Today, as you’re no doubt aware, marks Mozart’s 250th birthday, and the world is awash in Mozartian sound – surely a good thing, ceterus paribus, a net plus for our universe compared to the alternate universe identical to ours in all details except it doesn’t celebrate Mozart’s birthday.
It has always bugged me a little that Mozart has the “boy genius” tag associated with him. He was, to be sure, a musical prodigy – playing the piano blindfolded at age 6 for Empress Maria Theresa and all that. But that was mostly trained monkey stuff; there were other kids at the time, and since, able to perform dazzling tricks like that at the keyboard. And while it’s also true that he was composing at a ridiculously early age – sonatas at age 6, a symphony at 8, an opera at 10 – the fact of the matter is that the stuff he wrote as a boy is all quite pedestrian. In fact, I’d argue there’s nothing he wrote before the age of 20 that’s at all interesting, let alone something that can be called a work of real genius. Compared, say, to Mendelssohn, who by the age of 17 had composed two genuine masterpieces: the incidental music to Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the remarkable and transcendent Octet for Strings.
Mozart’s not remarkable for what he did as a kid – he’s remarkable for what he did as a grownup. At his most sublime – the last Act of Figaro, the Jupiter symphony, the set of String Quartets dedicated to Haydn, Piano Concertos 20 and 21, . . . – there is not only nothing truly comparable, nothing that touches us more deeply, but nothing that one can imagine ever could touch us more deeply.
And here’s a weird bit of Mozartiana. He’s one of the few composers who ever actually wrote anything for Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica – one of the world’s most peculiar instruments, consisting of a series of water-filled glasses whose rims are rubbed by the player to make sounds at different pitch (depending on how much water is in the glass. It’s pretty lousy stuff, to be honest; the instrument’s very difficult to keep in tune, has very limited range, and, to my ears, sounds a bit like the coyotes up here in Vermont, on a night with a full moon . . . . Mozart’s pieces for the instrument – a Fantasie, and an Adagio & Rondo – were both composed during the last few months of his life, in 1791; a shame, really, as he (or at least we) would have been considerably better off had he spent that precious time working on, say, another opera, or another symphony ...
However, it's also important that the early stile galant style is one of the easiest musical styles of the last 500 years to compose in--much easier, I think, than the Renaissance and Baroque stuff before it, for ex.
Of all the well-known prodigies out there, I think only Mendelssohn really exceeded the young Mozart. Most of those that came after were purely instrumentalist geniuses--which, while admirable, is hardly the same as doing it all like the young Mozart.
And I appreciate TravisW's point about the tuning of the "armonica" — what I meant about its "limited range", though, was not so much its limited acoustical range but its limited emotional range. It just can't do very much, as an instrument —
David
1. There is a whole disk of Glass Harmonica music on Naxos (8.555295), played by Thomas Bloch. Besides two pieces by Mozart, there's also a 1-minute 'melodram' (a bit of incidental music for a play) by Beethoven, plus the mad scene from Lucia di Lamermoor and a bunch of things by now forgotten or near-forgotten (Reichhardt) composers. The album has a picture of Ben Franklin playing his instrument on the front, and you can see that it's almost a keyboard instrument with all the glass bowls or discs lined up parallel to each other -- no water involved. I find the music painful to listen to for more than a minute or two, and am not surprised that most of the early virtuosos died insane. The liner notes attribute this to lead poisoning from the glass, but the sound must have had something to do with it.
2. David Post asks what we would think of Mozart if he had died at 20. Which reminded me: Today is the 200th birthday of the Spanish composer Arriaga, who died just before his 20th birthday, but left three delightful string quartets, plus a symphony, a nonet, and the overture to the opera 'Los Esclavos Felices'. I gather that the rest of the opera does not survive, so perhaps we will never know whether the title is ironic or metaphorical -- I certainly hope so, since it means "The Happy Slaves". Anyway, it's not Mozart, but it's excellent, and it all fits on two discs: there are a lot of recordings of the quartets (I like the Sine Nomine version, now out of print), and Jordi Savall has done 'original instrument' versions of the other three works).
On another point, one should also add the second act of Figaro in addition to the fourth act in the category of sublime. (Also in contention is the beginning of the third act, where Figaro discovers that his mother is Marcellina--one of the most marvellously comic scenes ever created).
Oh also, Mozart's violin concertos were written when he was 19. Those alone would have made him remembered. 3-5 are among the real masterworks of the repertoire and pretty much the best violin concertos from that era. Every violinist learns at least one of them who gets to about an intermediate level. I like them better than Haydn's. I would put those pieces in the genius category, for sure.
Also, La Finta Simplice, written when he was in his mid teens, while on the whole not all that incredible of an opera, has Il re pastore, one of my all-time favorite arias and as superb an aria as Mozart ever wrote.
If your kid was composing an opera while in the fourth grade, would you let him know that it was derivative and pedestrian, or would you immediately call everyone you know and say "My kid composed a F***ing opera!!!!!!"
As for the glass armonica, I would venture to suggest that, despite those being his last few months, he was moving in a more musically experiemental direction - as with Beethoven and his last three piano sonatas - and he was not above catering to a whim every now and then.
What Mozart rose up to become from age 20 to 34, and the generous output of a mere 14 years, and the fact that we celebrate by playing Mozart all day on the radio (the only other composer who gets an all-day-on-the-radio extravaganza is Beethoven ... at least in my part of town) is the mere beginning of a testament to genius (though sadly overlooking our dear Mendelssohn, Wagner, Bach, etc).
David, I think you're off base on this one.
Of course, I also think it's true that Mozart wrote his very best works in the last years of his life. But I don't think anyone would dispute that.
Anyway, for him to go from the excellent ("Exsultate, Jubilate") to the sublime (e.g. "Ave verum Corpus" (K. 618)) does not indicate that he had become more of a musical genius. Rather, it is the result of a maturing and more reflective outlook on life.
I didn't realize Exsultate Jubilate was written in his teens--another incredible piece of uncommon maturity and grace.