(This essay was originally published as a programme note for the 2016 Salzburg Festival.)
WOLFGANG
A. MOZART • Symphony no. 39 in E-flat major, K. 543
WOLFGANG
A. MOZART • Concerto for Violin and Orchestra no. 3 in G major, K. 216
LUDWIG
V. BEETHOVEN • Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21
Surprisingly little is known of
the circumstances of composition and performance of Mozart’s final three
symphonies, traditionally seen, somewhat disrespectfully to Haydn, as the most
glorious of eighteenth-century summatory symphonic statements. We know that they
were written within a six-week-period during the summer of 1788, perhaps for
autumn subscription concerts ‘in the Casino’ on the Spiegelgasse in the centre
of Vienna, which may or may not have taken place, or perhaps with a visit to
London in mind; the one does not necessarily exclude the other. Posterity has
nevertheless made them its own, although the 39th, lacking either
the minor key of the 40th, or the finality and the nickname of the
‘Jupiter’ has, for no good reason, slightly lacked the popularity of its two
successors.
It is the only work of the three
to open with a slow introduction, its E-flat major grandeur presaging the
summatory magnificence of Die Zauberflöte.
Lavish woodwind writing, bearing the hallmarks of serenade and operatic experience
alike, not to mention that of the piano concertos, underlines and indeed
enhances the harmonic tension, whose release marks the lighter, almost buffa-like onset of the exposition
proper. ‘Lightness’ is in many respects deceptive; it performs the role of an
operatic foil, incomprehensible without what has come before and what will come
after. The almost-text-book quality of the sonata form thereafter might seem
conventional – until one listens. Here we discover, if ever we doubted it, that
Mozart’s sense of balance, of formal adventure, of development, of return will
always surprise us; the devil and angel are in the detail. As Donald Tovey so
admirably put it, ‘The composer … is not the man who, having got safely through
the exposition, turns with relief to the task of copying it out into the right
keys for the recapitulation; but he is the man who conceives the exposition
with a vivid idea of what effect it will produce in the recapitulation.’
If the slow movement, in A-flat
major, the subdominant, lacks a development section as conventionally
understood, that is only because development continues throughout the
recapitulation; such is the ‘developing variation’ Schoenberg discerned in
Brahms and in his own music, and for which he worshipped Mozart. So much for
‘conventional understanding’; all is transformed by what has come before. ‘Lack’,
however, is quite the wrong way to think about it; Mozart here conceives, as
Tovey might have put it, the themes with their variation in mind, not least the
dark, stormy transition to the second group, and the complexity of the harmonic
journey from and to the tonic key. Here the tonal system stands before us like
a Newtonian universe to be navigated; Mozart is our sure yet adventurous
harmonic (and enharmonic) guide. The aristocratic grandeur of the Minuet recalls
Mozart’s adorable ‘occasional’ dances for Vienna, yet its woodwind luxuriance
marks it out as something still more. Of that greater profundity there can be
no doubt in the Trio, which transports us to a serenaders’ Elysium, even to the
pleasure-in-pain sado-masochism of Così
fan tutte.
Thematic economy marks the
finale, its second theme a development of the first, without the slightest hint
of melodic parsimony: Mozart the master conjurer surprises us whether his hat
contains a single rabbit or twenty. It seems over in a flash, quicksilver
operatic resolution both superficially similar to and yet, in Mozart’s
particular brand of theatrical ‘characterisation’, quite different from that to
a Haydn finale. The kinetic energy experienced in the first movement and,
before it, in the character of Don Giovanni, is intensified and runs its firework-like
course; it fizzes like the champagne traditionally consumed in the nobleman’s
‘Finch' han del vino’, and what a vintage this is!
All five of Mozart’s violin
concertos were composed in 1775, perhaps intended for the leader of the
Salzburg court orchestra, Antonio Brunetti; both Mozart and Brunetti certainly
enjoyed playing the works. The Third, in G major, composed in September of that
‘violin year’, is generally held, and not without reason, to mark a step
forward from its two predecessors; at any rate, it has long proved popular with
soloists and audiences alike. As ever with Mozart, indeed as we have just seen
(and heard), there is a strong affinity with the world of opera. Although the
fully ‘mature’ operatic composer had yet to burst forth in Idomeneo, he was already on the cusp, with La finta giardiniera and Il
re pastore his most recent essays in the genre.
The virtue of operatic ‘surprise’
– think, looking forward, of the disguises, concealments, and sudden appearances
of Le nozze di Figaro – is certainly
to be heard in the G minor Andante interpolation
to the rondo finale and indeed in its folksier (cunningly-placed inner-part drones
and all) successor episode. Moreover, the opening theme of the first movement Allegro is taken – and, of course,
developed – from Il re pastore,
composed for a Salzburg visit the previous year by Archduke Maximilian Francis.
Performance, we should remember, was almost always the raison d’être of a Mozart work, however much, as with those final
three symphonies, we may wish to claim them for posterity. There is an
exploratory-without-experimentalism sense to this Allegro, almost as if the composer wished to visit as many keys as
the material would decently allow, but no more. Classical propriety was never a
restriction to Mozart; instead, it tended to offer a compositional spur, with
which he might then offer us the rarest of aural sweetmeats. His ear for wind
colour never deserts him, whether here or in the aria-like, D major slow
movement, whose cantilena sounds all the more exalted set against muted
orchestral strings. Alternation between oboes (first and third movements) and
flutes (second), horns heard in all three, suggests that orchestral players
might have doubled parts, a common Salzburg practice, especially in the court
orchestra. (That, you may be relieved to hear, is unlikely to be imitated by
even the wilder reaches of contemporary ‘historically informed performance’.)
Whereas
Mozart’s symphony was conceived as part of a very eighteenth-century ‘set’ and
the concerto had at least become part of one by default, the symphony was, by
the time of Beethoven, already something more singular, more ‘Romantic’ even.
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!’ We may or may not
agree; few of us, whilst acknowledging the debt owed – and repaid – to Mozart
and Haydn in Beethoven’s symphonies, and not just his earliest symphonies,
would deny also the novelty apparent here from the word go – or rather, from
the celebrated opening in the ‘wrong’ key, or rather with a C major dominant
seventh chord foreign to the tonic key, whose emphatic statement requires a
struggle of its own rather than be presentation as a mere given.
The
‘right’ key, C major, may well have been chosen with Mozart’s Jupiter and Haydn’s Symphony no.97 in
mind, with, to quote Elaine Sisman, ‘the purpose of homage, of placing himself
within a tradition, laced with one-upmanship, and casting the result in the
most brilliant conventional and instantly recognisable of eighteenth-century
symphonic modes: the “C major symphony” tradition with its trumpets and drums
and “ceremonial flourishes”.’ At any rate, triumph in Beethoven is always hard
won. The simplicity of the opening theme, echoing perhaps that of the opening
movement to Mozart’s E-flat Symphony, following the tension of their respective
introductions, is already called into question by the sequence at its close, in
which the exposition’s goal already seems set. ‘It is the opening,’ wrote
Tovey, ‘of a formal rather than of a big work,’ a nice distinction reinforced
when we think of it in Mozartian context, but also a distinction against which
Beethoven struggles. The concision of the development is perhaps more
Haydnesque than Mozartian, but the splendour of the coda, whilst owing much to
eighteenth-century rejoicing, is already on a scale we might acclaim as
Beethovenian.
We return
to the F major in which the symphony allegedly opened for the Andante, its opening theme as playful as
anything in the music of his great predecessors, its courtly quality undeniably
post-Mozartian, yet also seemingly straining towards greater ‘weight’. Haydn’s inspiration looms large, not least from trumpets
and drums (reminiscent of the late Masses as much as the symphonies); and yet
the abiding memory remains that of the opening theme. It is a score-draw, then,
between Mozart and Haydn, albeit with Beethoven himself firmly in the lead. The
scherzo-in-all-but-name, which Beethoven still describes as a minuet, is
perhaps the most unambiguously ‘Beethovenian movement’. There is Romantic
mystery, moreover, in a trio which Tovey saw, ‘with its throbbing wind-band
chords and mysterious violin runs’, as foretelling ‘Schumann’s most intimate
epigrammatic sentiments’. Perhaps; to these ears, the Harmoniemusik is more a tribute, touchingly earnest, almost
literal, to Mozart. There is no need, of course, to choose one or the other; a
fine performance will likely suggest both. The expectancy sensed in the
introduction to the finale is, rightly, of quite a different nature from that
to the first movement. Here is a skittishness that takes Haydn as its
starting-point, but only a starting-point; here, perhaps more clearly than in
previous movements, the echt-Beethovenian role of rhythm (not just syncopations,
but certainly them) and harmony in supporting, surprising, propelling each
other is the order of the day. The timpani part alone makes that dynamically,
explosively clear.
And so, with
this work, written in 1800, the final year of the eighteenth century, we hear as
good a candidate as any for Beethoven bidding that century and its careful
balance of tradition and innovation a fond, if less than final, farewell. Haydn
would offer one last great C major triumph the following year, with his
oratorio, The Seasons, its libretto
by Beethoven’s symphonic dedicatee, Gottfried van Sweiten, although Haydn’s
countervailing Romanticism is perhaps still greater than that of Beethoven’s at
this stage. The next time Beethoven would conclude a symphony in C major, in his
Fifth, the musical world around him, shaped to an almost incredible extent by
him, would seem very different indeed.
