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Music Notes: Arnold Rosner's critique of Mozart
By
David Amos
SAN
DIEGO—In
my last column, I wrote on the virtues of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and on the
nearly universal and common belief that he was
one of the greatest composers who ever lived.
But,
there are many others, people of great musical knowledge, experience and
intellect who do not agree. For them, Mozart is hardly great,
and at best an aberration of serious musical values. One of these people is a
composer that I greatly admire. Arnold Rosner is also a teacher of high
regard. His many intensely personal and emotional compositions have been
performed and recorded on both sides of the Atlantic to critical acclaim.
I have invited him to write this column with his possibly controversial, but
sincere perspective on “the other side of the coin.”
Rosner
tends to write in a more technical music language than I normally use in this
column, but read on and absorb the spirit of his arguments.
He titles it The Bicycle Pump:
*
*
In
the 36 years in which I have taught music survey, or appreciation sections to
liberal arts students I have always said: “All I want from you is that
you allow music to address any and all aspects of the human condition.” These
students’ prior acquaintance with classical music generally begins and
ends in the single digits of age when they watched cartoons; many of them now
require heavy rock accompaniments and charismatic, lean, slightly scary
artists to take music seriously. Or they may tolerate tragedy in a movie;
suspense and tension on TV. A few others, however, “get it” and I do the
best
I can with them.
But in the Classical era of music history, even the composers fail to meet my
condition. Inheriting an already sparse choice of two principal scales,
95% of the time they choose the brighter and lighter major; minor is too serious
for them. The music mainly is heard by the aristocratic few, helping them
forget what they are doing to the impoverished and overworked many. It is
no coincidence that the brief life of Mozart spans the years of both the
American and French Revolutions. Someday we may all teach that the principal
gift of the Classical period is the codification of sonata form, symphonies,
and so forth, making a transition between the dynamic (and contrapuntally
driven) Baroque period and the expressive (and structurally driven) Romantic
period.
Do
I dislike them all — Boccherini, Gluck, Haydn, early Beethoven? Yes, I do. But
Mozart deserves a special place. It is not true that he is the worst
of all composers; his prodigious technical skills developed by age six.
Sometimes it is not so great to be a prodigy — I often feel his emotional and
dramatic palette is set at the same age. Rather, he is the most overrated
composer of them all. The difference between the (mediocre) quality of his music
and the (celestial) reverence he is accorded is a gulf simply beyond belief.
There
are those who have told me: “Wait ‘till your 40s, when you’ve lost people
close to you, suffered disappointments in life, fully matured. Then you’ll
see the melancholy in almost every phrase.” I am 60, and I’m still waiting.
And they have told me: “Just listen to those fantastic minor-key fugues,
Laudate Pueri from the K.339 Vespers,
Kyrie from the C Minor Mass.”
Those would be very impressive examples if I hadn’t also heard the
counterpoint
of one J.S. Bach, of whose works Mozart’s constitute A-minus student
imitations. (The MAJOR-key multi-subject fugue in the finale of the Jupiter
Symphony DOES impress, however).
And
they told me: “Listen to the pieces, usually in minor, where you can hear a
contained smoldering prefiguring of the Romantic era.” Those excerpts do
indeed exist, but they actually are the most convincing passages of the fact
that the emperor has no clothes, as Mozart always follows them with silly
kid-stuff. It is like topping off a fresh-herb veal scallopine with Ready Whip.
For reasons of space, I will refer only to examples in D Minor.
The quartet in that key has a remarkable minuet with dark counterpoint and some
unexpected harmonic connections. But the “B” section is major-tonality,
broken-chord fluff — barely even a recognizable theme, but just what would be
accompaniment, much less anything of substance. In the outer movements
of the 20th Piano Concerto
we do hear music that anticipates a composer like Schumann much of the way. But
at the end Mozart cheers us up (in my
opinion lets us down) by asking the first trumpeter of the orchestra to play,
innumerable times, a simple figure delineating a D Major chord, six fast A’s,
then one each F# and D. A friend of mine once played that part in a concert.
After the concert, he and I went for pizza and every time he went for a swig
of beer, I made him laugh by humming “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Bum-Bum.” The poor
guy might have gotten down three good sips.
But
the worst is the Requiem. Commanding
opening — one of the better Neo-Bach fugues, ending with a surprising open
fifth, and a stormy Dies Irae
(which I rather find a tempest in a teapot, but that’s not the point). Now
comes perhaps the worst few minutes of music ever written. The aria Tuba
Mirum presents (loudly, but that doesn’t help) the solo voice in a melody
that would be better a lullaby. The obligato part is a solo trombone; surely
Mozart did not think that just the choice of instrument was enough for the
fearful day-of-judgment words. But indeed he writes dominant 7th
arpeggios,
graceful and gentle, and the poor trombonist sounds less like the trumpet of
doom or wrath, and more like a pump refilling the tires of a bicycle with air.
See
if you don’t agree. When you’ve been to your umpteenth Mozart concert this
year, and already are scratching your head about the mystique, take out
your CD of the Requiem, any
performance will do (we know you own one), and with an open mind, ear and heart,
ignoring all standard wisdom and
listening afresh, play the bicycle pump — oops, I mean the Tuba
Mirum. See if you don’t laugh out loud. See if you don’t say:
“Goodness, is this the icon
we have worshipped for one quarter of a millennium?”
I
bet that is exactly how you will react; I’ll stake my own reputation as a
composer on it.