inspiration for 20th century composers (aside from its frequent dissonances, it displays among the first Western examples of whole tone scales and polytonality), but it’s also become a firm, unironic audience favourite, particularly the third movement with its catchy though vacuous theme.
And speaking of catchy but vacuous tunes, let’s end with one of the best known of all: Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, also known as
Ah, vous dirai-je Maman, upon which Mozart composed one of his many variation sets. It’s elegant but disposable music, as you’d expect from Twinkle Twinkle... but because this is Mozart, we get
the beautiful 11th variation along the way...