“I think that Mozart is the
God of music …. There is something special about this man
which is irresistible” – Sir Colin Davis
“Mozart’s music touches me
deeply because it is sincere and (his opera characters) are
so fragile, both passionate and profound” - Cecilia Bartoli
“Retrospectively we have
constructed this myth of an amazing angel who was visited
with a supernatural talent and then taken away from us far
too soon” – Jonathan Miller, opera director
Another
enlightening programme in BBC TV’s Great Composers series.
This one succinctly explores the genius of Mozart and how
influential and important his work was to the development
of European music. The programme illustrates his manifest
gifts with numerous well-chosen excerpts from many genres.
It illuminates his essential humanity and the often-overlooked
profundity of his music.
The
programme includes many contemporary portraits of Mozart
and his family and location shots in Salzburg and Vienna
but it is the excerpts, splendidly performed, and the filmed
interviews that really make this programme so informative
and entertaining.
There
is so much enlightening material. At the outset, the point
is made that for any such child prodigy to succeed, he should
not only be extraordinarily talented and quick to learn,
but should have the infinite support of parents and teachers
and the enthusiasm of attentive audiences; all of which came
together for Mozart. Furthermore, at the end of the 18th
century, in Joseph II’s Vienna, an emerging affluent, educated,
often multilingual and well-travelled middle class, was supporting
public concerts. This allowed music to develop outside the
more restricted requirements and confines of church and court.
All these conditions were favourable to Mozart’s emerging
genius.
Mozart
is shown as a fully rounded personality. For instance, he
is recognised as a shrewd businessman. Early in his career,
for example, he realises that Italian opera overshadows German,
so he studies the Italian genre and not only succeeds in
that idiom, but also cleverly and artfully adopts and refines
that form’s techniques into his concert music. Some of the
most interesting and unexpected gestures of Mozart’s A Major
Violin Concerto, are instanced. In earlier concertos the
violin, on its first entry, repeats material previously announced
on the orchestra. In Mozart’s A Major Concerto, the violin
behaves like an operatic diva and plays something different,
some entirely new material.
Some
of the most illuminating comments come from pianist and musicologist,
Robert Levin who is shamefully relegated to an obscured credit,
behind the DVD on this company’s typically slipshod and inadequate
packaging*. Speaking of Mozart’s A minor Sonata, composed
shortly after, and surely influenced by his grief over the
death of his mother, Levin draws attention to its wildness,
the music lashing out, “one can imagine fists striking out
at the instrument … there’s something psychotic about this
music; those terrifying chromatic scales, slithery things
sucking him into the vortex … and then there is (elsewhere)
a sense of helplessness”; redolent of the work’s calmer,
more poignant music.
(*Works
are wrongly identified or not identified – for instance,
there is no mention of the A minor Piano Sonata and K488
is Piano Concerto No. 23 not No. 2!)
Later,
Levin comments that, in the context of his piano concertos
of which the programme credits him with having created its
modern form, Mozart cannily presented himself to his audiences
as composer, performer and improviser. He goes on to state
that although we, today, would regard Mozart’s accomplishments
in that order, it was the reverse for Mozart’s audiences. “His
improvisations were beyond delight”, Branagh immediately
after comments and then continues, “Mozart dazzled his audiences
with many magical improvisations in just one concerto, leaving
all other pianists with a problem – should you just play
the notes as Mozart wrote down or add your own embellishments
to his text?” This dilemma is particularly acute at the end
of the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 where,
as Imogen Cooper remarks, “… the piano line in the score
looks very spare and simple – with rising and falling intervals
from the top to the bottom of the piano and back again with
nothing else written in. Now Mozart would do this quite often
leaving a line quite bare and would fill in, extemporising
in performance; and he would have varied it from performance
to performance. He would never have bothered to write it
down. There is no subject (how to interpret such music) that
divides musicians more and raises blood pressure more; it’s
a very personal thing.” On this subject, Sir Colin Davis
opines “You don’t know that Mozart did not want that bareness.
To put frills on it sometimes is inappropriate, you are missing
a moment of extraordinary depth and desolation in this man
by dressing him up in dolly’s clothes.”
The
programme is full of enlightening insights like these across
all genres of Mozart’s music.
“The world will not see
such a talent again for a hundred years.” – Joseph Haydn,
on the death of Mozart
Even
the keenest Mozart admirer will find some wonderful insights
in this excellent documentary.
Ian Lace
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AmazonUK
Narrated by: Kenneth Branagh 
[59:00] 
