The complete idiot's guide to classical music (32 page)

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Never mind Amadeus: Mozart’s real name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus. Try saying that one fast three times. The Wolfgang, of course is short for Wolfgangus, but his father preferred Gottlieb to Theophilus, and in Latin that translates into Amadeus (love of God).

Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria. It didn’t take long for his father to figure out that the kid was pretty unusual. At the age of three, Wolfgang began to repeat his older sister’s keyboard exercises by ear, and he started correcting Papa Mozart whenever his fiddle wandered off key. Next thing you know, Wolfgang was handing the old man a page full of ink-blots marked Symphony no. 1. With visions of fame and fortune dancing in his head, Leopold took his wunderkind out on the road, zipping him all over Europe and showing him off for all he was worth.

 
Music Word
Wunderkind
is a word we swiped from the Germans. It simply means wonder-child, and is used to refer to a prodigy, meaning any youngster with talent or achievements far beyond the expectation of his or her years.

Actually, he was worth plenty. Little Wolfgang wowed audiences everywhere he went, improvising sonatas on tunes people sang to him, making up new accompaniments for old songs, or performing with a napkin covering the keyboard. In Rome, the Pope decorated him like a Christmas tree (even though the boy had broken the papal rule by putting down on paper the allegedly top-secret score to a nine-voiced “Miserere” after hearing it just twice). In London, Wolfgang played for King George III and accompanied Queen Charlotte while she sang some arias; and in France, Wolfgang proposed to Marie Antoinette. (Don’t get excited, they were both seven-years-old at the time.) In fact, everywhere he went royalty showered the prodigy with useful gifts, like golden toothpick holders and silver snuffboxes.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
As an adult, Mozart was no longer happy when royal patrons gave him silly presents instead of far more urgently needed cash. “I now have five watches,” he grumbled, “and am seriously thinking of having an additional watch pocket sewn on each leg of my trousers, so when I visit some great lord, it will not occur to him to present me with another.”

After a number of very busy years, the novelty of little Wolfgang wore off even as his littleness itself had disappeared. By the time he reached his preteen and early teen years, his prodigy appeal had vanished and his touring blitzes petered out.

At 15, Mozart followed his father into the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, who promptly died, leaving the boy in the clutches of a musically unappreciative replacement Archbishop, who paid peanuts for all sorts of masterworks to which he was utterly indifferent. Financially struggling (as he would be the rest of his life), largely unappreciated, and no doubt emotionally miserable, Mozart nonetheless spent the next half a dozen years in Salzburg, really settling down to the business of composition. Brilliantly endowed with a vast imagination as well as amazing technical facility, Wolfgang worked much harder and with more discipline than the Mozart movie myth (again, the entertaining
Amadeus
) would have us believe. He wrote opera after symphony after oratorio after sonata; he tried his hand (in fact
both
hands) at conducting, and was available for piano or violin performances on demand. During this Salzburg period, he finished his first 13 Piano Sonatas; the Flute Quartet, K. 285; his Mass in C Minor, the five Violin Concertos; and the opera
Idomeneo.

During those years, Mozart also began synthesizing German and Italian music to create a style uniquely his own. The Italians tended to view music as light and entertaining, the Germans leaned toward more serious expressions; Germans preferred instrumental pieces, Italians melted at the sound of a beautiful voice; Italian composers sought to charm audiences with soaring melody, the Germans were more concerned with form and texture. When you listen to Mozart, all of those ingredients are combined; we bask in the best of both musical worlds.

By age 21, Mozart was desperately anxious to have a woman in his life. “The voice of nature speaks as loud in me as in others,” he told his father, and when he met the beautiful 16-year-old Aloysia Weber, who had a lovely voice (and even played the harpsichord a bit), he figured he was all set. Papa Mozart, however, was not keen on having anyone take Wolfgang’s mind off his music, so he whisked his son away on a concert tour to Paris. By the time Wolfgang came back, Aloysia was unavailable. (She had become the mistress of the Elector of Salzburg, if you must know.) Not to worry, there were plenty more Webers where she came from, namely her three fresh, young sisters. Mozart moved in with the family, where he could explore his options more easily, and eventually settled on Constanza. “She understands housekeeping,” he explained to Papa.

Wolfgang and Constanza moved to Vienna, and there Mozart spent his last years, plagued by poor health and dreary finances. Here was a case of life and art taking separate paths. Even as Mozart’s genius reached the pinnacle of expression with his four greatest operas, the Clarinet Quintet and Concerto, his most acclaimed symphonies, and a magical body of chamber music, his life deteriorated beyond repair. His last work was the
Requiem,
which remained unfinished when his final illness—likely typhoid fever—led Mozart to a pauper’s grave on a wet winter day in December 1791. He was 35 years old.

If you see a Mozart piece on a concert program, it will usually be followed by the letter “K” and a number. What on earth, you wonder, does that mean? His Symphony no. 25, for instance, is K. 183, while the ever-popular
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
adds up to K. 525. No, the K. doesn’t stand for Konzert, nor even potassium. It refers to Köchel, as in Ludwig Alois Ferdinand Ritter van Köchel, an Austrian botanist, mineralogist, and part-time musicologist. Most composers and publishers settled for identifying pieces by opus numbers (“opus” simply meaning “work”), but Mozart wrote music so quickly, and in such profusion, that even he sometimes lost count (his Symphony no. 24 is really no. 31, he seems to have forgotten no. 37 altogether, going right from Symphony no. 36 to no. 38, and so on). To bring order out of this creative chaos, Köchel systematically catalogued every one of Mozart’s compositions, assigning each one a number from 1 (a keyboard minuet written at the age of four) to 626 (the
Requiem
). Theoretically, the listing was in chronological order, but Köchel goofed up fairly often, so you can’t always be sure. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.

As with Haydn, many of Mozart’s most popular symphonies come with titles attached, like the
Haffner
(no. 35), named for a wealthy Salzburg family (if you’re in a hurry, try the shorter and sweeter “Haffner Serenade”), and two Symphonies named for the cities where they were premiered,
Linz
(no. 36) and
Prague
(no. 38). Under no circumstances, however, should you fail to hear the superb final three symphonies, written within the incredibly short span of six weeks in 1788: no. 39 in E-flat, no. 40 in G Minor, and no. 41 in C, the last of those also equipped with a nifty nickname,
Jupiter
.

The sparkling
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
is great at any time of day, and for a round of pure slapstick, try “A Musical Joke.” You won’t go wrong with any of the Mozart Concertos, including those for Bassoon, Clarinet, Flute, and Flute and Harp together. There are four Horn Concertos, five for Violin, and 25 for Piano (plus one for Two Pianos and another for Three).

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
You won’t find a trumpet concerto on Mozart’s list, because from earliest childhood until the age of nine and beyond, Mozart couldn’t abide the sound of the solo trumpet. “Merely holding a trumpet toward him was like aiming a loaded pistol at his heart,” reported a family friend. “Papa wanted to cure him of this fear and once asked me to blow my trumpet at him, but my God! Wolfgang had scarcely heard the sound when he turned pale and began to collapse. . . .”

In chamber music, the list of delights is endless, with all sorts of solo and duo sonatas, trios, quartets, and some quintets, too. Want some background music for your next dinner party? Several of the divertimenti and serenades have lost none of their charm since they first served that very purpose in 18th-century drawing rooms.

On the vocal aisle,
Requiem
is a must, though by all means counterbalance its poignancy with the bright and virtuosic joy of the motet “Exultate Jubilate.” The great
Coronation Mass
is bursting with energy, while the “Ave Verum Corpus,” like the
Requiem
written in the last year of Mozart’s short life, is serenity personified.

For the opera aficionado,
Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute,
and
The Marriage of Figaro
are the best starting points, though you may well want to proceed to
Cosi fan Tutte
and
Idomineo
as well.

In fact, there is hardly a Mozart work that will fail to please. As Aaron Copland put it, “Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness that has never since been duplicated.”