(This essay was originally published in the programme for a performance of these symphonies by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus musicus Wien, at the 2014 Salzburg Festival.)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No. 39 in E flat major K. 543
Symphony No. 40 in G minor K. 550Symphony No. 41 in C major ‘Jupiter’ K. 551
Programming, properly understood, is fun but difficult.
Thoughtful performers have long taken it upon themselves to present music by
Mozart and Schubert in tandem with works by composers of the Second Viennese
School. All-Mozart programmes have become rarer than they should; opportunities
to hear Mozart’s last three symphonies in sequence, apparently a post-Romantic
conception that would not have been his, are now infrequent. Yet, although we
may draw comparisons and contrasts, perhaps even considering them à la Mahler as part of a greater meta-symphony,
concentrated listening nevertheless continues to suggest, to eyes and to ears,
tendencies pointing towards Mozart’s Austro-German successors (and back to his
predecessors: the Bachs, Fux, and Handel).
Nikolaus Harnoncourt is not the only present-day conductor
to wish to redress the balance. Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim have recently
performed the hallowed final triptych in single concerts. Nevertheless,
Harnoncourt remains different, avowedly wishing to present the symphonies as
having been planned not just by him, but also by Mozart, as an intégrale, possessing its own
architecture. Harnoncourt even considers the celebrated finale to the ‘Jupiter’
as a finale to all three works – which can certainly be our experience in
performance. In the conductor’s view, this is an oratorio without words, a
drama of the soul (he employs the German Seelendrama
),which in some senses may be understood to mirror, to dramatise the life
of that soul, perhaps looking forward to Haydn’s The Seasons as well as to the works of CPE Bach and Handel, Mozart
having re-orchestrated some of the latter’s essays in the genre. Perhaps liberated
by the technical capabilities of instruments vis-à-vis voices and indeed,
by the lack of concrete words, such is the typically provocative conception of
Mozart Harnoncourt wishes to present.
There remain surprising lacunae in our knowledge of Mozart’s
life (not the least of temptations towards romanticizing). Little is known of
the circumstances of composition and performance of these symphonies, in stark
contrast to the acclaim received by the preceding ‘Prague’ Symphony. We know,
even if we cannot quite believe the astonishing fact, that Mozart wrote all
three within a six-week-period during the summer of 1788, yet have no certain
evidence of performance. The old seductive idea that he therefore wrote them as
a statement for posterity no longer garners acceptance. Perhaps they were
written for subscription concerts ‘in the Casino’ on Spiegelgasse in Vienna’s
Innere Stadt. The second version of the G minor Symphony (without clarinets), however,
suggests a particular performing imperative, perhaps for a 1791 Tonkünstler-Societät
concert, at which Salieri conducted an unidentified Mozart symphony. Or they
may have been written with a visit to London in mind. Posterity has nevertheless
made them its own. Brahms, keen to distinguish between novelty and ‘inner value’,
remarked in 1896 that, although Beethoven’s First Symphony had offered a ‘new
outlook […] the last three symphonies by Mozart are much more important!’ That once-heretical
judgement now sounds uncontroversial.
Unlike the famously minuet-less ‘Prague’, all three works
are in four movements. The 39th Symphony is the only one to follow
on from the ‘Prague’ in having a slow introduction, its E flat major grandeur
presaging that of Die Zauberflöte,
but all the opening movements are unsurprisingly in sonata form. Contrast
between first and second groups remains an important guiding principle, yet so
does dynamic propulsion, the tension between those principles providing part of
an operatic, formal and musical drama. Indeed, the second group of the
‘Jupiter’ takes us unmistakably into the realm of opera buffa, incorporating a quotation from Mozart’s insertion
arietta ‘Un bacio di mano’ (K. 541). It offers a perfect foil to the trumpets
and drums of earlier material, replete with resonances of the traditional Missa solemnis figuraliter and the seria pomp-to-come of La clemenza di Tito. Dramatic tension of
a proto-Romantic order is overriding in the 40th Symphony; its
opening lower string throbbing presents an on-going scene of ‘accompaniment’
prior to the entry of the first subject above. (Harnoncourt points to the lack
of a ‘beginning’ as such, comparing the movement to a Vivaldi Adagio.) Its nagging semitonal fall
prepares us, if only slightly, for one of Mozart’s most disorienting chromatic
explorations. The opening of the development shocks us by yanking first-group
material into the remote key of F sharp minor and then attempting, though not
succeeding, its Mephistophelian negation through harmonic and contrapuntal
means. Not for nothing was Schoenberg drawn to its analysis in his Harmonielehre.
Slow movements now carry greater emotional weight than had
generally been Mozart’s symphonic practice, perhaps influenced by his piano
concertos. If the slow movement of Symphony No. 39 lacks a development section,
at least as conventionally understood, that is only because development – hints
of the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in Brahms and his own music
– continues throughout the recapitulation. All is transformed by what has come
before. Chromaticism again haunts the slow movement of the 40th
Symphony; if we are in the major mode, it is hardly at its most affirmative.
Complexity, whether harmonic or formal, reaches a new level in the slow,
sarabande-like movement of the ‘Jupiter’. It may not be lengthy but it is
powerfully concentrated.
Minuets (and Trios) retain their origins in dance, though are
entirely symphonic in conception. There
is certainly an aristocratic grandeur to the Minuet of No. 39 that would not
have been out of place in Vienna’s Redoutensaal, yet its woodwind luxuriance marks
it out as something more. The Trio transports us to a ravishing serenade-like
Elysium, pointing towards Così fan tutte.
Mozart’s G minor daemon drives home cross-rhythms in the 40th
Symphony that serve to demonstrate our distance from the ballroom. Perhaps most
extraordinary of all is the chromaticism of the initially ‘simple’ if sinuous Minuet
of the ‘Jupiter’. Ultra-chromatic subversion of the tonic results in a passage
of just six beats which includes every pitch class save that of C. Yet however
much that has us peer into the Schoenbergian future, Mozart’s chromaticism
retains a great deal, though certainly not all, of its meaning by virtue of its
relationship to a fundamental diatonic tonality. ‘Home’ remains a place to
which Mozart returns, though who knows where a longer life might have taken
him.
Thematic economy marks the E flat major Finale, the second
theme a development of the first. The movement seems over in a flash, a quicksilver
operatic resolution. Tragic complexity continues to rule in the G minor. One
passage of chromatic and rhythmic disjuncture delineates a sequence of all 11
pitches, save for the tonic; this may in a sense be the most radical of all
Mozart’s finales and meaning is again imparted partly through contrast between
such exploration and the tonality of ‘home’, however uncomforting. In Georg
Knepler’s words, this Symphony ‘clings relentlessly to the minor mode’. It was,
Knepler noted, not an unusual practice for Mozart, though Mozart’s other G
minor masterwork, the String Quintet K. 516, does turn to the tonic major.
Tragedy is preferred over a Beethovenian-Romantic journey from ‘darkness to
light’ or even the Classical dramatic happy ending. Mozart never confuses
sentiment with sentimentality; catharsis shakes us to the core.
Simplicity and complexity
In his article on the Trio of the 40th Symphony, Leonard
B. Meyer argued that the belief to which he had earlier subscribed that ‘complexity
was at least a necessary condition for value’, was ‘if not, entirely mistaken,
at least somewhat confused’, since what was crucial in music, as exemplified by
this Trio, was ‘relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no
way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar’. He proceeded
to argue that it was possible for the listener to discern the Trio’s
complexities ‘precisely because these arise out of uncomplicated, unassuming
tonal means’. Meyer was certainly right to point to that possibility, though
the issue of ‘relational richness’ quite rightly complicates – in his sense as
well as others – given that the ‘relative’ simplicity of the Trio’s ‘tonal
means’ may be understood to acquire some of its meaning from its contrast with
complexity elsewhere. There would not be a sense of relaxation were it not for
the nigh Schoenbergian extremity of some of Mozart’s writing beforehand.
Harnoncourt speaks even of the ‘destruction’ of tonal melody and harmony.
Mozart’s compositional style, here and elsewhere, offers
something quite extraordinary, akin to a dialectic in equilibrium, in which
simplicity and complexity seem on the one hand to be held in balance and, on
the other, dialectically to depend upon one another and to find themselves in
dramatic conflict with each other. We may offer all manner of possible
explanations for that. Mozart’s experience as an opera composer certainly
informs his symphonic writing – sometimes to the chagrin of those who, like
Wagner, wish that Mozart’s conception of sonata form had conformed more closely
to expectations conditioned by Haydn and Beethoven. The composer’s historical
position is another factor. The stage at which Mozart’s musical language finds
itself is somewhat analogous to the world of Newtonian physics, then in its
popular heyday, a tonal universe extending its bounds almost rationally, tonal
relations, remote and close, almost yet not quite classifiable. And yet there
remains a ‘progressive’ imperative, ineluctably urging him on towards chromatic
dissolution.
Harmonic language is not the only element one may consider
in such a fashion. One can learn a great deal from Mozart’s irregularity of
phrase length. It is, however, perhaps the most important or at least the most
readily apparent. Moreover, as with Schoenberg, the potential, if not yet the
realization, of harmonic dissolution necessitated a more rigid form of musical
organization. What could be more ‘organized’ than a fugue, or at least fugal
writing, in the case of the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony fused with sonata
form?
The
sense of a finale offering the culminating achievement of the work, its telos or goal, is not the least of
Mozart’s legacies. For the ‘finale problem’ experienced by Beethoven and every
German Romantic symphonic composer – a good few non-Germans too – may, with a
little exaggeration, find its origin in Mozart’s tour de force. A requirement of Classical balance and the scope for
throwaway finale humour – always more Haydn’s thing than Mozart’s – have been
dealt a blow by a teleology throwing the greatest weight upon a climactic final
movement. Lest that seem Romantic sentimentalism, there is a great deal of
evidence to indicate that the Finale of the ‘Jupiter’ was understood as such at
the time. Vincent Novello would recount a conversation with Franz Xaver Mozart,
Wolfgang’s son: ‘he considered the Finale to his father’s sinfonie in C – which
[Johann Peter] Salomon [the impresario who commissioned Haydn’s London Symphonies] christened the Jupiter
– to be the highest triumph of instrumental composition, and I agree with him.’
Complexity is triumphantly reinstated, if ever it had gone away, yet the coda’s
quintuple invertible counterpoint – all the movement’s themes are combined in
mind-boggling combination and permutation – is all the more miraculous for how
lightly-worn the learning is. Yes, there is triumph, but there is no sense of forcibly
welding the themes together (as, say, in Wagner’s Meistersinger counterpoint). Mozart’s Finale is the product of an 18th-century
art that conceals art, offering the apparent paradox of effortless climax. It
is, moreover, difficult not to feel some sense of signing off, of culmination
to more than a single work. Had Mozart lived longer, he would certainly have composed
other symphonies longer, but he did not; Harnoncourt’s thesis of an
‘instrumental oratorio’ may yet shed new light upon the particularity of this
climax.
