Program Notes

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Concerto for Fortepiano No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 In 1781, Mozart went freelance. It wasn’t entirely planned. The composer had been fired by the Archbishop of Salzburg, dismissed with the ‘kick to my arse’ he so enjoyed recalling. Deep down, Mozart knew the change would do him good. He moved to Vienna, where his industry, talent and imagination carried him to success. But so did a hugely popular and fastdeveloping piece of equipment: the piano. As Handel had before him, Mozart cocked an ear towards the slipstream of public taste, and got wise to what his ‘customers’ wanted. What they wanted was piano music played by him. In 1784 alone, Mozart wrote six piano concertos to play at his own subscription concerts in Vienna. Ticket income was healthy, and for a time Mozart was cruising. Then, in 1785, he changed gear. Over the next two years, Mozart significantly reduced his quantitative output of piano concertos but massively increased their depth, expression and architectural imagination in inverse proportion. His concerto numbered 20, written and performed in 1785, got the Viennese talking by dint of its predominating minor key (unusual at the time). All the while, Mozart was taking advantage of the instrument’s increasing capacity for expression and dynamic variance. A year later in 1786, Mozart delivered something similar but without that concerto’s light relief. He unveiled a concerto in C minor that maintains its tragic mood right to the very end. This concerto’s music is emphatically repetitious and anxiously chromatic, and also more ready to devolve its textures down into instrumental groups. It touches upon all twelve notes of the chromatic scale within the first eleven bars of its exposition (there are 88 more still to come). The unusual three-in-a-bar gait, the leaps through awkward ‘seventh’ intervals and the nervous energy all look beyond Classicism’s principles of symmetry and perfection towards something more personal, more Romantic. There is balm (the E flat major Larghetto) and there is humour (the two majorkey diversions among the finale’s set of variations on a sinister dance). There is also a new status for woodwind instruments: in the Larghetto, piano and winds seem to hang on each others words while in the final movement theme and variations, the woodwinds take on the second variation. Otherwise, there can be little doubt that Mozart’s vision for the piano concerto as more than an entertainment has come to full fruition here. The score calls for Mozart’s biggest orchestra yet in a concerto (oboes and clarinets). It carries with it a feeling of grandeur fuelled by defiance, laying groundwork for Beethoven’s concertos and maybe even putting him on to the particular qualities of the key of C minor. The musicologist Wolfgang Rehm has referred to the concerto’s ‘veiled tragedy, suppressed sorrow and ominous tension’.

‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ ... Non temer, amato bene”, K. 505 In the final days of 1786, Mozart was moved to write something deeply personal. Nancy Storace, the singer who had created the part of Susanna in his opera The Marriage of Figaro months earlier, announced her departure for London. In bidding her a musical farewell, Mozart turned to a valedictory text he’d already used for the opera Idomeneo, and set it as an aria ‘for Mlle Storace and me’. The Recitative and Aria Ch’io mi scordi di te? is rather more than both those things. It is effectively an exceptional hybrid of piano

concerto and aria in which pianist and singer are bound in a heartfelt, intimate exchange. There has long been speculation that Mozart wanted more from Storace than good friendship. His aria—words and music—would appear to confess as much. The music starts out full of tenderness, the shapely vocal line alternating with commentary and decoration from the piano, which occasionally joins it in duet. But Mozart soon draws us into a multi-shaded drama in which voice and piano (and orchestra) are inseparably intertwined.

‘Bella mia fiamma, addio’ K. 528 Mozart produced quite a few stand-alone arias throughout his career. They were often written for insertion into operas by other composers, or as test pieces with which the younger, more inexperienced Mozart flexed his dramatic muscles. This example, like its predecessor heard earlier tonight, had a more personal genesis. While his opera Don Giovanni was rehearsed and premiered in Prague in the Autumn of 1787, Mozart stayed with his friend the composer František Xaver Dušek on the outskirts of the city. Dušek’s wife, the soprano Josepha Hambacher, cajoled Mozart into writing this aria for her before he took his leave of their villa, reportedly locking him in a garden pavilion until he had done so. Mozart, always up for a caper, got his revenge. He is alleged to have warned Josepha that she could only take possession of the aria if she could perform it faultlessly at first sight. Not too serious a problem for an experienced singer – until Mozart lined Josepha’s aria with technical traps. One passage in particular finds its way to extraordinary harmonic complexity that was surely designed to challenge a sight-reader (and tease Josepha)—listen out for it on the words ‘Quest’affanno, questo passo è terribile per me.’ The text allowed Mozart this depth of expression. It was borrowed from a libretto by Michele Sarcone already used by one of the composer’s contemporaries (an old method), and recounts an episode from the Proserpina myth in which Titano, commanded to die and leave his beloved, takes his leave for the last time with extreme anguish. It drew intensity and pathos from Mozart. Even when imprisoned in a greenhouse by a friend playing a prank, the composer’s dramatic powers are formidable.

Symphony No 38 in D major K. 504 “Prague” Mozart didn’t just have a good time with the Dušeks; he adored Prague and the city apparently adored him back. The Bohemian capital furnished Mozart with lucrative commissions and welcomed the fruits of those commissions with open arms—offering Mozart all the unqualified admiration and success he’d started to find elusive in Vienna. ‘My Praguers understand me,’ Mozart is reported to have said of his audiences in the city. The composer’s so-called ‘Prague’ symphony has come to represent that mutual fertility, warmth and joy. It actually pre-dates the success of Don Giovanni, and was written in December 1786—at the same time as the piano concerto heard earlier tonight – as a gift to the city as Mozart travelled there to view its production of The Marriage of Figaro. Early in 1787 the symphony was given its first performance at the Prague National Theatre. Mozart returned the respect offered him by Prague’s audiences with an intelligent, profound and witty symphony. Famously lacking a minuet—the most undemanding of symphonic movements—it opens with a statuesque, D-minor gravity that seems to foreshadow Don Giovanni (the opera’s

music might well have been brewing inside Mozart already). This pregnant, straining opening material, which is not heard explicitly again, soon gives way to music of thrilling momentum in which the orchestra is nudged onto new paths by a keen oboe. What follows is music of complex, intimate argument that once again appears to credit the citizens of Prague with keen ears. Mozart plunges his orchestra into a deep discussion of musical ideas, and a forwardlooking symphonic debate emerges rivalled only in Mozart’s output by the later Jupiter symphony. There is contrast and effervescence on the surface, while a consistent undercurrent appears to root the music in place. The rigorous conversation extends to the slow movement. This is a serene exercise for woodwind, horns and strings that possibly owes its text-like pace to the Prague opera swimming around in Mozart’s head. The nimble theme that opens the compelling finale (actually a quote from Figaro) introduces a rhythmic motif that dominates the movement in various adapted forms—by turns sumptuous and perky—while also providing the basis of a witty and spirited conclusion. Mozart pushes the harmonic envelope in this movement with even more exploration of chromatics and dissonance and the most multi-layered web of voices a symphonic structure had yet been forced to sustain. But he also ensures the symphonic circle is formally closed: listen carefully for a subtle recycling of the bass arpeggios that underpinned the symphony’s imposing opening.

Prague, Music and Mozart

Prague was an international city long before San Francisco, London or Berlin. Situated in a position of vital strategic importance on the River Vltava, it fell under the influence and rule of a succession of foreign regimes, most famously the Habsburg dynasty. The Habsburgs established dominance in Prague in the 1600s, when it was capital of the area known as Bohemia. Initially, music had a rough ride under the Habsburgs. On their watch Prague became a provincial rather than imperial capital, leading to an exodus of aristocrats to Vienna (musicians and artist quickly followed). Into the 17th and 18th centuries music did flourish, but it was far from native: imported styles and talents reflecting the traditions of other countries came to dominate musical life. One of those influences was Italian— specifically Italian opera. It grew in popularity among Prague’s aristocrats through the Baroque and into the Classical periods. Without an operatic tradition of its own, Prague once again looked elsewhere for influence and an injection of talent. In 1782 Prague staged Mozart’s German language opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail and, four years later, the Italian-sung The Marriage of Figaro. Both went down a treat, and the composer was invited to Prague to view the latter production. Once there he conducted the symphony written for the city performed tonight. So impressed was the impresario Pasquale Bondini with Mozart that he commissioned an opera from the composer to be completed that same year: Don Giovanni.

Andrew Mellor © 2022

ARPEGGIO A series of notes, played separately but in ascending or descending order, that when sounded simultaneously would form a chord with a specific harmonic function. Arpeggios are sometimes referred to as ‘broken chords.’

DOTTED RHYTHM A rhythmic feature straddling two notes, in which the first note steals half of the second note’s duration, thus shortening it. The label ‘dotted’ comes from the way the feature is notated—with a dot drawn next to the first note to indicate its duration should be increased by half. In Baroque music, slow manifestations of dotted rhythms (often strung together) were used by composers to evoke grandeur—particularly in the genre known as the French Overture.

CHROMATICISM Music that uses ‘chromatic notes’: half notes, or ‘notes between the notes’—most obviously those represented by the black notes on a piano. In the Baroque and Classical eras, chromatic music was rare—used for phraseology, effect and harmonic tension. The bolder the composer, the more their music would tend towards chromaticism.

DISSONANCE A combination of notes that produces discord, not concord. In the Baroque and Classical ears, dissonance might be seen as a harmonic suspension suggesting a particular resolution. In later periods, it took on is own aesthetic value. SINFONIA The Italian word for ‘symphony’, often used in the Baroque and Classical eras to indicate a purely instrumental section or interlude in an otherwise bigger work involving other forces (voices, for example). In the Baroque era, the word could be used to describe what we would understand as an Overture.

OVERTURE Orchestral or instrumental music that traditionally forms an introduction to an opera, ballet or play before the curtain is raised. An Overture may introduce melodies to be heard later in the opera, or simply set the mood or form an instrumental palette-cleanser. In the Baroque, an Overture might be referred to as a ‘Sinfonia’.

LIBRETTO The words to an opera or oratorio, usually written specifically for musical setting by a ‘librettist’.

FUGUE The braiding of a specified tune (or ‘fugue subject’) into an elaborate conversation by different instruments or melodic voices, who introduce the tune at staggered intervals and in different pitches. PASSACAGLIA A piece of music controlled or rooted entirely by a looping bass line played underneath it, often by a single instrument.

CHACONNE Similar to a passacaglia, though controlled by a looping series of implied harmonies, rather than a fixed bass line.

OSTINATO A repeating pattern—often built of a broken chord or ‘arpeggio’— that persists in the manner of a loop. Often an ostinato will accompany a melody above it, but not always.

CANTILENA An Italian word implying lullaby; a song or piece of music with a smooth, song-like melody.

VERSE ANTHEM A form of sacred choral piece that emerged in England in the late 1600s, in which choral statements alternate with elaborate solos from individual singers. Verse anthems were accompanied by organ or stringed instruments.

CONCERTO GROSSO A particular form of multi-movement orchestral work that emerged in the Italian baroque. In a Concerto Grosso, the soloists are also the ensemble, with individual members stepping out to play alone. Exchange, conversation and sharing are vital components of the Concerto Grosso style.

RITORNELLO A phrase or melody that ‘returns’ as a refrain throughout a piece of baroque music—often during a concerto, where it is played by the ensemble and in order to contrast with the more intricate sound of the soloist(s). TRAGÉDIE EN MUSIQUE A genre of French opera pioneered by JeanBaptiste Lully, usually following a plot from classical mythology. At the time of Louis XIV, performances would often include an allegorical prologue extolling the monarch’s virtues.