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 [log in to unmask]