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Dan Coren
Sonata-form, Part 6:
Mozart as the ultimate juggler
DAN COREN
Few of us ever enjoy the run of good fortune that Mozart experienced in Vienna from 1781 though 1786. On his own in the big city, free of his father, naturally gregarious and soon to be happily married to a fellow musician, Mozart was able to translate his musical gifts into several years of substantial financial success, a success he seems to have had no trouble savoring. In short, Mozart the former child prodigy easily made the transition to full-fledged adult superstar. The vehicle that took him there was the piano concerto.
In 1782, Mozart wrote a famous letter to his father describing his newly-composed 11th, 12th, and 13th Piano Concertos: “These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are also passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less discriminating cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”
Like so many of Mozart’s letters about music, it describes his aesthetic sensibilities but divulges virtually nothing about his compositional techniques. Here’s the sort of thing I wish he’d said instead:
“Hey, Dad! Take a look at these concertos. I think you’ll agree that I’ve perfected a musical scheme that’s true to the essential ideas of sonata-form, a form that allows me to show off to perfection my compositional skill, impeccable taste and virtuosity. It was really so easy! Once I hit upon the idea of starting off with an opera overture instead of a repeated exposition, everything fell into place.”
Waiting for Mr. Wonderful
To put it another way, Mozart made one simple alteration to the rules governing a sonata-form exposition: The orchestra, by itself, lacks the ability to leave the home key. Since the dramatization of key change is at the very heart of the sonata-form idea and the Classical style in general, what’s left for the orchestra to do? Nothing much, actually, except to play beautiful medodies and wait for somebody with some executive power to come along.
That somebody is, of course, the soloist: Mr. Wonderful, the Fonz, Quinn the Eskimo– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself! If you try to imagine what it was like to attend the premiere of a Mozart piano concerto, forget the Lisztian image of the heroic soloist sitting at a nine-foot Steinway grand waiting to do battle. I think the experience was much closer to waiting to hear the first solo of a legendary pianist in a jazz ensemble. And, I imagine, one of the great attractions for the connoisseurs Mozart mentions in his (actual) letter would have been waiting to see what Mozart's first entrance would be like.
Would it be understated and subtle (Concerto #11, K. 431, soloist: Vladimir Ashkenazy)? Or would he make a grand entrance with a melodramatic solo (Concerto #20 K. 466, soloist: Ingrid Haebler)? Would he calmly sit down and simply play music that the orchestra had already given him (Concerto #23, K. 488, soloist: Ashkenazy)? Or sneak in a side door when you least expected him (Concerto #25, K. 503, soloist: Alfred Brendel)?
This last excerpt epitomizes, for me at least, the improvisational quality at the heart of Mozart’s concerto style. Even today, it sounds as if Mozart, with Gerry Mulligan-like coolness, invented that solo on the spot. And who’s to say he didn’t?
He’ll do it every time
No matter what the character of piano’s entrance, it’s always followed by the sense of getting down to the business at hand— namely, integrating the tunes we’ve heard in the orchestral introduction into a sonata-form exposition.
As always in the exposition, it’s not a matter of what’s going to happen next, but how it’s going to happen. If you’ve been reading these essays, you scarcely need to be told that Mozart’s first executive act will be— all together now!– a modulation to the dominant (or, in the two minor-key concertos, #20 and #24, to the relative major).
In my last few essays, I’ve tried to sell the idea that modulation to the dominant is tricky and elusive— that it often slips by before you’re sure it’s happening. Mozart himself, in his other instrumental music, was a master at this sort of subtlety. In his concertos, though, Mozart does everything he can to dramatize this move, often passing through some striking, exotic harmonies on the way. And once he’s in the new key, he’ll almost always celebrate the fact with a melody for the piano. Sometimes it’s a tune the orchestra had played in the introduction, sometimes something entirely new.
Here’s a particularly rich example, the journey to the dominant in Mozart’s 25th Piano Concerto. What you’ll hear in this example are two completely new tunes. The first starts in an exotic key far removed from either the tonic or dominant. This tune then modulates to what sounds like an even more remote place– which turns out to be the dominant!– and the beginning of the second melody. None of Mozart’s contemporaries, save Haydn and Beethoven, would have been able to comprehend the complexities of this passage.
Hunting for an opera collaborator
By the time the exposition of one of his piano concertos is over, Mozart has often become like a juggler on a unicycle with six or seven musical balls in the air at once— some belonging to the orchestra exclusively, some only to the piano, and some up for grabs. One of the great joys of these works is seeing how Mozart sorts it all out in the recapitulation.
There’s a reason that I have Mozart referring to opera in his imaginary letter to his father. In the concertos, melody is king. There’s hardly a passage that doesn’t invite itself to be sung. In fact, if there was a fly in the ointment of Mozart’s life during these years, it’s that he was frustrated in his attempts to do what he loved more than anything else: write for the stage. As David Cairns shows in his recent book, Mozart and His Operas, Mozart spent the years between The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and The Marriage of Figaro (1786) unsuccessfully hunting for a suitable collaborator. Cairns makes the very convincing argument that we owe the existence of Mozart’s mature piano concertos to this frustration: “It was as if the pent-up operatic longings … were concentrated on a medium that became…a dramatic form in its own right.”
The Mozart piano concertos transform sonata-form and infuse it with the spirit of comic opera. We can be thankful that it took Mozart so long to connect with Lorenzo Da Ponte.
To read earlier articles in this series, begin here.
Mozart as the ultimate juggler
DAN COREN
Few of us ever enjoy the run of good fortune that Mozart experienced in Vienna from 1781 though 1786. On his own in the big city, free of his father, naturally gregarious and soon to be happily married to a fellow musician, Mozart was able to translate his musical gifts into several years of substantial financial success, a success he seems to have had no trouble savoring. In short, Mozart the former child prodigy easily made the transition to full-fledged adult superstar. The vehicle that took him there was the piano concerto.
In 1782, Mozart wrote a famous letter to his father describing his newly-composed 11th, 12th, and 13th Piano Concertos: “These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are also passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less discriminating cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.”
Like so many of Mozart’s letters about music, it describes his aesthetic sensibilities but divulges virtually nothing about his compositional techniques. Here’s the sort of thing I wish he’d said instead:
“Hey, Dad! Take a look at these concertos. I think you’ll agree that I’ve perfected a musical scheme that’s true to the essential ideas of sonata-form, a form that allows me to show off to perfection my compositional skill, impeccable taste and virtuosity. It was really so easy! Once I hit upon the idea of starting off with an opera overture instead of a repeated exposition, everything fell into place.”
Waiting for Mr. Wonderful
To put it another way, Mozart made one simple alteration to the rules governing a sonata-form exposition: The orchestra, by itself, lacks the ability to leave the home key. Since the dramatization of key change is at the very heart of the sonata-form idea and the Classical style in general, what’s left for the orchestra to do? Nothing much, actually, except to play beautiful medodies and wait for somebody with some executive power to come along.
That somebody is, of course, the soloist: Mr. Wonderful, the Fonz, Quinn the Eskimo– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself! If you try to imagine what it was like to attend the premiere of a Mozart piano concerto, forget the Lisztian image of the heroic soloist sitting at a nine-foot Steinway grand waiting to do battle. I think the experience was much closer to waiting to hear the first solo of a legendary pianist in a jazz ensemble. And, I imagine, one of the great attractions for the connoisseurs Mozart mentions in his (actual) letter would have been waiting to see what Mozart's first entrance would be like.
Would it be understated and subtle (Concerto #11, K. 431, soloist: Vladimir Ashkenazy)? Or would he make a grand entrance with a melodramatic solo (Concerto #20 K. 466, soloist: Ingrid Haebler)? Would he calmly sit down and simply play music that the orchestra had already given him (Concerto #23, K. 488, soloist: Ashkenazy)? Or sneak in a side door when you least expected him (Concerto #25, K. 503, soloist: Alfred Brendel)?
This last excerpt epitomizes, for me at least, the improvisational quality at the heart of Mozart’s concerto style. Even today, it sounds as if Mozart, with Gerry Mulligan-like coolness, invented that solo on the spot. And who’s to say he didn’t?
He’ll do it every time
No matter what the character of piano’s entrance, it’s always followed by the sense of getting down to the business at hand— namely, integrating the tunes we’ve heard in the orchestral introduction into a sonata-form exposition.
As always in the exposition, it’s not a matter of what’s going to happen next, but how it’s going to happen. If you’ve been reading these essays, you scarcely need to be told that Mozart’s first executive act will be— all together now!– a modulation to the dominant (or, in the two minor-key concertos, #20 and #24, to the relative major).
In my last few essays, I’ve tried to sell the idea that modulation to the dominant is tricky and elusive— that it often slips by before you’re sure it’s happening. Mozart himself, in his other instrumental music, was a master at this sort of subtlety. In his concertos, though, Mozart does everything he can to dramatize this move, often passing through some striking, exotic harmonies on the way. And once he’s in the new key, he’ll almost always celebrate the fact with a melody for the piano. Sometimes it’s a tune the orchestra had played in the introduction, sometimes something entirely new.
Here’s a particularly rich example, the journey to the dominant in Mozart’s 25th Piano Concerto. What you’ll hear in this example are two completely new tunes. The first starts in an exotic key far removed from either the tonic or dominant. This tune then modulates to what sounds like an even more remote place– which turns out to be the dominant!– and the beginning of the second melody. None of Mozart’s contemporaries, save Haydn and Beethoven, would have been able to comprehend the complexities of this passage.
Hunting for an opera collaborator
By the time the exposition of one of his piano concertos is over, Mozart has often become like a juggler on a unicycle with six or seven musical balls in the air at once— some belonging to the orchestra exclusively, some only to the piano, and some up for grabs. One of the great joys of these works is seeing how Mozart sorts it all out in the recapitulation.
There’s a reason that I have Mozart referring to opera in his imaginary letter to his father. In the concertos, melody is king. There’s hardly a passage that doesn’t invite itself to be sung. In fact, if there was a fly in the ointment of Mozart’s life during these years, it’s that he was frustrated in his attempts to do what he loved more than anything else: write for the stage. As David Cairns shows in his recent book, Mozart and His Operas, Mozart spent the years between The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) and The Marriage of Figaro (1786) unsuccessfully hunting for a suitable collaborator. Cairns makes the very convincing argument that we owe the existence of Mozart’s mature piano concertos to this frustration: “It was as if the pent-up operatic longings … were concentrated on a medium that became…a dramatic form in its own right.”
The Mozart piano concertos transform sonata-form and infuse it with the spirit of comic opera. We can be thankful that it took Mozart so long to connect with Lorenzo Da Ponte.
To read earlier articles in this series, begin here.
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