(This essay was originally published in a Salzburg Festival programme for a concert in which Marc Minkowski conducted the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. The programme was slightly altered at late notice, owing to a change of soloist, but I have given the original version here.)
Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No. 33 in B flat major K. 319
‘Parto inerme’ from La
Betulia liberata K. 118
‘Ombra felice’ – ‘Io ti lascio’ K. 255
‘Venga pur, minacci e frema’ from Mitridate, re di Ponto K. 87
Kurt
Weill (1900–1950)
Symphony No. 2
Deviation
and dialectic
Mozart’s Symphony No. 33, dating from 1779, would prove to
be his penultimate Salzburg symphony. Initially it was a three-movement work,
its Minuet and Trio added five or six years later, most likely for a specific
performance in Vienna, where audiences tended to expect, and in this case
therefore received, a symphony in four movements. Whereas the first of the
symphonies written upon returning home from Paris, No. 32 in G major K. 318,
very much bore the marks of Mozart’s experience in the French capital – its
three sections in one movement clearly modelled after the overture style of opéra comique – this three-movement work
conformed to the Italianate model most popular in Alpine Salzburg, though,
interestingly, the later Minuet and Trio offer no hint of stylistic
incongruity. (Hans Keller begged to differ, suggesting an element of undue
contrivance in its ‘fit’, but that seems a dubious case of wisdom after the
event.) Whether the smaller orchestra – no flutes and two horns rather than
four – reflects a response to audience reaction, the orchestral forces
available or simply a matter of the composer’s inclination remains, in the
absence of documentation, a matter of conjecture.
Perhaps the most strikingly ‘forward-looking’ feature of a
work which erroneously, if understandably in the light of ‘reversions’ such as
orchestral size and number of movements – is the high level of motivic
cohesion, not only within movements but between them too. The first, third and
fourth movements all open with a downward octave leap, B flat to B flat, a
unifying correspondence the least tutored of ears might readily recognize. This
being Mozart rather than Haydn, the generative variety of melodic profusion
following each of those opening statements is, however, more striking still. A
familiar yet typically finely crafted balance between fundamentally diatonic
harmonic rhythm and sinuous melodic chromaticism characterizes the first
movement. So does the startling – with hindsight – appearance of a four-note
contrapuntal tag which would make its most celebrated reappearance in the Finale
of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. It is perhaps more immediately relevant to this Symphony,
however, to consider its previous appearance in the Credo of Mozart’s Mass in F
major K. 192 and more generally as reflective of an Austrian and South German
contrapuntal tradition born of Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum.
Experimentation may not be so overt in this Symphony as in
some of its immediate predecessors and is, in any case, rarely a prevailing
characteristic of Mozart’s symphonism. Nevertheless, the reversal of events in
the slow movement’s recapitulation, the second subject preceding the return of
the first, offers a formal ‘deviation’, albeit one with precedent in earlier
works, as satisfying as it is surprising. More noteworthy still however is the
movement’s serenade-like grace, serenity and warmth. The ‘reduced’ wind section
shows in a well-nigh perfect blend of the harmonic and contrapuntal that we
need not wait for the Viennese Mozart to experience delights both sensuous and
intellectual. Such a dialectic also informs the ‘Viennese’ third movement, the
ready cliché of Trio ‘relaxation’ undoubtedly true in the brief serenade
sandwiched between two hearings of the Minuet. The latter’s sternness in
miniature seems almost to prefigure the neo-classicism of La clemenza di Tito, even Beethoven. In the Finale, we hear
ebullience, contrapuntal mastery, hints of Parisian orchestral virtuosity
allegedly left behind and, perhaps most important, an operatic sense of
characterization, oboes and horns again taking a leading role, in which all the
world is truly a stage. Indeed, in 1786, the year of Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart would sell a copy of this Symphony,
together with Nos. 34 and 36 and three piano concertos, to the Donaueschingen
court, attesting to a more extended after-life than was typical for his
Salzburg symphonies.
Precocious
dramatic sensibilities
It would generally take longer for the wider world to
appreciate the charms and, in many cases, the profundities of Mozart’s early
vocal works. Mitridate, re di Ponto gained
considerable success with its 26 initial performances, but then went
unperformed until the early 20th century. In the case of the 1771
oratorio La Betulia liberata,
commissioned by Don Giuseppe Ximenese, Prince of Aragon, the music seems
originally never to have been performed at all, notwithstanding Mozart’s
unfulfilled idea over a decade later to rework material for a commission from
Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. This azione
sacra, a setting of Metastasio’s 1734 libretto, drawn from the Book of
Judith, is stylistically very much in the mould of opere serie such as Mitridate,
written the previous year for Milan. Both castrato arias, the oratorio’s ‘Parto
enerme, e non pavento’, sung by Judith herself, and the opera’s ‘Venga pur,
minacci e frema’ speak of a dramatic sensibility belying the composer’s tender
years. Some of the luxuriance of the Salzburg symphonies is present. So also,
however, is considerable single-mindedness in pursuit of dramatic truth,
doubtless partly born of Mozart’s admiration for and imitation of Gluck. The
righteous determination of a biblical heroine may thus be understood,
historically as well as in the context of this concert, to be informed by that
of Mitridate’s treacherous son, Farnace.
Not, of course, that we may not discern in those arias a
genuine delight in the capabilities of the voice as such. The same may be said
of the contrasting, mostly tender scena ‘Ombra felice’ and aria ‘Io ti lascio’,
wherein we hear what to us is a strikingly familiar Mozartian voice of
compassion, prior to an ‘operatically’ brilliant conclusion. We also hear
startling freedom of form within the rondeau
structure of repeated refrain, not at all what Metastasian traditionalists
would have expected. Perhaps some at least, though, were beguiled, even
inspired. For already, without being entirely fanciful, we hear in all three
arias intimations, if not yet fully formed, of the mature Mozart’s
Shakespearean ability to abstain from judgement, to permit characters to speak
for themselves rather than didactically to be commanded. Such is apparent in an
‘edifying’ oratorio, in a more overtly ‘dramatic’ operatic ‘entertainment’, and
in this ‘insertion’ aria for Metastasio’s Arsace,
an aria which seems in fact never to have been ‘inserted’ and was probably
intended instead for castrato concert performance in 1776. At any rate, it
offers Mozart’s sole example of a concert aria for alto, irrespective of
gender.
Three
night scenes
It may seem something of a distance to travel from Mozart to
Kurt Weill, and it would in most respects be vain to pretend otherwise,
especially with respect to the mature and ‘late’ Weill of Brecht and Broadway.
Weill’s Second Symphony is no early work, hailing instead from the period
immediately following his 1933 flight from Germany, of Die sieben Todsünden, that ballet-cantata interrupting the
Symphony’s composition. The Symphony nevertheless seems in retrospect to hark
back to a greater seriousness more readily associated with Weill’s teacher,
Ferruccio Busoni, far from the least in his generation of Mozart’s disciples.
Indeed a good deal of Weill’s melodic and harmonic language here is strikingly
close to Busoni’s and would surely be more generally recognized as such, did
Busoni’s music not continue to languish in such neglect. The first movement’s
introduction, arguably more balletic, even operatic, than symphonic in the
Classical-Romantic sense, leads into a sonata-form movement whose scurrying,
fantastical qualities might almost have leaped out from a discarded sketch for Doktor Faust. A neo-Lisztian
Mephistopheles certainly seems at work in the transformational techniques both
within and between movements. Without labouring the point, and certainly
without wishing to ascribe ‘influence’, we may also recall Mozart’s practice
here.
Amidst the debris of the once all-conquering Neue Sachlichkeit, orchestral wind
proffer a satirical edge, harsher, more ironic than Mozartian seduction.
Hindemith’s Kammermusik may be a
reference point here, but far from the only such point, or even, surface
impressions notwithstanding, the most important one. For there beats, perhaps
surprisingly, a heart not entirely distant from that of another great
symphonist: Gustav Mahler. The second of the 1924 Violin Concerto’s three movements,
Notturno – Cadenza – Serenata, has provoked comparisons with the central, three-movement
sequence, Nachtmusik – Scherzo – Nachtmusik, of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. The
unhappy reception accorded Weill’s Symphony upon its 1934 Amsterdam premiere by
the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Bruno Walter even drew from the composer an
alternative title, Drei Nacht-Szenen (Three
Night Scenes), recalling Mahler’s example, enduringly strong with Willem
Mengelberg’s orchestra. That said, as ever with Weill, as with Mahler, things
are not so simple. If we consider the central Largo funereal, then it can only
be so in a markedly detached sense: certainly not without wit and difficult to
describe as tragic in a Mahlerian or indeed any other sense (even, that is,
when we invoke the nocturnal ambivalence of the Mahler of the Seventh
Symphony). Hints, sometimes more, of jazz, even of show tunes, permeate the
whole, most of all in the Finale, which seems concerned as much to step aside
from as directly to combat grandiloquent, Romantic expectations of symphonic
climax and fulfilment.
And yet, even though Weill’s speaking at times both of a
‘symphonic fantasy’ and of a ‘nocturne’ reveals important truths, this is no
anti-symphony. The recurrence and questioning of the first movement’s march
rhythms in the Finale imparts a degree of conventional cyclical unity even as
its expectations undergo a degree of deconstruction. Weill, like Mozart, was
above all a musical dramatist and such in a sense was the deconstructive drama
of his exile: more defiant, perhaps, less sardonic than that of his Weimar-era
coming to maturity, but the Verfremdungseffekt
(distancing effect) was always more Brecht’s conception than that of his
sometimes uneasy collaborator. The composer’s final orchestral work is now,
alongside the Violin Concerto, generally and rightly considered as significant
in their way as Weill’s collaborations with Brecht. Perhaps it is helpful to
think of the composer as analogous to Prokofiev: enamoured with the stage, not
always the most ‘natural’ of symphonists, but an interesting symphonist
nonetheless, the interest of his contribution being partly a consequence of a
more oblique relationship to this weightiest of forms and traditions.
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