And set me to wonderin’ how much hitherto unknown German I might have in me.

Your post also inspired tonight’s music from my computer’s fine speakers: an early Haydn symphony (no.23), Mozart’s piano concerto no.8, his sym.no.18, then Beethoven’s quintet for piano and winds (inspired by Mozart’s earlier and seminal quintet of the same instrumental mix), Mozart’s piano concerto no.9, and then to top it all off, Beethoven’s First Symphony.

See wat’chu dun, boy?

Music to which I will finish my read of Daniel Dennett’s ‘Breaking the Spell’.

How odd it will be to read a book of that title while a sound-spell enchants me!

Popular 18th Century composers commonly suffered from the publication, in their names, of spurious compositions. It was a way for competent but otherwise hack minor composers to make a little dough, by selling to music publishers something fraudulent they wrote while mimicking the style of a famous composer. Franz Joseph Haydn in particular suffered from this because he was the most famed composer of his times. And so here’s the point: Haydn—BY FAR—was the most famous—Mozart wasn’t. Mozart, after the novelty of his precocious talents wore off, was, in the minds of Europe’s music-buying nobility, relegated to a curiosity. A fad. This only worsened as he aged into a typically pimpled adolescent—a no longer ‘cute kid’ but the unattractive son of a minor musician from a backwards Austrian province (Salzburg).

Musicologists debate the provenance of 18th Century compositions all the time. It’s their business (and obsession). Such debates never amount to much when the composers’ handwriting is obvious and the paper types (chemically tested) are known to be from mills their towns’ merchants traded with. The problems arise when a composition’s original manuscript can’t be found—when the musicologist can only study copies. Then the composer’s style – his usual, predictable use of musical grammar – becomes the musicologist’s sole authentication-tool. This isn’t as doubtful a proposition as it might seem: the misattribution of a pair of symphonies by Leopold and his son Wolfgang Mozart (the ‘Lambach’ pieces) was corrected a couple of decades ago using studious analysis. (The analysis overturned two centuries of conventional wisdom that the finer piece must have been the work of the ‘child genius’—it was ultimately agreed that father Leopold—an accomplished composer in his own right—must have written the longer, more lovely symphony, while young Wolfgang—still learnin’ his licks—must have written the shorter and less polished piece.)

Haydn has many more spurious compositions than Mozart—although after Mozart’s death and the sudden, if belated, surge in his popularity, the hacks got active for sure. But these frauds are often easier to finger than the spurious ‘Haydn’s’. Because Haydn’s lifetime of output was prodigious to say the least (was paid by his noble employer to compose EVERY DAY), and not as self-documented as the musicologists might wish.

(Pen)ultimately, it’s important to understand that until the 18th Century’s last couple of decades most compositions outside of opera weren’t taken as seriously as the same types of compositions in the next century. For example, symphonies were little more than glorified opera overtures: pieces designed to open a concert of somewhat more ‘serious’ stuff—like chamber music, whose scores the composer could then sell to the music-playing nobility and the newly emerging bourgeoisie. Thus the bulk of Mozart’s 80-odd ‘symphonies’ are nothing like Beethoven’s nine monsters. Most of ‘em are more akin to serenades—background music for soirees—than to the ‘serious’ symphonies Haydn was then pioneering, and that Mozart himself would write to great effect later in his short lifetime. Many of these early symphonies were written to be played only ONCE in his career. Mozart was able to compose such stuff in a day. Even later, when he applied himself to the ‘serious’ symphonies great composers were then becoming expected to produce (thanks to Haydn), Mozart could produce a complex symphonic masterpiece (like the ‘Paris’, ‘Prague’, and ‘Linz’) in only a few days.

The point of all this is to dispute the implication of your Jan.13th post that Mozart wasn’t all he’s cracked up to be. I say just the opposite: as we piece together the fragmented details of his life and his talent, he actually seems all the more a living miracle (and his is coming from an avowed agnostic-atheist, mind you!) (Robert Gutman’s ‘Mozart: A Cultural Biography’ is a good starting point to test my disputation of your implication.) I rather think legitimate the 600+ compostions attributed to Mozart. Keep in mind that only the last couple of hundred of these are generally considered masterful.

Lastly, the point of the radio show’s pianist guest was that Mozart put something new into music: emotions less cheerful than the nobility of his era wanted to hear expressed. He lived in a time wherein the nobles and royals of Europe wanted light, happy musical reassurance for their soon-to-be overturned hierarchies. Mozart managed to sneak anxiety into his music—and the Viennese music-loving public didn’t much like it. He expressed more too, like pathos—but not the pathetic type of pathos that would come later from the soggy and dreary Romantics—Mozart’s expressions of pathos were gorgeous, not overdone. He could just as easily express longing—and this, perhaps, was his finest gift. Yes, the ‘Mozartean gift’ was his graceful emotional expressiveness, not his prodigious output, much of which he composed while young and still learning.

Listen to his clarinet concerto (K.622) or to the g minor viola quintet (K.516)—listen CAREFULLY (get stoned first! –no, just kidding!), understanding that NO ONE before him, not even the great Haydn, had yet produced anything nearly so perfect—and then tell me whether Mozart’s ‘detractors’ have a leg to stand on. I suspect you’ll find reason to revise your opinion.

Cheers.

Now why not do a show titled, “Anne Bradstreet at 333,” per the show suggestion thread?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4602542.stm

There are others, many others, but a performer has to know who he is performing, even if that who exists only as an image that comes from staring between the cage of the fine bar lines of the staff.