Mozart: the musicians' composer

Mozart’s consummate craftsmanship, his inventiveness and prolific flow of melody have made him a favourite of practising musicians throughout the years. He was a phenomenon, a boy genius, adored by the public and although dying poor (though perhaps not as poor as the ‘buried as a pauper’ myth would suggest) was honoured as a supremely gifted composer in his day and ever since.

I once attended a concert given by the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and conducted by Ricardo Muti. I had gone to hear a Bruckner Symphony, which was preceded by Mozart’s Flute and Harp Concerto, played in one of their many performances by James Galway and the Spanish harpist Marisa Robles. It’s a delicate and perfectly balanced work and I enjoyed it. The couple sitting next to me were wildly excited and looked to me to join in their loud applause. ’Wasn’t it wonderful’ they said. ‘Very pretty’, I replied. They were horrified at my mild perhaps deflationary comment. I don’t know whether it was me or Bruckner that made them leave their seats, never to return. So, I declare my heresy as one alone!

Twenty years on I have become more humble in my opinion of Mozart’s music, recognising its perfect structure and prodigality of tunes that sing even when there is no voice to give them utterance. I love his later symphonies and piano concertos, and of those I know my favourite is No. 17 in G Major,K453. The second movement is of ethereal beauty, as near to perfection as anyone can reach.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and was already composing at the age of five. Capitalising on his gifts and those of his daughter Maria Anna, their father Leopold presented his children’s talents in various European courts, including two weeks at Louis XV’s court at Versailles and a royal reception in London from George 111 when Wolfgang was still only eight years old. These tours were typical of his earlier years and emphasise as we have already seen, the cultural unity of Europe in the eighteenth century. His mature years were marked by constant financial troubles but also a stream of compositions in which he took every known contemporary form of music and gave it new depth and significance, especially in the field of opera. Haydn declared he was the greatest composer he knew.

The circumstances of Mozart’s death and the unseemly way in which one of Vienna’s greatest citizens was hastily buried has been the source of much fascination and Peter Schaffer’s scurrilous play ‘Amadeus’ where murder lurks, is only one of many unproven scenarios. What is in no doubt is the brilliance of Mozart’s legacy to the musical world. Idolised by Tchaikovsky, one critic has said of Mozart : he ‘is music’.

B.R.

Bruckner the indefatigable

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) was searching for his own authentic voice as much as Schubert had done. Born in Vienna he trained to be a teacher and as a sideline studied composition and he went on studying for much of his life. He eventually became a virtuoso organist and after several appointments to church and cathedral and European travel (he played in the newly opened Albert Hall in London), he moved to Vienna where be became professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatory.

There was great rivalry between supporters of Brahms and Wagner (very much the new voice) in Vienna at this time. Bruckner adored Wagner’s music but Eduard Hanslick, the most influential critic in the city, didn’t and saw Bruckner’s symphonies as an unwelcome reminder of Wagner’s musical extravagance. So the work of this awkward man, with his hidden passions and dreams, and a child-like religious faith, constantly struggling to say what he thought, became a battleground for people with other interests. In the last five years of his life when his health was failing, he at last received the recognition that was his due. The day he died he was still working on his ninth symphony, leaving pages of the finale in sketch form only.

He is still an acquired taste – a friend of mine can’t believe that I find him so rewarding. He is certainly long-winded and you feel he was always trying for something that was beyond his grasp. Those wonderful climaxes his music reaches after an enormous build up, and then – silence and you may wonder whether the climb was worthwhile. He was desperately vulnerable to criticism, hence the continual revision of his symphonies often at the behest of others who had less skill than he. His enthusiasm for Wagner meant that he probably tried to impress his mentor too much. He had little social charm and was unfairly characterised as rough and uncouth. Hanslick’ was an informed and respected professor of music and knew what he was talking about, but his hostility was so intense that for Bruckner it must have felt like a vendetta.

I think the architectural splendour of his music is wonderful, the adagios of his symphonies immensely moving. He demands patience, is best heard in the concert hall or in the home with all the windows shut and the highest volume you can bear! In both you feel that you are sitting in a great cathedral. The Oxford Dictionary of Music denies that the symphonies are ‘elephantine monsters but’ but instead ‘are now recognised as being in the Austrian tradition of Schubert’s last symphony….admired for their combination of contrapuntal splendour with intense melodic beauty and grandeur...’ I say ‘amen’ to that.

B.R.

Franz Schubert: Man of contrasts

‘My favourite composer’ is as fruitless a subject as ‘favourite’ anything else. Different moments and moods suit a variety of experiences, musical or otherwise. But increasingly I have a great affection for Schubert’s music as well as being sad that he died so young and at the height of his powers. There could have been so much more, and whereas one regrets that Beethoven was never able to hear much of his later music, Schubert was able to perform only a fraction of his output in public, and most of it was unpublished in his lifetime. Born 29 years after Beethoven, he died only a year after his death, and living under the shadow of the great master and the new wiz kid Mendelssohn, it has taken years for his work to be fully appreciated.

He was a prolific composer, writing over 600 songs (on which for a long time his reputation mainly rested), more than 200 of them settings of the same poems, often by Goethe and Schiller. The English record company Hyperion recorded every known song over a period of years, performed by the finest singers in Europe. His accompaniment to the songs is almost as worth listening to as the songs themselves. He wrote many operas, none of which, to his regret, were successful, as well as a great deal of church and chamber music. His ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and the ‘Great’ C Major Symphony were the culmination of his symphonic works. Above all he was a lyrical composer – his music is full of beautifully crafted tunes. It was as a writer of melody that he was first recognised.

His later music fascinates me. I have a set of piano CD’s which mainly consists of the late sonatas, played by the incomparable Alfred Brendel and I return to them again and again. They don’t make for easy listening. They reveal a man experimenting with a new world of his own making and using techniques that demand virtuoso playing. There’s an argument going on with which one wants to engage, but you have to listen not only to the notes but to the spaces between them. Schubert’s biographer John Reed says that it is only in the twentieth century that such pianists as Brendel and Schnabel have brought the sonatas to the notice of the concert-going public. ‘In the nineteenth century such self-revealing music was thought to be out of place in the concert hall.’

Schubert was one of the coffin bearers at Beethoven’s funeral. Often people say that it was Brahms who developed the art of ‘The Master’. O.K. But for me, in his distinctive way, it was Schubert.

B.R.

Mahler and the human condition

I suggested that Beethoven’s life was in his music – struggling to develop the traditional form he inherited against the spectrum of his unquiet life, the turbulence discernable in the music itself. Gustav Mahler(1860-1911) however claimed that for him his music comprehended the whole world . ‘To listen to a Mahler symphony’ writes Philip Barford ‘is to have not only a musical experience but to be profoundly stirred in psycho-spiritual inwardness by an emotionally highly-charged sound-pattern’.

Sixty years ago Mahler’s work was rarely performed and it may have been his raw emotion and spiritual searching that prevented general acceptance of his new vision. Now his symphonies and lieder are in every orchestral repertoire; indeed he is in danger of being over-played. Recognised in his day as a foremost conductor on the international scene, every summer he retreated to compose music that came out of his search for true musical expression. His friend Bruno Walter (whom I saw conduct a concert in 1946) writes ‘I was struck by the explosiveness of his nature and a certain part wild, part droll humour that contrasted with a touchingly deep and clear tranquillity’.

I first heard one of his symphonies in performance in 1975 in Birmingham Town Hall. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Kurt Masur played the first Symphony. I was sitting in the choir stalls – just behind the percussion! The great motif which thunders out the climax of the last movement was one of the most visceral moments of my life. I was overwhelmed with such power and passion and leapt to my feet (alone I quickly realised, so sat down quite soon!). I had never heard music like it. The triumph in that conclusion is typical of Mahler’s art, but a sense of despair and loss is in all his music as well, as it was in his life. In the symphonies you see the darkness of his soul – in the Sixth Symphony especially, but also as it turns to the light, such as in the glorious final choral movement of the Second.Deeply affected by the death of his elder daughter at the age of four and bitterly aware of a heart condition that was to cause his death at a comparatively early age, death became a recurrent theme in his music, but also resolution and hope. Reflecting on his popularity, the conductor Klaus Tennstedt (who recorded all the symphonies) said ‘Young people are searching for values that have been destroyed. Long after his death, Mahler fights on against a terrible world. He gives people back their sense of feeling, and fear, and outrage’.

Of another generation, his music belongs to and eloquently speaks to our’s.

B.R.



B.R.

Beethoven - The Master

Ludwig van Beethoven(1770-1827) is the pivotal classical composer – everything leads up to him and everything that follows refers back to him, his influence an inspiration to composers ever since. Haydn was his teacher and Mozart his model but Beethoven was uniquely himself, his tempestuous life and appalled struggle with deafness that left him briefly to contemplate suicide, his temper, financial problems, possessively trying to organise his nephew as nearest to the son he never had, and his failed love affairs, all of them helped to create the energy of his inspiration There is plenty of ‘form’ in his work, but he strained it to the limit. So, for example, in the triumphant ninth symphony, he rehearses the themes of the previous three movements at the beginning of the fourth before discarding them and introducing the choral climax of the hymn to Joy. And by then he was stone deaf. He was the last of the classicits and the first of the moderns, he put his life in his music in a way that had never happened before.

The BBC’s Third Programme devoted a whole week to his music last summer. You couldn’t escape even if you wanted to. Symphonies and songs, sonatas and quartets, his opera Fidelio and the four overtures it gave birth to, the five piano and the violin and triple concertos, everything that could be found from his vast output (some of which the old boy might have preferred to be forgotten or forgiven) was broadcast. No other composer could have been so honoured and the consensus was that it had been an amazing presentation of one man’s genius.

As I get older I find a latent aggression in much of his music which disturbs me – his struggle for love and peace often painfully explicit. But yesterday I was present at a concert given by the Philharmonia Orchestra of London under its Principal Conductor, Christoph von Dohnanyi. A fine performance of the third Piano Concerto ( Till Fellner the pianist – an exquisite performance perfectly matching the refinement and passion of the orchestra) was followed by the Sixth Symphony, the ‘Pastoral’. Plenty of love and peace there – and a storm! I was reminded again of Beethoven’s astonishing inventiveness.

B.R.

Moving on

The first interest of this blog has been Spanish classical music. When we began these postings in May, however, we said this wouldn’t exclude the music of other nations. On a recent visit to the euroresidentes office, it was suggested that we broaden our scope to include the mainstream classical scene, which we will now begin to do. It will be a hotch-potch of personal experience and pleasures, but I hope others who read it will add their own perspectives to mine. I shall miss the Iberian focus and we will return to it from time to time, but now the field is open.

Trying to give a rough definition of ‘Classical’ in that first posting I said it was music with some serious purpose to it rather than just entertainment, that it had proved to be acceptable to people over a period of time and that it had some sort of recognisable form. N.G.D.M. suggests that musical form has literary antecedents, quoting Aristotle who said that a tragedy was the imitation of an action that is whole and complete in itself. There is also an organic equation. Schoenberg of all people, once wrote that a piece of music ‘consists of elements functioning like those of a living organism’. Thirdly, musical form has the effect of a discourse, even a language, where the composer within a given framework creates a conversation. So these three -unified; organic; dialogue are characteristics of classical music.

There are technical terms to describe various commonly used forms. The Oxford Dictionary of Music identifies six, of which sonata form is the one most commonly used, the contrast of different themes and keys creating a structure. The opening statement of a movement may be repeated and developed, then a second theme announces itself, providing the counterpoint to the first. After many variations the first theme may then return to bring the movement to an end. I am a virtual innocent in these matters but you can see this ‘conversation’ as well as hear it as you watch a quartet play – each musician watching the eyes of the others as together they recreate the music.

Form is the bedrock of eighteenth and nineteen century European music – emerging in purity with Haydn, magically developed by Mozart and taken in hand almost brutally by Beethoven, whom we shall meet next time.

B.R.

Spanish orchestras

I am unable to discover as much about the orchestras of Spain as I would like; there is an absence of information on the internet and where websites exist they tend to be out of date. Some Spanish orchestras such as the Galicia Symphony Orchestra are of only recent formation. Founded in 1992 and under its conductor Victor Pablo Perez, they have had two tours of Austria and Germany and an impressive number of distinguished soloists have performed with them. The City of Granada has an orchestra and Barcelona has two, as well as several chamber ensembles. The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra have recorded four discs of music by Leonardo Balada (b.1933)in the Naxos Spanish series. The Madrid Symphony Orchestra is presently celebrating its centenary and has a special distinction as the capital’s own orchestra. The Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra of Spain based in Madrid is very silent on the web about itself, but I imagine is well used by the media.

Increasingly Spanish orchestras record their work. We have already mentioned that the Asturias Symphony is one such. Founded in 1937 and undergoing some struggle to survive over the years, the orchestra was enlarged in 1988 to a complement of 69 players, presently under its conductor, Maximiano Valdes. The Symphony Orchestra of Castile and Leon was established in 1991 with the declared purpose to promote music and stimulate interest throughout the region. The orchestra has played in other parts of Spain and contributes to the principle Spanish festivals as well as playing abroad. Both orchestras have recorded for Naxos.

The Philharmonic Orchestra of Gran Canaria was founded way back in 1845, but the latest stage in their history began in 1980 when they were established by the Gran Canaria Island Council. They have made many recordings under their English Conductor Adrian Leaper (conductor also of the Madrid Radio and TV Orchestra). Appointed in 1994 and now relinquishing that post, he is, however, beginning a series of recordings for the ASV label works by contemporary Spanish composers Xavier Montsalvatge (b. 1912) and Ernesto Halffter(1905-1989), who was a disciple of de Falla and friend of Salvador Dali.

So, here is a bit of the orchestral scene that I must research with more success. Musical performance in Spain is rich and varied but in the international field, their orchestras have perhaps some way to go before they find their proper place, whcih I am sure they will.

B.R.