Mozart can do no wrong

"Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music." Go here for quotables from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . (Our title is from a member of our group in 2021.)

Who doesn’t know some music of Mozart? Or recognise his image, especially in a red coat. (Above is a posthumous portrait by Barbara Kraft , in 1819, regarded as probably a very good likeness.) Most people know something about his life. The movie Amadeus ensured that, amid controversy. Check out History Buffs for a brisk illustrated review of the film and its dubious accuracy.

Or go for more facts and a lot more music to the superb BBC documentary ‘Genius of Mozart’.

This section of an unfinished 1782 portrait by Joseph Lange is regarded by historians as the most accurate surviving likeness of Mozart, then 26 years old.

The ‘magic’ or more often ‘God-given talent’ of Mozart is a common theme. "His music seems absolutely effortless without being insubstantial. He evoked a huge range of emotions, but his music floats ... He made the arduous, often frustrating task of composing look easy. Each note of his music seems like it could not be any different than it is. And since his untimely death, his myth has only grown." Lots more to browse in this discussion.

From Baroque to Classical

Mozart is transitional in many ways in music.

He lived 1756-1791. Musical style changed around the mid-eighteenth century from the ornate textures of baroque to a more melodic and emotional approach, now often called "Classical". Read more about it in the history of opera here.

Mozart as a child playing piano with his father Leopold Watercolour by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle 1777 Paris, Musee Carnavalet

Music changed rapidly. Harpsichords gave way

to the piano with its ability to play soft and loud, and hold long notes. (From childhood, Mozart was a fine pianist.) The orchestra

became larger, more significant in expressing singers’ emotions, and more like the

symphonic orchestras we know today.

The main composers of classicism were Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Haydn wrote 12 operas, none now produced; Beethoven wrote just one. So in opera, Mozart dominated till the end of the century. Only Gluck, earlier, had such an effect on the overthrow of Baroque.

Arias became shorter and more emotionally expressive rather than show-off virtuosity. Choruses became more important and the distinction between recitative and aria much more fluid. The mythological and heroic themes of classical opera gave way to more realistic plots, often about everyday people, with librettos expressing social commentary, especially from the chorus. From Idomeneo, Mozart's operas abandoned Baroque.

"As a young child, Mozart was capable of writing fully realized compositions, and by the time he was a teenager, his compositions really reach a kind of perfection within the classical style. However, Mozart’s mature works transcend even that level of perfection by introducing elements that reflect an increasing desire to go beyond the assumptions, constraints, and philosophy of music of his time… his frustration with his situation in Vienna, which had an active musical life, yet lacked a full appreciation of his musical genius, became elements of subversion and even transcendence in his music. …

What Mozart is doing is making more with less: he takes a relatively simple theme and does more complex, less predictable, and more reflective variations on the theme than his predecessors, or even his contemporaries would have done. In this, he is setting a precedent for Beethoven, for whom this became a central compositional principle. He is also stating by example that music, above all, is important and significant, in particular with regard to the display of the individual mind in relation to society." A short bit of a long lecture that's here.

"Silence is very important. The silence between the notes are as important as the notes themselves." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 

Remaking opera

In a few decades, with a few operas, (compared to the output of Handel, for example, in a longer life) Mozart revolutionised opera. In his selection of stories, and his music to fit them, Mozart challenged the operatic conventions and class assumptions of his day.

*        He determined to put his music at the centre of the action…  "the notes and the music must propel the action at all times," he wrote.  

*         His music and characters were realistic, funny, human. "In a general way it may be said that, before Mozart’s time, composers of grand opera reached back to antiquity and mythology, or to the early Christian era, for their subjects. Their works moved with a certain restricted grandeur. Their characters were remote. Mozart’s subjects were more modern, even contemporary… In the evolution of opera, Mozart was the first to impart to it a strong human interest with humour playing about it like sunlight." More here.

*        And they were more common – and the messages far more subversive. He confronted the dominance of (aristocratic) Italian opera in Vienna. The Marriage of Figaro was in Italian, but our hero, a servant, mocked his master to the tune of a minuet. Listen here to his "Se vuol ballare".

Don Giovanni, written in 1787, two years before the French Revolution, declared (still in Italian) that the aristocracy performed no particularly useful function. And the antihero, its central aristocratic character, beyond control, was destroyed for his sins. Listen here to Kurt Moll as the executor.

And at the end of his life, Mozart set The Magic Flute  in German, performed in a simple, suburban theatre with a small orchestra.

Not very Baroque. Idomeneo at the Met, 2017.

Here's the timeline of these operas: 7 in ten years.

1781, Idomeneo his first opera success, premiered in Munich.

1782   Die Entführung aus dem Serail,   also a great success.

Mozart takes four years away from opera composing, starring as a piano soloist and writer of concertos.

1785, Mozart begins the operatic collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

1786 hugely successful premiere of Le nozze di Figaro in Vienna, then Prague.

1787 the next partnership with Da Ponte: Don Giovanni, triumph in Prague, less in Vienna.

1790, the last of the three Da Ponte operas, Così fan tutte, premiered. A success but the death of the Emperor cut short performances. The partnership with Da Ponte ended.

1791 while composing Die Zauberflöte Mozart is commissioned for an opera seria. La clemenza di Tito premiered on 6 September 1791. Die Zauberflöte premiered on 30 September, 1791, at Schikaneder's theatre, in Vienna, just two months before Mozart's death. It was Mozart's last opera, and remains the best known and most often performed.

We start, as he did, with Idomeneo...

Lyn, 6/8/25