Ulvi Yurtsever wrote:

>Examples of what I have in mind of Mozart's ups and downs are the
>last mvmnt of the G minor string quintet, where an absolutely gorgeous
>introduction leads to utterly vacuous music (but it's melodious allright)
>which really doesn't belong with the three great movements that precede
>it, the last mvmnt of the D minor piano concerto, where a particularly
>frivolous new theme tears into the otherwise tight fabric of the musical
>argument, and other examples I can go dig up for you if you want.

Maybe you can dig up other examples, but these are surely the two standard
cases when charging Mozart with a certain sort of unevenness.  But it seems
to me that there is some confusion here.  There are at least two things
that can be meant in calling a composer's work "uneven": the term can
refer to compositional quality (in which uneven production suggests that
some works are much better than others) and inappropriate juxtaposition (in
which uneven production suggests that elements differing in, say, mood or
emotional depth are placed together).  Ulvi might mean both of these in the
cases of the D minor concerto and the G minor quintet, but I think he'd be
on firmer ground in applying the term "uneven" in the latter sense than in
applying it in the former.  And I suspect that some have been reading the
charge of "wild unevenness" in the former sense.

And I'm not even sure that the latter sense ("inappropriate juxtaposition")
is really suitable here.  I have a hunch that when we have that reaction,
we're responding to a definite aesthetic that in the intervening years has
come to seem alien.  Surely these last movements are not failed attempts
to sustain the mood of the earlier ones.  (That would be uneven in my first
sense.) Mozart has no trouble maintaining serious, even grim, moods when he
wants.  (Witness the C minor piano concerto and the G minor symphony.) The
effect in the former works is perhaps closer to the final sextet (?) in
DON GIOVANNI, which has also been criticized as being inappropriately
light.  It's not a breakdown of craftsmanship that we observe here; rather,
there is a brightening of the concluding spirit that has come (since
Romanticism?) to seem unsuitable.  (And the fact that Mozart himself staged
DON GIOVANNI in Vienna without the concluding sextet complicates the issue
further.)

Then, of course, there are Tovey's remarks about the conclusion of the G
minor quintet: after the mournful introduction, the music says, "That is
all, my children: the rest is too sad for you."

Nick
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