Charles Rosen on Mozart
Charles Rosen takes the opportunity, in the current New York Review of Books, to make his review of several new books about Mozart into a blithely magisterial assessment of Mozart's achievement for our times. He makes many interesting points - for example, that Mozart was writing music at a time when the the very idea of the history of music was born - but the heart of the piece seems to me to be this:
In spite of his radical experiments, Mozart could be one of the most conventional composers of his time—except that no one ever handled the basic conventions with such skill and such ease, and he must have gloried not only in his ability to shock, but also in his facility at producing the conventional with such purity and grace.
Long phrases of absolutely conventional figuration and banal motifs articulate his works at the end of short sections, and give the structure its clarity. (Beethoven imitated Mozart closely in this respect, but he had the knack—already to be found in Mozart, but with less panache—of making one think that he had invented the most conventional motif expressly for each piece.) Writing about Mozart, we are always tempted to dwell on the extraordinary purple passages without noticing that in every case they are followed or preceded by the most conventional devices. They complement and support each other.
Mozart may not have been the first composer to make the sublime out of the familiar, but I doubt that any composer has approached his ability to work such magic as a matter of course, over and over again in almost every mature composition. Because the material is familiar - and also because it lacks the dramatic significance of motifs, such as "doom" and "destiny," that would shape music from Beethoven to Mahler and beyond - the sublimity is easily missed by inexperienced listeners, as well as by people whose primary interest in music is "emotional."
I thought about this while listening to the Linz Symphony the other day. It is interesting music only if you are an active listener, capable of bearing what you have heard in mind even as the music is being performed. This means paying attention to the little conventional bits that, as Mr Rosen writes, "give the structure its clarity," and hearing them for what they are. And wondering at the magic. But not too intently, because Mozart will be working another transformation presently.
