Saving Mozart from his Devotees

This morning I had a yen to explore my favorite Mozart symphony (#39 in E-flat, K. 543) and took a few CDs off the shelf to do a little "comparative listening." As usual with performances of this and the other mature Mozart symphonies, pleasure was soon tempered with annoyance: why, of all the major composers' symphonic works, are Mozart's consistently the most misconstrued? Listen to almost any recording of K. 543 from the 1970s or earlier, and to many of more recent vintage: you will hear the opening  Adagio (marked in common time, four beats to the bar) distorted with a grandiose, funereal pace: a dismal snooze-fest with 8 long, draggy beats per insufferable measure. Wouldn't even a cursory glance at the score suggest that the 32nd-note figure that makes its first appearance in measure 2 should be related to the same figure that appears in 16th notes throughout the main body of the movement, including at the very end? Well apparently, that never occurred to such "great" Mozart conductors as Beecham, Walter, Klemperer, Böhm, Colin Davis, and could I go on! Or take the second movement (please!) if you're going to conduct it in a lethargic four beats per measure when Mozart clearly marks it  andante con moto in two. By the way, it sounds lovely in two, but when did you ever hear it done that way before the advent of the "period instrument movement?" (Wait, they'll get theirs later!) Let's not even talk about the minuet, most always at a tempo that the Gramophone Magazine would describe as "elephantine," thus unfairly defaming elephants everywhere. The finale typically went better in older performances, usually at an idiomatic tempo, occasionally a bit too fast. 

I can hear some of my fellow old-timers protest, "But surely whatever disagreements you have about the tempos in these well-loved historic performances, you can't deny the patrician elegance of Beecham, the humanity and warmth of Walter, the monumentality of Klemperer." Uh, actually, I can: I think all three of those estimable conductors got Mozart dead wrong, at least in the late symphonies, and got him wrong in a way that is a much more dramatic betrayal of the composer's conception than similar lugubrious tempos in mainstream performances of Haydn and Beethoven from the same decades. 

Whether unwittingly or not, the kinds of performances I am describing (the ones that all Mozart lovers over the age of 45 grew up with) reinforced the ingrained concept of Mozart the angelic Raphael of composers, divorced from the baser passions of humanity. Even after Peter Shaffer's badly written and eye-rollingly didactic  Amadeus introduced into the popular imagination the suspicion that maybe Mozart was a filthy little degenerate in his personal life, the music-loving public swallowed hard and decided that this only made the contrast to the unearthly perfection of his music more of a wonder. From my earliest exposure to Mozart, I found these caricatures of his supposed social and musical personalities a shrieking bore; gradually I came to see that they formed an elaborate myth. Or, if you prefer, a big lie: one that served to neuter his music and render it decorative and harmless, and therefore more easily consumed by audiences who want to appreciate and applaud nothing more challenging than their own concepts of good taste.

In the late 1970s and early 80s the "original instrument" brigade, tiring of their erstwhile diet of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, decided that their quest for musical lebensraum found its logical next step in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. First Christopher Hogwood, then in quick succession Roger Norrington, Franz Brüggen, John Eliot Gardiner, Nicolaus Harnoncourt and many others began recording and performing late 18th century music with an eye towards recreating the sound and style of the works as they were originally performed. I don't care to go into the whole debate about whether they succeeded, or whether such goals are even attainable. (Read Richard Taruskin's Text & Act to immerse yourself in that kerfuffle.) To me, all of these performances were a basic step in the right direction, if solely on the basis of a relative respect for tempos that bore some resemblance to Mozart's markings and an honest directness of phrasing that escaped the portentious, fart-sniffing turgidity of the older generation. Or to put it more simply, suddenly the Andante con moto of the 39th didn't suck: one heard the equivalent of a lithe and supple young woman moving at an elegant yet purposeful gait, not some arthritic dowager toddling around a croquet field. Suddenly, minuets whirled and danced with one elegant pulse per measure instead of three mincing galumphs. Suddenly, measure 2 of the first movement of K. 543 bore some relation to the identical scalar passage that closes the movement. "Aha!" one exclaimed.

But the "earlier-than-thou" crusaders couldn't leave well enough alone, and along with the bathwater of lugubrious tempi, they managed to jettison the baby in the form of common sense about a completely different aspect: repeats. There's always been a lot of debate about those sections of symphonic works which composers enclose in repeat marks. Are the repeats optional or mandatory? Were they practical devices to aid the audience in its first hearing of a piece, or are they essential structural components which must be observed in any cogent realization? I've never bought the argument that repeats are no longer necessary because we know the works at hand so much better. In the case of a masterpiece like Haydn's Symphony #52 in C minor, it's probably not true that most of us know it well, so we'd better hear that exposition repeat in the first movement. And even if we're talking about one of the last three Mozart symphonies, well, somebody in the audience is hearing it for the first time: it's as new to that person as it was to people at the premiere.

I take a militantly pragmatic attitude towards repeats: if the performance is compelling, I want to hear the repeatable passages again; if it's a bore, better to skip them and get it over with. (This is a variation on the Or-Better-Still-Silence-Principle, as originally coined by my friend Will Crutchfield.) Like most listeners, I was familiar with the repeat debate principally as it applied to first-movement (and sometimes last-movement) exposition sections, and certain sectional repeats in middle movements. But the authenticists managed to assert their absolutism about repeats and apply it where one had traditionally (and, I shall argue, with good reason) never heard it before: to the development and recapitulation sections of finales. 

I don't have room in this already overlong post to go into the history of sonata form and how it grew out of simple binary form, but there are plenty of good discussions of the subject to be found in music history textbooks and on the internet. The point is that by the time we reach Mozart's late masterpieces, the final movement of a symphony had become a fully-worked through sonata allegro structure, usually briefer than that of the first movement, with fewer subsidiary theme groups and a shorter development section, but a sonata allegro nonetheless. Yes, Mozart places repeat marks around the second halves of these final movements, but I would argue that this is merely a structural vestige of the finale's original binary form. To observe these repeats in performance is to commit an act of not only musical but emotional redundancy, and anyone (including the composer) who wants to hear a development and recapitulation repeated is usually onto a bad idea. 

Here's why: compare a sonata allegro movement to a joke: in many jokes, the setup is something that happens twice in one way, and then is varied the third time to achieve an unexpected payoff. (These three guys walk into a bar...these three nuns die and go to heaven...a rabbi, a minister and a priest are on a sinking ship...that last one's my favorite!) The setup of the joke depends on the regularity established in the first two events, and these are analogous to the repeated exposition in music. The elaboration of the third event and the outcome (punch-line) are similarly analogous to the development/recapitulation section. If you repeat the development and recapitulation you are in effect repeating the last episode of the joke. People who tell jokes and repeat the punch-lines, either because they think their listeners didn't get it, or because they crave the few extra seconds of attention, are generally considered tiresome. Conductors who insist on these written but unnecessary repeats invariably produce performances that, whatever their other virtues, end on a similarly tiresome note.

The Argument

That is to say, "argument" in the sense of "summary," "gist," "précis," "synopsis". OK, first of all, why "Whole Note Rest?" I spent more than a few hours searching for the perfect title for my blog, and discovered that...er, they've all been taken. I thought of a few titles that sounded variously: bossy ("Try Listening"); literary ("Brandy of the Damned" -- Shaw's definition of music in "Man and Superman"); self-aggrandizing ("Tharp on Music"); paradoxical ("The Listening Voice"); overly personal and in-jokey ("Or Better Still, Silence"); and excessively whimsical ("Wake Up and Smell the Music"). Alright, there are probably worse blog titles out there. But still...

I needed a title that would suggest the perspectives of both a performer and a listener, since I am emphatically both, and both points of view inform my outlook on music. "Whole Note Rest" came to me, like many of what seem (at least at the time) to be my best ideas, while I was running around the lake in the Parque 3 de Febrero near my home in the Palermo neighborhood in Buenos Aires.

At the simplest level, "Whole Note Rest" encapsulates a situation in which a singer does some of his most intense listening: during the introduction to a song or aria, or during the orchestral interludes and vocal interjections or arias of one's fellow artists in an opera or oratorio. Well, one hopes that we listen, rather than just waiting to sing! Many of my colleagues claim not to have much interest in music apart from their performing activities, but I was a music nut long before I became a singer, and I've managed to keep my love of listening alive during my career. So "Whole Note Rest" is that place for me that encompasses both doing and listening, or the alternation of the two.

A rest may also come in the form of a gran pausa, a silence that follows the music and is part of it, as it is part of the music that follows. So the title also suggests that place of silence, still part of the process of music, which gives punctuation and contrast to the notes and phrases sounded: it may fill us with awe or make us nervous, it may provoke annoying/amusing situations if someone in the audience starts to applaud in the "wrong place" or if a performer (usually a trombone or a tenor) doesn't cut off, or it may stand for the silence out of which all music emerges and to which all sound returns. Maybe that's a good starting place for thinking about music, even if putting it into words is still a slippery endeavor. (Steve Martin: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.")

Hey,"Dancing About Architecture" -- what a great title for a blog. Rats, already taken, several times! Anyway, welcome to my blog. For my British friends, a whole note rest is what you call a "semibreve rest," but I'm not going there! And for any fastidious types out there who prefer "whole rest" and find the phrase redundant with that extra word "note," I send you a big raspberry! Merry Christmas!