Mozart to the Rescue!

"Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them?"
   ~ Robert Schumann

"In my dreams of Heaven, I always see the great Masters gathered in a huge hall in which they all reside. Only Mozart has his own suite."
   ~ Victor Borge

"Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it-that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed."
   ~ Albert Einstein

Take it from these authorities, Mozart is the standard by which all composers are judged. Profound simplicity, simple complexity. You don’t know this until you have heard other composers and how they fall short of, or laughably overshoot, Mozart’s example. The Knoxville Symphony will be playing his Overture to Idomeneo, Violin Concerto No. 4 in D, A Musical Joke, and Symphony No. 31, Paris on Thursday and Friday nights, November 14 and 15 at the Tennessee Theatre. Violinist Lara St. John will be the soloist for the Concerto.

In Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Mozart is written into the story as a part of the Magic Theater, a venue in which a saxophone player, Pablo, experiences the fantasies that exist in his mind. Mozart says to (the protagonist) Harry Haller, “Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption but it will take him all his time.... Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted.” [I know this will raise the hackles of some Brahms freaks].... “Thick instrumentation was in any case neither Brahms’ or Wagner’s failing. It was the fault of their time.”

Composers in Mozart’s day were governed by strict rules which governed phrase lengths, scoring, and keys into which they could venture, given any specific beginning key. A lot of the humor in the Musical Joke is subtle and derived from the abandonment of these rules. By the time neo-classical composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Casella were composing, it was understood that those rules would be routinely broken. The results were just as comic, but about 150 years too late. Mozart got the jump on them. There are some horn notes in the Minuet that will elicit belly-laughs, (hopefully not from the hornists themselves), as will the cadenza of the third movement Adagio cantabile, and the entire Presto finale. As for the closing three chords... Katy bar the door.