Ulvi Yurtsever wrote:

>...  melodic invention is only one aspect, and not really that decisive
>of greatness.  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...

Realizing that my entering a musical discussion w/ Ulvi, Don, Nick, or
Steve can only serve to dilute it, I feel nevertheless constrained to add
my own two cents to the comments on the final movement of the g minor
quintet and what I think is the "frivolous theme" referred to in the final
movement to the d minor piano concerto.

I've never considered the final movement to the g minor out of place after
the music that has preceded it.  I had not previously heard Tovey's take
on it, quoted by Nick ("That is all, my children: the rest is too sad for
you") and I'm pleased to see how close my hearing of it was to his.  For me
the final movement was a case of Mozart feeling that the weeping had worn
itself out (as it must in all who are mentally healthy) and that it was now
time for a tentative, timid, venture into the cheerful.  I've also heard
the movement as a parent's or loved one's consolation, understanding the
grief from the earlier movements and assuring us that it's going to be
all right.  It's not intended to be an ode to joy and its attendant
intoxication.  And perhaps because it is the outgrowth of hesitancy and
perhaps even guilt at presuming possibly premature therapeutic joy, some
may find it vacuous in comparison.  I don't.  Nor do I expect to be
changing the minds of those who do.

I hope I'm recognizing what is being referred to as the "frivoulous theme"
in the final movement to the d minor concerto.  I assume it the one that
could be sung to the words,

   "Oh, that naughty theme,
    Naughty theme,
    Naughty, naughty theme!
    Oh, that naughty theme;
    How it spoils the movement!"

(I hope my apparent frivolity will be pardoned by the folk for whom this
is serious business.  Actually, I'm quite serious too.)

While the introductory passage to the concerto might be described as
ominous or foreboding, I never considered that concerto as particularly
tragic even though it's in a minor key.  I've always listened to it as a
piece of absolute music, w/ a stormy first movement followed by a tranquil
second movement and the frivolity-stained third.  I could say that the
offending theme is no more out of place than the hurdy-gurdy fragment just
before the end of Bartok's Fifth Quartet, but some might find that scant
justification.

After the tempestuous first movement, and the delicately poignant second,
the last movement risks being anticlimactic, like IMO, the final movement
to Mozart's c minor concerto.

To me, the so called "frivolous" theme seems an organic outgrowth of the
preceding passage that could have been to the following words:

   "Is THIS...
    How I'll
    Finish
    Out this
    Movement...?"

Which of course it isn't.  I think the theme in question is an inspired
flavoring to that movement's earlier themes, down to their almost parodied
recapitulation in the winds at the very end.

Walter Meyer