Mozart Fest

[Bryn]

... JSB and Ludo, both of whom are all so terribly serious and earnest. ...

Only when played very badly. Beethoven, like his mentor, Haydn, was a great musical humourist, and Back had rather more than his moments, too.

[Flosshilde]

surveying the works of Mozart contemporaries alongside that of Mozart. That would have been a more ambitious and somewhat more illuminating idea and more of what I would have expected from R3.

Agreed - that would have been very illuminating, & possibly have indicated the general untruthfulness of Peter Hayes' assertion that Mozart's contempraries were all second rate. It's very difficult to know if that is true or not when one doesn't hear their music very often (or at all).

[kernelbogey]

.... the general untruthfulness of [the] assertion that Mozart's contempraries were all second rate. It's very difficult to know if that is true or not when one doesn't hear their music very often (or at all).

I think that Mozart was put on a pedestal in the 1950s and '60s when much less was known about his contemporaries, and much much less of their music played and recorded. He hasn't altogether fallen off that pedestal, which is right, because of the major works: but I think he was deified in that period to the detriment of contemporaries. Maybe he stands head and shoulders above them, but I think we were brought up to think he was head and body well above them, and they had to look up even to his feet. When I do hear others from that era (who had heard any Salieri before Schaffer's play?) I'm struck by their quality.

[mikerotheatrenestr0y]

So, what's the shopping list? Cecilia Bartoli has a CD of Salieri arias; Jaroussky has that CD of JC Bach; there are the Dittersdorf symphonies after Ovid; there's Myslivicek; there are the international Czechs - Rosetti, Stich, the Stamitz family; there's Ignaz Pleyel, whose works on Naxos are very tuneful; there's those people like Triebensee who did wind-band arrangements of the greatest hits. JCB's instrumental music can be ravishingly tuneful and has most inventive combinations - there's a lot of it with Halstead on CPO. Not to forget JM Kraus, the Mozart of the North - and that's only the ones in the Austro-German area that I can think of, leaving out CPE Bach [not really a contemporary?] and the French and Italians and Spanish and Portuguese...

However, my impression [and I don't drop names I haven't listened to, and in many cases own] is that, while they all use the same little formulae, Wolfi does something different with them - even if it's only taking them seriously, and making them into real questions and answers instead of just call and response. I'm not sure he does it all the time - but because he does it sometimes we tend to listen to the rest of it as if were also that profound. And maybe he played it that way...

[I'd be up for a proper exploration of Danzi, Krommer and Reicha wind-music, and a detailed comparison with Mozart's... but it's not going to happen, is it?]

[kernelbogey]

[I'd be up for a proper exploration of Danzi, Krommer and Reicha wind-music, and a detailed comparison with Mozart's... but it's not going to happen, is it?]

Well why not suggest these names to Composer of the Week? What you have in mind is the sort of thing Donald M does superbly. (And I have a hunch that CoW may well have covered some of them.) Thanks for the list, btw: I know some music by many, but not all, of them!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

(who had heard any Salieri before Schaffer's play?)

He was probably best known through the Rimski-Korsakov opera "Mozart and Salieri" which was based on the same unsupportable rumour as "Amadeus".

[kernelbogey]

My point, rather, EA, was that we didn't hear any of the music of Salieri or, as I recall, of any of the other contemporaries mentioned a couple of posts back, in the 50s and 60s - but correct me if I'm mistaken about that.

[subcontrabass]

He was probably best known through the Rimski-Korsakov opera "Mozart and Salieri" which was based on the same unsupportable rumour as "Amadeus".

We can pass the blame further back to Pushkin's verse drama of 1830 which supplied the plot and much of the libretto for the opera.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

KB, I'm quite sure that you're right. One of the problems of "Amadeus" is that it makes the situation even worse, but making him appear barely competent as a composer, whereas he has been shown, in recent years, to be rather good. Put it this way: I would be extremely proud to have composed much of Salieri's music.

[Flosshilde]

I think Mozart's papa was tireless in promoting him as a child genius & touting him round the courts etc of Europe; there was also the fact that he died young, & the stiry that he was buried in a pauper's grave. It all contributed to the myth of the neglected genius. If his contemporaries had had similar opportunities (if dying young can be called an opportunity ) they might have been as well known as Mozart was/is.

[aeolium]

Well, I think Mozart *was* a genius and was out on his own (with Haydn) as a composer. I have heard a fair amount of music by his other contemporaries - J C Bach, Krommer, Benda, Salieri, Sussmayr, Cimarosa inter al - and I think the mature Mozart, from roughly the composition of his 9th piano concerto, is simply in a different class. His range over many different genres, the quality of orchestration for large scale works and interplay of instruments for chamber works, the quality of the melodies and the way they are developed, the consistently high standard of composition over a great number of works - none of his minor contemporaries can match him at all for these. They may be able to have two or three good arias in an opera, or a good concerto movement but it's rare that the quality is sustained even for as long as a single work. It's not surprising that Haydn, no mean judge, told Mozart's father in 1785 that he thought Mozart was the 'greatest composer known to me either in person or by name' or that he said on hearing of Mozart's death, 'Posterity will not see his like again in 100 years'.

That's not to say we shouldn't hear works by M's contemporaries, or even that some of those works stand up better than some of M's early compositions.

[verismissimo]

I've listened on an occasional basis to R3 during the Mfest to date, without ever looking up what I'm to hear. The result has been enjoyable, often surprising in that the work in play seems unfamiliar.

And I agree with aeolium's general point above. WAM before K271 is often on a par with JC Bach and the rest.

[Nick Armstrong]

There is a (large) number of works from WAM's maturity which clearly do put him at least head and shoulders above contemporaries, to my ears - one gropes for an original way to say it, but falls back on 'sublime', 'genius', 'inspiration'... And yet the 12 day saturation approach tends to underline that (as with LvB) there are large swathes of workmanlike pieces, not often played for good reason, that show he was not the godlike genius who turned everything to gold. To that extent, the Mozart Fest could be said to undermine the 'Mozart the Genius' label. Another way of putting it, would be to say that it introduces some realism, some perspective.

I for one am grateful to the R3 coverage for introducing me - via Stephen Plaistow (to whose conversation with Suzy Klein earlier in the week I listened this morning, to avoid more operatic warblings) - to the 14th Piano Concerto K449. I'm a Mozart Piano Concerto nut but amazingly this one had passed me by. Great performance by Serkin. Just the sort of discovery I had been hoping for from the fortnight.

[subcontrabass]

See the comments at the bottom of http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/20...ombe-and.shtml for some reactions to saturation Mozart.

[aeolium]

Caliban, I agree with a lot of what you say in the first paragraph - and I was against the Mozartfest from the start - but there are still a huge number of exceptional works in Mozart's output, perhaps 150 or more, and even in light music genres like the divertimenti he could compose music that went far beyond what his contemporaries could manage. Listen for instance to the Divertimento K334 and compare that with other similar works by contemporaries, Boccherini for instance, and the sheer quality of the writing, even in an occasional work, stands out.