Nick Perovich replied:

>Felix Delbruck wrote a number of things that I agree with.  He also wrote
>the following (in a variety of ways--I reproduce only one of them)

I know I'm repeating myself. It's damned hard to generalize about someone
like Mozart, and I hoped that by attacking what I wanted to say from several
angles, the more likely it would be that I would cumulatively hit the nail
on the head.

>Insofar as I am inclined to interpret Mozart and Beethoven in non-musical
>terms (i.e., not in the terms of formal musical analysis), it is largely
>through the emotions their works seem to me to express.  (If by
>"non-musical," Felix means something closer to the "storm" and
>"battlefield" images he uses elsewhere than to the expression of emotions,
>I apologize.)

I'm myself not quite sure what I mean - the words 'storm' and 'battle'
are crude and melodramatic, of course, but what I think I meant was (and
I'm saying the same thing again) that in Beethoven not just individual
moments, but also the structural parts of the music - the bridge passages
and cadences and so on - work to produce a unified psychological narrative.
As Rosen said, the 'conventional' parts, the elements of sonata form and
so on, are put at the service of psychological development.  When I listen
to Mozart I don't always get that as clearly - the musical development is
still partly an end in itself.  You had this reaction to Haydn, where the
themes are musical actors in a musical drama, rather than psychological
themes in a psychological drama, if you see what I mean (that, I think,
defines my distinction between 'musical' and 'non-musical' rather more
accurately - references to theoretical analysis may have been a red
herring).  I'd agree with you that Haydn is even more strongly 'abstract'
in this sense than Mozart.  To me, Mozart sits on the fence between Haydn
and mature Beethoven, and that makes him so difficult to pin down for me.

Of course, much of this may be the result of overly literal performances.
A few days ago, I got the Quatuor Mosaiques' recording of the G major and
D minor quartets dedicated to Haydn.  I enjoyed many individual parts
very much and thought they were psychologically penetrating.  But the QM
insisted on taking the main theme in the recapitulation in exactly the
same mood and dynamics as at the beginning.  I therefore had the feeling
- especially in the D minor - that the psychological tensions of the
development weren't properly followed through into the recapitulation:
the spell was broken, we were back at square one.  The recapitulation was
a musical 'homecoming', but the psychological potential of what had come
before wasn't fulfilled.  How explicit are the performance markings in the
Mozart quartets? They might sound much more 'direct' if performers had the
courage to play recurring sections differently in the light of the
transformed musical context.

(But you're right about Figaro - I don't hear any parody in its serious
sections either.)

Felix Delbruck
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