When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was relieved of his duties in June 1781 as court organist to Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, the 25-year-old had every reason to believe he would achieve great success on his own. Conditions in Salzburg, the city of his birth, had become unbearable, owing in part to Colloredo’s lack of respect for him. Headstrong, replete with confidence in his abilities, Mozart had agitated for his release.
Success would be his indeed. Over the next 10 years, centered now in Vienna, Mozart would write his most glorious works: A short list includes the operas Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Magic Flute; a generous handful of symphonies, including his last three, his very best; and more than half his piano concertos.
But those 10 years were also his last. Mozart died in 1791 at the age of 35. The music from his final decade is the subject of the latest book by Simon P. Keefe, a professor at the University of Sheffield and an accomplished Mozart scholar.
The story of a work from early in his Vienna tenure, a sonata for two pianos (K. 448), shows how Mozart, no longer in the archbishop’s employ, had to draw on all his resources to secure a livelihood. The sonata was commissioned by Johann Michael Auernhammer to exhibit the talents of his daughter, Josepha, to whom Mozart gave lessons in his early days in Vienna. The sonata was premiered at a private concert attended by select members of the nobility. This concert gave Mozart the chance to show himself, before an audience of potential patrons, as a musical triple threat: composer, performer, and teacher.
Keefe is interested principally in the intersection of Mozart’s composing and performing activities; for him, understanding the “vibrant continuities between the two” is a key to appreciating the special quality of the music. Mozart the performer was a masterful improviser. As a keyboardist, he was able to play extemporaneously—using no notated music whatsoever—to dazzling effect. Keefe cites the high praise of critics who had the privilege of hearing him in action. One likened his improvisational ability to “a sweet bewitchment.” Another was exhilarated trying to follow the “bold flight of his fantasy.” More rhapsodically, a third wrote that “we swim away with him unresistingly on the stream of his emotions.” Mozart’s genius for improvisation was honed during his years as a touring prodigy. One tour, known to Mozart aficionados as the Grand Tour, began when he was just 7 and lasted three and a half years, taking him and his family to the great European capitals. His absorbent mind took in all that he heard—music from Italy, France, England, and elsewhere—and almost immediately he fashioned original compositions that perfectly caught the spirit of his models. His imagination then began to play upon what he heard, resulting in variations that evoked a thousand moods and atmospheres.
A hint of Mozart’s improvisatory bent can be heard in the Piano Sonata No. 13 in B-flat Major (K. 333), a work that, according to Keefe, has so far not been dated with certainty, though composed likely in 1782 or 1783. The last movement, a rondo, opens with a refrain that returns several times. Even in its first appearance, at the beginning of the movement, Mozart ornaments the refrain in various ways: by filling in gaps in the melody with embellishing tones, adding arpeggios that demonstrate the performer’s virtuosity (a product of years of practice), and changing the accompaniment in the left hand midway through so as to suggest the entrance of an orchestra. All this he does in a stretch of music that takes about 20 seconds to perform. Twenty imperishable seconds: Here is an instance in miniature of the flourishes that to him were second nature.
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At every turn, Keefe is interested in showing how Mozart’s approach to composition was qualified by pragmatic matters surrounding performance. For example, as the French-hornist Joseph Leutgeb (for whom Mozart wrote his four horn concertos) approached the end of his career, the composer wrote solo parts that were less taxing to play. And in a reverse situation, the undiminished skill of the clarinetist Anton Stadler prompted the composer to explore the timbral possibilities of an instrument that was still working its way into the sonic landscape of the symphony orchestra. Having been commissioned to write Don Giovanni for a premiere in Prague and knowing the reputation of the city for producing fine woodwind and brass players, Mozart included a large contingent of these instrumentalists in the orchestra and gave them challenging music
to play. While writing opera arias for solo singers, Mozart always made sure to tailor his melodies to suit the strengths, and cloak the weaknesses, of star performers. On the other hand, writes Keefe, when composing for a small group of singers, say a trio or a quartet, he believed “he had to be allowed a free hand to compose what he himself deemed appropriate.” Appropriate or not, the composer also referred, at least on occasion, to the extramusical gifts of his best singer. In the banquet scene toward the end of Don Giovanni, Mozart has Don Giovanni boast repeatedly to Leporello of a “tasty dish” (Keefe’s translation of piatto saporito); here is a hardly veiled reference to Teresa Saporiti, the Italian soprano who sang the role of Donna Anna and was, by all reports, easy on the eyes.
Readers with musical training—not just able to read musical notation, but with an understanding of harmony, counterpoint, and form—will be best equipped to appreciate Mozart in Vienna and to weigh its arguments fairly. Keefe’s writing frequently becomes technical, not just on matters of the music itself but even on subjects like the kind of paper Mozart used and the shade of the ink that appears on a musical score; these and related variables help musicologists determine the date of a composition or the order in which individual parts were written.
Obviously and unfortunately, no recording exists of Mozart’s own performing. This, for Keefe, has the inevitable effect of “[distorting] the lens through which his music is viewed.” Through this distorted lens, listeners today see only the composer; the performer disappears from view. They all too often miss out on the “seamless fluidity” that characterizes the “composition-performance dynamic” of Mozart’s time. Thanks to the miracle of musical notation, at least part of his work has been preserved. This remnant makes listeners long for the “sweet bewitchment” they have missed.
John Check teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri.
