Donald Satz wrote:
>A few list members have seemed frustrated and bewildered as to Mozart's
>high level of popularity in the classical music community. Being a Mozart
>fan, I've been giving this some thought over the past two days. Why is he
>so popular? And I've thought in terms of linking strong Mozart musical
>traits to what most folks seem to want in their music.
>
>My conclusions are:
>
>1. Most listeners look for and want melodies in the music they listen
>to. As postings on another thread have shown, there are many other musical
>features besides melody, but they pale in importance with the majority of
>listeners.
>
>2. I know of no composer who could churn out as many great melodies within
>a small musical time frame as Mozart (the melody man).
>
>3. Most listeners also want "upbeat" music; they want to be entertained,
>and who better to do this than Mozart whose music has a very high
>entertainment quotient.
>
>4. One additional trait which I think puts Mozart at the top of the
>"upbeat melody" category is how expertly he develops melodies and links
>them to one another in a work. The flow is astounding.
It's all true but, meaning no offense, it seems to hit the nail right on
the thumb.
It should hardly be necessary on this list to point out that there's
more to Mozart than catchy tunes. It's how they're presented. It's the
instrumentation. (Hear, e.g., the wind and the string quintet versions of
his Serenade in c minor. Opinions may vary, of course but Mozart's Clarinet
Quintet and Oboe Quartet sound to me as though the ensembles for which
they were written were naturally dedicated to each other while their
lovely successors by Brahms and Nielsen and the concertos by Strauss and
Vaughn Williams sound like pieces written for the wind instrument suitably
complemented.) It's (forgive this musical illiterate's possibly incorrect
choice of terms) his harmonies, his modulations, his syncopations. (Just
listen, for example, to the slow movement to his Jupiter Symphony, where
he changes to a minor key and presents us with a paroxysmic series of
syncopations which comes as close as anything that I can think of to a
brave child's holding back its tears.) Every Mozart lover comes back to
his g minor Quintet K. 516. If after hearing that, a listener still fails
to appreciate Moazrt as a composer whose genius transcends a facility to
write catchy tunes, I can only repeat the comment of a famous jazz musician
asked by a lady to explain it to her: "Lady, if I gotta explain it, you
ain't never gonna understand."
All this having been said, Mozart's melodies are more than catchy tunes.
*Amadeus*, often condemned as presenting a totally misleading story of
Mozart, has an episode which, even if fictitious, illustrates something
about Mozart's tune crafting. He acknowledges a pretty, if somewhat banal,
tune written in his honor by (boo! hiss!) Salieri, damns it w/ faint
praise, and proceeds by a nip and a tuck here and a rearrangement there, to
come up w/ the totally delightful and original and anything but banal "Non
piu andrai" from *Figaro*. Somebody once described genius as the ability
to make the unexpected appear inevitable in retrospect. Remembering now
how "inevitable" some of Mozart's melodies sound, and forgetting that we've
been hearing them for all our musical lives, it's hard to realize how
"unexpected" they were when first heard.
I realize that preaching Mozart on this list is almost like preaching
Christianity to a combined session of cardinals and Marxists. Either
because they need not be, or will not be convinced, nobody is. And friends
of mine, on this list and off, have indicated that for this reason they're
no longer wasting their energies on his defense. 'Tis a shame, because
they could do it so much better than I. But lest their silence be
interpreted as an absence of disagreement, I thought these comments of
mine to be not altogether inappropriate.
Finally, to thwart if I can reply volleys where no shot was fired, I yield
to no person in my admiration for Haydn and his compositions.
Walter Meyer
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