Yet, if he loves coming back, how he also loves to wander away! I hadn’t bothered with the first movement of this concerto, but it unfolds a wild and complex development section-that region where the music seems to be going for a bit of a tonal stroll-as he experimentally cycles through different keys, speedily trying them on and discarding them like the acquisitive dandy he was, at the average rate of about one key every two bars.īeethoven and Mozart are the composers most mansioned in myth contemporary scholarship has worked hard to blow these palaces down without evicting the presiding geniuses. To that cadence, the most formulaic of all in classical music, Mozart was almost fanatically drawn, and particularly to the rising journey of his basses up to the tonic again and again in his work, he finds different ways to ornament the rightness of this homecoming. Perhaps, then, it is the perfection of this beauty that moves me, with no specific emotion expressed by the notes themselves? The music surges romantically in a falling cascade but is actually stepping with deliberation toward the tidy inevitability of its so-called perfect cadence. Is the Larghetto mournful, really? Or does it enact something more paradoxical than that-a kind of proud dismay? That passage still provokes my tears, but they are not of grief so much as of gratitude, tears while smiling. But I am struck now by what I chose not to hear. (It would be embarrassing to mention which pop songs of that era performed a similar function, although, of all composers, Mozart, the machinist of popular arias, would likely be the most forgiving.) It’s a moving sequence, and I’m still unable to hear that crush of notes without emotion. I dropped the stylus onto the same grooves again and again, and the passage was shimmeringly installed in my mind, to play at will. A few minutes later, toward the end of the movement, Mozart returns to the same sequence, this time giving the arpeggiated run to the pianist, surely aware that this twining filigree was the real beauty, holding together all the other assembled beauties. Suddenly, what had seemed formulaic is beautiful almost beyond bearing. But then! Mozart, ruler of repetition, brings back the cadence, now with the second violins doing a gorgeous arpeggiated run underneath and then he brings it back a third time, enriched now by surging mixtures of woodwind and horns. It’s pretty and restrained, reminiscent of Handel. For a moment, the sound is a little boilerplate-a stately cadence unfolds, violins trilling as the basses make their moves up through A-flat and B-flat on their way back to the tonic of E-flat. Thirty or so bars in, the piano finishes this first tune, and the orchestra bursts into a loud tutti. Insistent, too, because we will hear it ten times in this short movement. It sounds stark, exposed, almost tentative. The piano opens the movement on its own, a four-bar melody of mournful beauty. But the slow movement, the Larghetto, that was what I needed. The third movement was a dance, a 6/8 romp. I discounted the first movement, with its gracious and sprightly tunes, the piano scampering around the orchestral parts with the usual firm joy of Mozart-far too happy for me. We had an LP of the concerto (I don’t recall the pianist, but it wasn’t Curzon, an intensely self-critical performer who didn’t release a version in his lifetime), and I started listening to it. Curzon had studied with Artur Schnabel and Wanda Landowska, and, above all, Curzon was English, and in those days you could feel almost patriotic about famous English musicians. My father collected pianists and their performances. I didn’t know the piece, but I knew about Curzon. My father, a man who in later life would think nothing of driving forty miles on his own to hear Bach or Beethoven, had recently seen the English pianist Clifford Curzon in concert, playing Mozart’s last piano concerto, No. I was thirteen, fundamentally cheerful but convinced I was fundamentally melancholy, and ravenous for all the music I could get my hands on, especially music that made me tearful. At some point in the autumn of 1979, I became obsessed with a few bars of Mozart. Music has its seasons, and people have their needs.
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