Klarinet Archive - Posting 000118.txt from 2003/10

From: Dan Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Lying awake early in the morning
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 12:31:12 -0400

Mark Charette wrote:

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Nancy Buckman [mailto:eefer@-----.net]
>>
>>At 09:17 AM 10/5/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>>
>>>The savant might say "You have destroyed the music by pruning too much."
>>>
>>
>>>And who was it who said Mozart wrote too many notes.......?
>>
>>
> "The Emperor Joseph II's famous comment on Mozart's first Viennese opera Die
> Entfuhrung aus dem Serail ('Too many notes, my dear Mozart, and too
> beautiful for our ears') is probably apocryphal. But the alleged royal
> critique does point to a recurrent problem in Mozart's music for
> eighteenth-century listeners. The richness, intricacy and emotional
> ambivalence, especially in the works from the mid-1780s onwards, that so
> delight us today were often simply bewildering to his contemporaries.
> Reviewing the six string quartets dedicated to Haydn, the writer in Cramer's
> Magazin der Musik 9 complained that they were 'too highly seasoned - and
> whose palette can endure that for long?'."
>
> WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
> Piano Quartets (Hyperion)
> Excerpts from the sleeve notes by Richard Wigmore (c)2003

One of the difficulties in listening to Mozart is that he is on the far
side of the great change that took place in music beginning with early
Beethoven and continuing to this day, namely Romanticism.

Without commenting on relative beauty (which is an impossibility
anyway), the confusion lies in the fact that Romantic music paints while
Classical music speaks. Most players are attuned to music that creates
a mood by its painting of one, and presume that such is the function of
Mozart's music. But it is not and many performers and listeners are
disappointed by his music failing to paint such a mood.

That listeners may find that there are "too many words" in a work of
Mozart is exactly correct. They don't care for either the quantity of
speech, its detail, or what it says, preferring to have a mood picture
painted for them; i.e., Beethoven's 6th, for example, an exquisite
example of a picture created by music.

So the use of terms like "too many words" shows what people from the
classical period listened for. It's a very good description.

Dan

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**Dan Leeson **
**leeson0@-----.net **
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