MOZART
Although Mozart, born twenty-four years later than Haydn, and
therefore belonging to another generation, was under heavy obligations
to his forerunner for technical resources and models of style, his
disadvantage in years was so much more than cancelled by the superior
brightness of his genius that he in his turn was able to exert a
potent influence upon the older man. The two great predecessors of
Beethoven, accordingly, can be understood only when they are considered
as subject to mutual influences, as supplementing each other through
a delicate play of action and reaction. Haydn led the way into the
_terra incognita_, did the rough work of clearing the ground, but it
was Mozart who turned the wilderness into a garden. The chief dates of
the two careers indicate concisely their interaction. Haydn was born in
1732, Mozart in 1756; yet Haydn, although he began writing symphonies
as early as 1759, when Mozart was but four years old, wrote none that
can compare with the younger man’s until 1791, or after Mozart had
written his three great symphonies of 1788. As with the symphony, so
it was with the string quartet. Haydn opened up the way, but Mozart,
outrunning him, became eventually the leader. It was a sort of hare and
tortoise race in which, to the confusion of morality, the hare won.
Both circumstances and endowment fitted Mozart, in this case, for
the rôle of hare. The son of a professional musician, who wisely
directed his early studies, and opened to him in his impressionable
years all the advantages of companionship with musicians and with
people of general cultivation, he came by good fortune into immediate
possession of all the favoring conditions that Haydn had to struggle
up to through years of poverty, neglect, and hard labor. It would be
hard to imagine more dissimilar lots in life. The contrast between the
two men thus externally induced was accentuated by their opposite
characters. Haydn, as we have seen, was an intensely human person,
full of sympathy for the ordinary and yet always appealing emotions
of common humanity, and looking at music largely as a means for their
expression. Mozart, on the contrary, was an artist pure and simple.
His genius was almost completely independent of his character, and
it was by virtue of the former that he was great. His sensitiveness
to the minutest distinctions and gradations in sound, his unerring
instinct for perfection in form, in the smallest as in the largest
instances, his wonderful power to shape a multitude of details into a
breathing organism, his Greek serenity of temper and indifference to
ranges of feeling that might perturb his art--all these things gave
him an incalculable advantage over the plodding Haydn as a master of
the purely artistic side of musical composition. They enabled him to
assimilate instantaneously all that the older man had to teach him of
design, and to become his teacher before he had done with learning from
him. Haydn showed Mozart how to do things; and in return Mozart showed
Haydn how to do them better.
Both men were clearly aware of their obligations to each other. In
the midst of the petty jealousies and the malicious efforts to stir
up ill-feeling which characterized musical Vienna in their day, they
remained warm friends and mutual admirers. Mozart dedicated his six
finest string quartets to Haydn, with the comment: “It was due from me,
for it was from Haydn that I learned how quartets should be written.”
“It was affecting,” says a contemporary observer, “to hear him speak
of the two Haydns or any other of the great masters; one would have
imagined him to be one of their enthusiastic pupils rather than the
all-powerful Mozart.” Haydn’s respect for Mozart was equally profound,
and even more creditable, in that he was older and less appreciated
by the Viennese public than the man he lost no opportunity to praise.
He often asserted that he never heard one of Mozart’s compositions
without learning something from it; and once when “Don Giovanni” was
being discussed he made a period to the argument by saying: “I cannot
decide the questions in dispute, but this I know, that Mozart is the
greatest composer in the world.” Mozart was thus much more than a mere
successor of Haydn in the usual course of musical evolution; he gave
fully as much as he received. His short though full life, moreover,
came to an end eighteen years before Haydn’s more leisurely one; so
that in a purely human as well as an artistic sense, we can look upon
him, in relation to Haydn, as a sort of brilliant younger brother.
Johann Chrysostum Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart, generally known to the
world as Wolfgang Amadeus[33] Mozart, was born at Salzburg, a small
town southwest of Vienna, in Austria-Hungary, on January 27, 1756.
His father was Leopold Mozart, a professional musician of excellent
abilities, court-composer to the Archbishop of Salzburg, and author of
a School for the Violin which in its day was known throughout Europe.
He was a devoted father, and although there has been some difference
of opinion as to his character, it is certain that he spared no pains
in the education of his son, which he considered the chief business of
his life. He has been charged with penuriousness, with narrowness and
bigotry, and with having forced his son to be a prodigy for the sake
of gain; but there is no evidence that he ever acted unconscientiously,
and the very thoroughness and almost mechanical regularity of the
training he gave Wolfgang were invaluable in laying the foundations of
his remarkable technique.
Under his father’s careful tutelage the young Wolfgang, together with
his sister Maria Anna, who was almost equally precocious, advanced
rapidly in music. When he was but three he picked out simple chords at
the piano; at four he played minuets and other short pieces; and at
five he composed them. His early compositions were carefully copied
out in a sketch-book, at first by his father and later by himself, and
dated; so that we have documentary evidence that they were actually
written by him at an almost incredibly early age. The first, dictated
when he was five years old, is a Minuet and Trio.
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XIV.
MOZART’S FIRST COMPOSITION. MINUET, WITH TRIO.]
In this childlike but well-organized piece is shown already a perfect
mastery of the simple three-part song-form which is, as we have seen,
the structural embryo of the sonata. Both minuet and trio consist
of (a) an eight-measure sentence, cadencing in the dominant, or
contrasted tonal centre, (b) a four-measure clause of contrast, and
(c) a four-measure clause echoing the last half of the first sentence,
and closing in the home-key. Thus both halves of the piece, and the
entire piece, as a whole, illustrate the fundamental principles of
musical design in a very consummate way. All this, however, Mozart
might have done simply by careful observation and imitation of methods
familiar to all contemporary composers. What is therefore even more
remarkable in such early work is the variety of detail that he manages
to introduce. In view of the fact, which we shall later find very
significant, that his skill as an artist lay largely in his command
over _variety_ of effect (while Haydn’s consisted more in the salient
unity of his composition), it is exceedingly interesting to note
that, at five years old, Mozart uses so complex a device as shifted
rhythm[34] in the manipulation of his motif. In the fifth measure of
the minuet, namely, he writes his motif on the second and third beats,
thus producing a very charming effect of cross-accentuation. It is also
noticeable that in so short a piece as this we find triplets (measures
7 and 15) and groups of sixteenth notes (in the trio), obviously
introduced for the sake of rhythmic diversity.
Even greater ingenuity, of a similar sort, is shown in a piece which he
composed in March, 1762. The theme runs like this:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XV.]
How many composers, whether aged six or sixty, would have spontaneously
thought of so charming an arrangement of the phrases, which we may
symbolize with the letters A B B A C C? Most minds would have traveled
the old time-honored rut, writing A B A B in something like this
fashion:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XVI.]
But Mozart knew how to compose. Nor does his ingenuity fail him when in
the last section of the piece he wishes, while repeating the essence
of his idea, to reach the tonic instead of the dominant key. Simply
dropping out the second A-phrase, he writes:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XVII.]
and the trick is done. It was by a steadily broader application of
principles such as are here illustrated that he gradually became so
marvelously skilful in composition.
Concerning the extraordinary physical delicacy of the young Mozart’s
ear there are many stories, some of which are probably true. He is
said to have fainted on hearing a trumpet. According to Schachtner, an
intimate friend of the Mozarts, he was able to perceive an interval of
pitch so small as the eighth of a tone. The story is that Wolfgang was
allowed to play one day on Schachtner’s violin, which he called, on
account of its full, rich tone, “Butter-fiddle.” “Herr Schachtner,” he
announced a few days later, “your violin is half a quarter of a tone
lower than mine; that is, if it is tuned as it was when I played it
last.” The violin was brought out, and proved, Schachtner says, to be
pitched as the boy had stated. As Schachtner, trained in literature by
Jesuits, had the literary man’s instinct for effective statement, it
is necessary to discount such tales a little; but the extraordinary
delicacy of Mozart’s ear is sufficiently proved. For that matter, it
needs no proof; so keen a sense of design would have been impossible
to him had he lacked the requisite physical basis of accurate
perception and discrimination of tones.
The first twenty-five years of Mozart’s life were spent largely in
professional tours, as a piano virtuoso, with intermittent periods
at home in Salzburg devoted to study and composition. Appearing as a
boy-prodigy when he was only six years old, before he was twenty-five
he had made five extended and uniformly successful tours. He appeared
in most of the larger German and Italian cities, as well as in
Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, everywhere giving new proofs
of the quickness, elasticity, and certainty of his musical powers.
In Paris, when eight years old, he “accompanied a lady in an Italian
air without seeing the music, supplying the harmony for the passage
which was to follow from that which he had just heard. This could not
be done without some mistakes, but when the song was ended he begged
the lady to sing it again, played the accompaniment and the melody
itself with perfect correctness, and repeated it ten times, altering
the character of the accompaniment for each.”[35] “On a melody being
dictated to him, he supplied the bass and the parts without using the
clavier at all.”[36] In Rome, when fourteen years old, after hearing
Allegri’s Miserere sung in the Papal chapel by a nine-part chorus, he
went home and copied out from memory the entire work. A few mistakes
were corrected after a second hearing. Such feats as this bespeak a
mastery of the technique of pure music even more remarkable, and far
more important, than his so much talked of skill as a performer on the
piano, organ, and violin. Had music not become to him in early youth a
natural language, a second mother-tongue, he could never have learned,
in his manhood, to manipulate it with such extraordinary freedom,
ingenuity, and power.
In the intervals of his travels, Mozart had to spend his time in
Salzburg, a town almost intolerably uncongenial. It was a dull,
provincial place, the butt of innumerable sarcasms. There was a saying:
“He who comes to Salzburg becomes in the first year stupid, in the
second idiotic, and in the third a true Salzburger;” and Mozart, in
whom taste and experience wrought together to make provincialism
odious, was never tired of telling of a Salzburgian who complained
that he could not judge Paris satisfactorily, “as the houses were too
high and shut off the horizon.” “I detest Salzburg and everything that
is born in it,” he wrote; “the tone and the manners of the people are
utterly insupportable.” Such a place would have been distasteful enough
to the gay and highly social temperament of Mozart even had he had
no responsibilities there; but it was his position of music-director
to the Archbishop of Salzburg, with the dependence it involved, that
finally exhausted his patience. Hieronymus, who became Archbishop in
1772, was a man famed for his churlishness and arrogant, bullying ways.
He made his poor music-director’s life a burden; he treated him as a
hireling, made him eat with the servants, and called him contemptuous
names, such as “Fex,” “Lump,” “Lausbube.” Mozart, driven to
desperation, finally applied for his discharge. Receiving no attention,
he went in person to press the matter, and was then actually thrown
from the Archbishop’s ante-room by a petty official. This insult marked
the end of his galling relation with his patron. From 1781 until his
death he lived in Vienna, picking up a scanty livelihood by teaching
and giving concerts.
His situation, after this open rupture with the system of patronage
which was the only solid dependence of the eighteenth-century composer,
was most precarious. The Viennese public was notoriously fickle towards
even the most popular pianists and teachers, while the number of
educated people who could be depended upon to buy serious compositions
was small, and publishers were consequently unable to pay composers
so well as they could in Beethoven’s day. To make matters worse,
Mozart was careless in money affairs, luxurious in his tastes, and
so weakly amiable that he would at any time give a friend his last
kreutzer. We cannot, then, be surprised that when Leopold Mozart, who
was naturally cautious, conservative, and worldly, heard that his
son had taken lodgings with a certain Madame Weber, in Vienna, and
fallen in love with her daughter Constanze, he summarily commanded
him to break off the affair. Mozart respectfully but firmly refused
to deprive Constanze, whose position in the house of her shiftless
and half-drunken mother had aroused his pity, of the benefit of his
friendship; and as his father had foreseen, this friendship rapidly
deepened into love.
Leopold Mozart for a long time stubbornly withheld his consent to the
marriage; but at last, overborne by his son’s persistence and by the
intercession of friends, he gave the pair a reluctant blessing. They
were married August 4, 1782. The sequel proved that both father and
son were justified in their opinions. The Mozart ménage was truly most
erratic. Husband and wife were equally improvident and unmethodical.
They were always poor, frequently in actual want. On the other hand,
as Wolfgang had hoped, Constanze’s virtues as a comrade compensated
for her deficiencies as a housekeeper, and their congeniality of
temperament made them contented in the midst of disorder, poverty, and
care. There is a story that a friend, calling on them one cold winter
morning, found them waltzing together, and was told that, as they had
no fuel, they were keeping warm in that way. The incident is typical of
their existence--irresponsible, haphazard, and yet on the whole happy.
The remaining events of Mozart’s short life, from his marriage
in 1782 to his death in 1791, were all artistic events--works
composed--standing out luminous against a dark background of poverty,
struggle, and pain. His three great operas were written during this
time. “The Marriage of Figaro” was first produced at Vienna in 1786;
“Don Giovanni” at Prague, in 1787; and “The Magic Flute” at Vienna,
in the year of Mozart’s death. In the realm of absolute music Mozart
was equally productive all through this period. The six great string
quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782, 1783, and 1784. The three
quartets written for Frederick William II of Prussia were composed in
the spring of 1790. The four greatest string quintets were written
in 1787, 1790, and 1791. Finally, the three finest and maturest
symphonies, works which will endure as long as music does, were all
written within two months in the summer of 1788. His last work was the
famous Requiem, begun in July, 1791. His strong constitution was now
beginning to give way under the long strain of poverty and unceasing
mental labor, and he gradually became haunted by the idea that he was
writing this Requiem for himself. He grew morbid and gloomy, but
continued to work with feverish energy. The last evening of his life
he looked at his unfinished score with tears in his eyes, saying, “Did
I not say I was writing the Requiem for myself?” And later, when he
became delirious, he was still busy with the Requiem, imagining it
played, and blowing out his cheeks to imitate the trumpets. He died
quietly on the evening of December 5, 1791, having accomplished an
enduring work in thirty-five laborious, brilliant, and painful years.
This story of Mozart’s last ten years is undoubtedly one of the
strangest pages of musical biography. The contrast between his external
and his internal life is so violent, so startling, that we rub our eyes
involuntarily, wondering if the facts as we know them can be true. And
indeed we can believe in them only when we assume that his mind was
independent of its environment to a degree uncommon even with genius.
Mozart seems to have been a dual person, to have lived two lives at
once; outwardly hounded by creditors, worn with the most prostrating
and debasing anxiety, forgetting his cares only in a dissipation that
was as squalid as they, he was all the time pursuing his artistic
ideals with the highest success, and with the serenity of complete
mastership. In his nature it was not even a step from the ridiculous to
the sublime--the two extremes coexisted and interlaced.
The case of Mozart is in fact an eloquent human proof of the truth of
Schopenhauer’s theory that pure music is a world by itself, parallel
with the actual world of ordinary experience but independent of it. The
plastic artist works in materials familiar to his ordinary experience;
he puts in his pictures or statues the men, women, animals, trees,
and other physical objects that he sees about him daily. Not so the
musician. He deals with ideas that have no existence outside of his
art; and he therefore constantly keeps up in his mind two independent
trains of thought, coexistent but unrelated. That Mozart, whose purely
musical genius was perhaps the brightest and most complete that ever
existed, habitually lived this double mental life, there are many
evidences. His sister-in-law described him as follows: “He was always
good-humored, but thoughtful even in his best moods, looking one
straight in the face, and always speaking with reflection, whether
the talk was grave or gay; and yet he seemed always to be carrying on
a deeper train of thought. Even when he was washing his hands in the
morning, he never stood still, but walked up and down the room humming,
and buried in thought. At table he would often twist up a corner of the
table-cloth, and rub his upper lip with it, without appearing in the
least to know what he was doing, and he sometimes made extraordinary
grimaces with his mouth. His hands and feet were in continual motion,
and he was always strumming on something--his hat, his watch-fob, the
table, the chairs, as if they were the clavier.” Other contemporaries
have recorded that he carried on this musical thought while having
his hair dressed, while bowling or playing billiards, while talking
or joking, and even, wonderful to say, while listening to other
music that did not especially interest him. “The greater industry of
his later years,” said his wife, “was merely apparent, because he
wrote down more. He was always working in his head, his mind was in
constant motion, and one may say that he never ceased composing.”
Lange, his brother-in-law, observed that “when he was engaged on his
most important works he took more than his usual share in any light
or jesting talk that was going on.” When his wife was confined of her
first child he was working on the second of the quartets dedicated to
Haydn; he brought his table to her room, and frequently rose to cheer
or comfort her in her pain, without apparently interrupting his train
of thought. On the evening before the day set for the first performance
of “Don Giovanni,” the overture was still unwritten, though Mozart
doubtless had it perfectly clear in his mind. He sat up most of the
night copying it out, his wife meantime plying him with punch and with
stories to keep him awake; and by seven in the morning it was complete.
When he sends his sister a prelude and fugue he apologizes for the
prelude being copied after the fugue instead of before it. “The reason
was,” he adds, “that I had already composed the fugue, and wrote it
down while I was thinking out the prelude.”
It is necessary to bear constantly in mind this independence, activity,
and self-sufficiency of Mozart’s musical thought-processes, if we would
at all understand the paradox of his personality. Mozart the man, and
Mozart the musician, were two beings. The man, when all is said, and
in spite of many endearing traits, was disappointingly commonplace.
Although he was a good linguist, and fond, as a boy, of mathematics,
he was intellectually undistinguished. His letters are rather
conventional, he kept no journal, he read little, and though he said a
sharp or clever thing now and then his conversation was not remarkable.
Emotionally he was also not unusual. Amiable, generous, and honorable,
he was rather lacking in will-power, rather immature and unformed.
His mental attitude and his conduct in the world were curiously
childlike. He was even unable to care for his own person; his wife
attended to his clothes and cut up his meat at table. In money
matters he was not a child, but a baby. Only six months after his
marriage he began a long course of borrowing, in small sums, from
friends and relatives, and he became later a familiar figure to the
Viennese pawnbrokers and usurers. To make matters worse, he was so
kind-hearted that he could not endure the sight of suffering when he
had money to relieve it. The result was that he gave away freely what
he had borrowed with difficulty, and sunk daily deeper in the morass
of hopeless debt. His dealings with Albert Stadler, an excellent
clarinetist and a wholly unreliable man, will serve as a specimen of
his guilelessness. Being asked by Stadler for a loan of fifty ducats,
he gave him instead two valuable watches to place in pawn, on the
understanding that he should redeem them in due time. Of course Stadler
did nothing about it; whereupon Mozart gave him the fifty ducats,
together with interest, so that he might redeem the watches. Stadler
kept the money. And what is more remarkable, Mozart seems to have
cordially forgiven him, and later to have made him further loans.
Mozart’s high spirits were unquenchable. A tireless jester, a
graceful dancer, a good hand at billiards, clever as an impromptu
poet of doggerel verses and as a deviser of practical jokes, he
found in society the relaxation he needed from the severe mental
concentration of composing; and there is no doubt that he gave himself
up to conviviality and to frivolous amours more than would to-day be
considered becoming. His fondness for wine and punch were generally
known, and he himself confessed to his wife that he was not always
faithful to her. But it must be remembered that in pleasure-loving
Vienna, in the eighteenth century, manners were lax, and that Mozart,
although by his very sensitiveness peculiarly subject to temptation,
was never grossly or habitually vicious. His failings were those of
a high-spirited, vivacious, ardent temperament, combined with an
amiable, but not a profound character. There was no depravity in him,
but there was at the same time little moral or mental elevation. His
humor, which bubbled forth unceasingly, was of the flavor of the comic
papers and of tavern horse-play. He used to make his friend Leutgeb, a
horn-player, submit to mock penances as the price of concertos for his
instrument. Once the penalty was to collect all the orchestral parts
from the floor, where Mozart threw them as they were copied; another
time it was to sit behind the stove until the piece was written. The
score of one of these concertos bears the inscription: “Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart takes pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and simpleton, at
Vienna, March 27, 1783.” Another is written in black, red, blue, and
green ink. Mozart was fond of writing, to original doggerel words,
for performance by gatherings of his friends, comic canons, in which
the curious duality of his nature is strikingly illustrated. The words
were colloquial, full of slang, and often coarse; the music, written in
one of the most severe of contrapuntal forms, was always gracious and
consummately wrought as only Mozart knew how to make it. His musical
humor reaches its acme in the “Musikalische Spass,” or, as he himself
called it, the “Peasants’ Symphony,” for string quartet and two horns.
This is nothing less than a parody of the kind of work that Mozart was
constantly producing in all seriousness--a Divertimento in regular
form, but supposed to be written by a tyro and played by amateurs. The
horns come in pompously with wrong notes; the first violin, ascending
a long scale, goes half a tone too high; at the end, in the midst of
a fanfare in F-major by the horns, the string instruments strike in
each in a different key. “The attempt after thematic elaboration,”
says Jahn, “is very ludicrous; it is as though the composer had heard
of such a thing, and strove to imitate it in a few phrases, greatly to
his own satisfaction. The art is most remarkable whereby the pretended
ignorance never becomes wearisome, and the audience is kept in suspense
throughout.”
Thus at every turn are we impressed with that wondrous inspiration and
skill as an artist which were so curiously combined in Mozart with
lack of distinction as a man. Even Haydn, for all his normality and
usualness of emotion, had a certain human quaintness and sweetness
for which we miss any analogue in Mozart. Yet when we shift the point
of view, and study the artists rather than the men, it is Mozart who
stands out as the more interesting figure. As we saw in the last
chapter, Haydn’s power as an artist depended chiefly on the trenchancy
and practical grasp of his mind, by which he was enabled to crystallize
into forms of salient unity the motifs, phrases, and sections of his
music. System is the key-note of his work; he was an organizer, both
by natural faculty, and in obedience to the needs of his time. And he
had the defects of his merits, in a certain monotony, angularity, and
cut-and-dried precision. Mozart, on the contrary, even in his earliest
pieces, already cited, showed a more flexible artistic technique; and
beginning where Haydn left off, he was able to carry the same sort of
organization into a higher stage, combining with the unity of the
whole a much greater diversity in the parts. Variety is as notable in
Mozart’s work as unity in Haydn’s. His art is more subtle, and not a
whit less solid.
In the first place as regards the themes themselves, Mozart’s are
longer and more complex than Haydn’s. It is hard to imagine Haydn
disposing his phrases with the ingenuity and mental grasp shown by the
melody in Figure XV., written when Mozart was only six years old. The
characteristic of this melody is that the phrases are not immediately
repeated, thereby balancing in the most obvious way, but alternated
with apparent whimsicality, which, however, eventually issues in order.
This is even more conspicuously shown by the following theme from
Mozart’s great G-minor Quintet:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XVIII.]
Here a broad and perfectly poised melody is evolved from
two simple motifs by a deftly managed accretion. The effect reminds one
of Beethoven; Haydn could scarcely have conceived it.
In harmony Mozart is more venturesome than his predecessor. His
harmonic structure, while no less clear than Haydn’s, is less bald,
less obvious. In the fifth of the quartets dedicated to Haydn, for
example, in A-major, there is an early and pronounced modulation
to C-major; after which the second theme comes in regularly in the
dominant key. The effect of this insistence on a comparatively
distant key is to blur slightly the contour of the form, and to
prevent any possible sense of triteness. In the Finale of the third
quartet, Mozart, after ending his first part strongly in C-major,
jumps suddenly, quite without warning, to an emphatic chord of D-flat
major,--a device by which we are irresistibly reminded of the complete
shifts of tonality at the beginning of the coda of the first movement
of the “Eroica” Symphony. Perhaps the most brilliant stroke of genius
in harmonic conception that Mozart ever made, however, is the famous
passage introducing the C-major Quartet. It runs as follows:
[Music: score]
[Illustration: FIGURE XIX.
INTRODUCTION TO MOZART’S C-MAJOR QUARTET.]
It was to passages of this kind (though even Mozart could not write
many equalling it in supernal beauty and mystery of effect) that he
owed his reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism among the pedants of
the time. A musical connoisseur of Vienna is said to have torn up the
instrumental parts of these quartets in his anger at finding that “the
discords played by the musicians were really in the parts”; the parts
were also returned from Italy as being “full of printer’s errors”;
and even so good a musician as Fétis undertook to “correct” this very
Introduction. Thus to scandalize the conservative is ever the effect of
the daring, novel, and unprecedented conceptions of genius.
Mozart’s rhythms, again, are much more various than Haydn’s. The
characteristic figures of his themes are apt to be strongly contrasted,
whereas Haydn’s generally bear a family resemblance to one another.
Take, for example, the themes of the first movement of Mozart’s String
Quintet in G-minor. The first is a simple series of eighth-notes:
[Music: score]
[Illustration]
The second is more resilient and individual:
[Music: score]
[Illustration]
The third, or conclusion-passage, is of a most strongly marked
character:
[Illustration]
[Music: score]
Not only do these figures contrast well as they appear successively,
but Mozart knows how to combine them in a very intricate web. When the
third one enters in the 'cello, the second violin and viola toss back
and forth the first, the second viola plays a slow sustaining part in
quarter and half-notes, and the first violin has a racing counterpoint
in sixteenth-notes. All this means life, variety, interest. And as for
the question of diversity in phrase-structure, it is only necessary
to compare the Minuet of Mozart’s G-minor Symphony, with its odd
three-measure phrases and its wide climactic stretches of melody, with
the square-cut Minuet of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, to gain a vivid
idea of the younger composer’s superiority in rhythmic life.
In the general construction of his works, moreover, Mozart is more
skillful than Haydn. Haydn’s transitions from theme to theme are
frequently conventional to a degree--passages of scales or arpeggios
unrelated to the thematic material, and therefore mechanical in effect.
Mozart, whose melodic fecundity was limitless, is much more apt to
write new, subsidiary melodies for his transitions; and though such
passages lacked the fine economy of Beethoven’s carefully wrought
transitions, founded on the themes themselves, yet they were far more
vital than Haydn’s empty formulas. When it came to the working out
of the themes, in the “development section” of the sonata, Mozart
again had Haydn at a disadvantage, owing to his greater contrapuntal
technique, the result of early study, and to the superior native logic
of his mind. Haydn’s development sections are apt to sound perfunctory;
worked out more by rule of thumb than by spontaneous fancy, they hold
together imperfectly, and seem fragmentary and artificial. Mozart’s are
more fluent, more sequacious, and more inevitable. Mozart is thus in
all respects a more subtle artist than Haydn.
In expression, the prevailing quality of Mozart’s work is a clear
serenity, an indescribable joyfulness and starry beauty, the natural
result of his artistic perfection. In spite of a deep and mordant
passion that he undoubtedly voices at times, as in the G-minor Quintet
and in portions of the quartets and the G-minor Symphony, in spite of
the breadth and heroism of such movements as the Andante of the E-flat
Quartet and the Finale of the Jupiter Symphony, and in spite of the
mystic vagueness and aspiration of that marvellous Introduction to the
C-major Quartet, which stamps him as an idealist, at least _in posse_,
his general tone is pagan, unsophisticated, naïve. He not only lacks
the self-consciousness, the tragic intensity, and the fierce, virile
logic of Beethoven; he lacks the genial, peasant humanity of Haydn.
There is an aloofness, a detachment, a rarefied purity, about his
music, that makes it difficult to describe in terms of human feeling.
It has the irresponsible perfection, the untarnished lustre, not to be
dimmed by human tears, of the best Greek art.
Every attempt that has been made to describe in words the differences
between the music of Mozart and that of his great successor, Beethoven,
has necessarily failed. The matter is too subtle for literary
description. Yet Henry Frédéric Amiel, with his usual marvelous
perceptiveness, wrote in his journal, after hearing quartets by the two
masters, a passage that must be quoted here. It at least suggests their
characteristics with an unerring insight:
“Mozart--,” writes Amiel, “grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and
precision of style,--an exquisite and aristocratic beauty,--serenity
of soul,--the health and talent of the master, both on a level with
his genius; Beethoven, more pathetic, more passionate, more torn with
feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect, more the slave
of his genius, more carried away by his fancy or his passion, more
moving and more sublime than Mozart. Mozart refreshes you, like the
‘Dialogues’ of Plato; he respects you, reveals to you your strength,
gives you freedom and balance. Beethoven seizes upon you; he is more
tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more disinterested and poetical.
Mozart is more Greek, and Beethoven more Christian. One is serene, the
other serious. The first is stronger than destiny, because he takes
life less profoundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared
to measure himself against deeper sorrows. His talent is not always
equal to his genius, and pathos is his dominant feature, as perfection
is that of Mozart. In Mozart the balance of the whole is perfect, and
art triumphs. In Beethoven feeling governs everything, and emotion
troubles his art in proportion as it deepens it.”
While the contrast here so well brought out is perhaps slightly
over-stated, it is certain that between Mozart and Beethoven comes
the gap between the serene childhood and the serious and thoroughly
awakened maturity of secular music. Even in the earliest works of
Beethoven, obviously modelled as they are in the forms and idioms made
common property by his forerunners, there is a virility, a profundity,
an intensity of spiritual ardor, for which we look in vain in Haydn and
Mozart. In him the idealism which with them was instinctive arrives at
self-consciousness. He is founded securely upon them, but he carries
music to higher issues than it was in their happier and simpler natures
to imagine. In leaving Mozart, therefore, we leave the preparatory
stage of the art of pure music, to pass into the stage in which it
realized its promises and accomplished its mission.
FOOTNOTES:
[33] Amadeus is the Latin form of the Greek name Theophilus. The German
form, Gottlieb, was also sometimes used.
[34] See page 147.
[35] Jahn’s Life of Mozart, English trans., I., 37.
[36] Jahn’s Life of Mozart, English trans., I., 37.