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jazzy_daveCharles Rosen "The Classical Style: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart" (Faber & Faber)
The issue of why Mozart is a stranger in our messed-up, impatient, overstimulated world, and why we need to approach him on different (musical) terms than the armour-plated ones we use to navigate our daily lives today if we are to appreciate what makes him so special. For me, the works which garner most unanimous appreciation have perhaps been the tougher, more dramatic ones: Beethoven 5 over Beethoven 4 or 6; Brahms 4 over Brahms 2 or 3; Verdi Requiem over Don Carlos, Othello or Falstaff; Stravinsky Rite of Spring over Petrouchka, Agon or Symphony in C; Mahler 2 over Das Lied Von Der Erde or Kindertotenlieder. This muscular power we seem as a society to tend to prioritize is not Mozart's way. All of those works, whilst supreme masterpieces, deal with extremes above all. Nothing in Mahler 2 or The Rite of Spring is moderate. We are a society of extremes, too. Pieces that operate at a more human scale can be lost in this. But Mozart always operates at this scale, even in his mightiest works. Mozart is not a composer of extremes. He is a composer of the middle. His music, like most Enlightenment music, but more so simply by dint of its extraordinary quality, traverses those subtle, intimate regions where small shades of meaning can mean so much, like furtive glances across a room. The reason we love his operas is that they are so full of complex humanity; the reason we particularly love his wind music so much, and also his piano concerti, is because they replicate this vocal dialogue in an instrumental form. The patient unfolding of, say, the Oboe Quartet - in which everything happens twice, question-answer, unfolding gracefully, calmly, every part seeming to listen to every other, to support, discuss, move forwards, but always constructively, with every small detail mattering, as do small details in civilized speech - is one example of countless others in which Mozart does this. To appreciate Mozart we need the patience to follow its logical, balanced unfolding and the concentration to follow the rhetorical inflections and subtleties of its melodic and harmonic details.
We are very fortunate that the genres the two greatest composers of the classical period - Haydn & Mozart - excel in are exactly complementary. While Haydn excels in the symphony, string quartets, piano sonatas & religious music, Mozart's greatest achievements are the operas & piano concertos.
Both composers have had their Primers in the gloriously entertaining and instructive Wire magazine - and this I do have a decent collection of both of these masters of classical music. The major gripe I do have about this hefty 500 page plus tome is that it is a somewhat dry academic tone with way too much musical notation for the uninitiated.
The issue of why Mozart is a stranger in our messed-up, impatient, overstimulated world, and why we need to approach him on different (musical) terms than the armour-plated ones we use to navigate our daily lives today if we are to appreciate what makes him so special. For me, the works which garner most unanimous appreciation have perhaps been the tougher, more dramatic ones: Beethoven 5 over Beethoven 4 or 6; Brahms 4 over Brahms 2 or 3; Verdi Requiem over Don Carlos, Othello or Falstaff; Stravinsky Rite of Spring over Petrouchka, Agon or Symphony in C; Mahler 2 over Das Lied Von Der Erde or Kindertotenlieder. This muscular power we seem as a society to tend to prioritize is not Mozart's way. All of those works, whilst supreme masterpieces, deal with extremes above all. Nothing in Mahler 2 or The Rite of Spring is moderate. We are a society of extremes, too. Pieces that operate at a more human scale can be lost in this. But Mozart always operates at this scale, even in his mightiest works. Mozart is not a composer of extremes. He is a composer of the middle. His music, like most Enlightenment music, but more so simply by dint of its extraordinary quality, traverses those subtle, intimate regions where small shades of meaning can mean so much, like furtive glances across a room. The reason we love his operas is that they are so full of complex humanity; the reason we particularly love his wind music so much, and also his piano concerti, is because they replicate this vocal dialogue in an instrumental form. The patient unfolding of, say, the Oboe Quartet - in which everything happens twice, question-answer, unfolding gracefully, calmly, every part seeming to listen to every other, to support, discuss, move forwards, but always constructively, with every small detail mattering, as do small details in civilized speech - is one example of countless others in which Mozart does this. To appreciate Mozart we need the patience to follow its logical, balanced unfolding and the concentration to follow the rhetorical inflections and subtleties of its melodic and harmonic details.
We are very fortunate that the genres the two greatest composers of the classical period - Haydn & Mozart - excel in are exactly complementary. While Haydn excels in the symphony, string quartets, piano sonatas & religious music, Mozart's greatest achievements are the operas & piano concertos.
Both composers have had their Primers in the gloriously entertaining and instructive Wire magazine - and this I do have a decent collection of both of these masters of classical music. The major gripe I do have about this hefty 500 page plus tome is that it is a somewhat dry academic tone with way too much musical notation for the uninitiated.
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