II
Mozart’s keyboard music is astonishingly different from Haydn’s. Because both men have fallen into the obscurity of the same shadow, one is likely to speak of them as if both were but a part of one whole. The differences between them are not merely matters of detail. In fact they may resemble each other more in detail than in general qualities. The spirit of Mozart’s music is wholly different from the spirit of Haydn’s. If with Haydn we may associate a frank good nature and something of the peasant’s sturdiness, in Mozart’s music we have to do with something far more subtle, far more graceful, and almost wholly elusive. It has been said of Mozart’s music that its inherent vitality is all-sufficient to a listener. In other words, there is neither any need nor any desire to interpret it, either in terms of another art or as an expression or a symbol of human emotion. It is perhaps unique in being sheer sound and nothing else. It is the thinnest gossamer spun between our ears and stillness. It is of all music the most ethereal, the most spiritual, one might almost say the least audible.
His life was utterly different from Haydn’s. To begin with, he was twenty-four years younger. He was most carefully and rigorously trained in his art, from infancy, by his father and by the greatest musicians in the world, whom he met on his triumphant tours over Europe. As a child he was all but adored in Vienna, in all the great cities of Italy, in London, in Paris, and in Brussels. As a youth fortune began to forsake him. He was not so much neglected as unappreciated. He was underpaid, harassed by debt. He was without an established position, chiefly apparently because in the nature of things he could not be but young. He died at last in Vienna, in more or less miserable circumstances, at the age of thirty-five. Thus a life could end that in early years had been the marvellous delight of nearly a whole world.
He was always a virtuoso as well as a composer. He played the violin excellently; he played the piano as no man in his time could play it and as perhaps no man has played it since. His playing was not so much distinguished by brilliance as by beauty. The quality of his tone was of that kind which once heard can never be forgotten. It haunted the minds of men long after he was dead. Even the memory of it brought tears.
His compositions give only a slight idea of what the range of his playing was. He seems to have moved people most at times when he improvised. This he would often do in public, according to the custom of the day; but in private, too, he would often go to his piano and pour his soul out hour after hour through the night in improvised music of strange and unusual power. Something of the quality of these outpourings seems to have been preserved in the fantasia in C minor. The sonatas and rondos have little of it. Neither have the concertos. Franz Niemetschek, one of his most devoted friends and author of the first of his biographies, said, as an old man, that if he dared ask the Almighty for one more earthly joy, it would be that he might once again before he died hear Mozart improvise. The improvisations of Beethoven, marvellous as they were, never took just the place of Mozart’s in the minds of those who had been privileged to hear the younger man as well.
Mozart did not compose his piano music at the piano, as Schumann and Chopin did. The improvisations were not remembered later and put down in form upon paper. They seem to have been something apart from his composing. He wrote music away from the piano, at his desk, as most people write letters—in the words of his wife. Most of the sonatas, too, were written for the benefit of pupils. Few of them make actually trying demands upon technical brilliance. Their great difficulty is more than technical, or than what is commonly regarded as technical—strength, velocity, and endurance. Yet no music more instantly lays bare any lack of evenness or any stiffness in the fingers. Mozart cared little for a brilliant style. His opinion of Clementi has already been mentioned. He preferred rather a moderate than an extremely rapid tempo, condemned severely any inaccuracy or carelessness, likewise any lack of clearness in rhythm. But, above all, he laid emphasis on a beautiful and singing quality of tone.
His avoidance rather than cultivation of brilliancy alone makes his music often suggest the harpsichord. There is an absence of the technical devices then new, which have since become thoroughly associated with the pianoforte style. Yet from 1777 Mozart devoted himself to the pianoforte. An instrument made especially for him, which he invariably used in his many concerts in Vienna, has been preserved. The keyboard has a range of five octaves, from the F below the bass staff to the F above the treble staff. The action is very light, the tone rather sharp and strong. It can be damped, or softened, by means of a stop which pulls a strip of felt into position between the strings and the hammers.
Concerning the pianoforte sonatas it may be said again that few depart from a normal, prevailing mood. Some are exceptional. Knowing his great gift of improvising and how rich and varied his improvisations were, it is perhaps a temptation to read into them more definite emotions than are really implied. Yet it is easy to pick from the later sonatas at least three which not only differ considerably from the earlier sonatas, but differ likewise from each other. Nevertheless, two or three traits are common to them all. They mark Mozart’s sonatas distinctly from Haydn’s and, indeed, from all other sonatas.
First, there is rare melodiousness about them all. The quality of the melodies is hard to analyze. There is little savor of the folk-song, as there is in many of Haydn’s melodies. They are not so clearly cut, not, in a way, of such solid stuff. Neither, on the other hand, have they a peculiar germinating vigor which we associate with Beethoven. They seem to spin themselves as the music moves along. The movements seem to flow rather than grow. Mozart was none the less a great contrapuntist, one of the greatest among composers. But his music seems strangely to pass through counterpoint, not to be built up of it. It has therefore a quality of litheness or supple flexibility which distinguishes it from that of other composers and gives it a preëminent grace. In this regard it is akin only to the music of Couperin and Chopin.
In the second place, the harmonic coloring is subtle and suggestive. His music seems to play about harmonies rather than with them. The simplest chords and modulations have a sort of shimmer. An instance in orchestral music comes to mind—the second themes in both the first and last movements of the inspired symphony in G minor, particularly the treatment of the second theme in the restatement section of the last movement. The effect is due largely to the chromatic half-steps through which his melodies glide, noticeably into cadences, and to the same chromatic hovering about tonic, dominant and subdominant chords. Oftener than not the fine thread of his melody only grazes the notes proper to its harmony, touching just above or below them in swift, light dissonances. Frequently the harmonic foundation is of the simplest kind. Modulations to remote keys or vague drifting of the whole harmonic fabric, such as one finds, for instance, in the first pages of the Fantasia in C minor, are rare. Usually the harmonic foundation is astonishingly simple. It is the wholly charming unwillingness of the melodies to be flatly chained to it that gives the whole such an elusive color.
There is a wealth of passing notes, of anticipations and suspensions, of every device which may aid melody to belie its unavoidable relations to harmony. These take from most of his pianoforte music all trace of commonplaceness. Most of it has a graceful distinction which we may call style. Take even the opening theme of the great sonata in A minor. The nature of the theme is bold and declamatory; yet the very first note avoids an unequivocal allegiance to the harmony by a D-sharp. Or observe in the last movement of the sonata in C minor (K. 457) how the short phrases of the melody not only anticipate the harmony in beginning, but delay acknowledging it again and again.
In the third place, the scoring of Mozart’s sonatas is usually lighter than that of Haydn’s. We have to do with a finer set of fingers, for one thing, which are unexcelled in lightness and sweetness of touch, fingers which prefer to suggest oftener than to declaim. The treatment of inner voices is more airy. One thinks again of Couperin and even more of Chopin. There is a better understanding of pianoforte effects, not effects of brilliance but of delicate sonority combined with grace. The last movement of the sonata in A minor just mentioned, is a masterpiece of style, and yet for the most part is hardly more than a whisper of sound. The passage work in the last movement of a beautiful sonata in F major (K. 332), the chord figures of the Piu allegro section of the Fantasia, even the F-sharp minor section of the familiar Alla Turca are the work of a man with an unusually fine sense of what fitted the pianoforte. Mozart also expected more of the left hand than Haydn expected. In all his pianoforte music there is more delicacy than there is in Haydn’s, more sophistication, too, if you will. It is more difficult to play.
Of the many sonatas, rondos and fantasias only a few may be discussed in detail. Three sonatas written before Mozart settled in Vienna, in 1781, are very fine. These are in A minor (K. 310), in A major (K. 331) and in F major (K. 332). That in A minor was written in 1778. The first movement is more stentorian than Mozart’s music usually is. It is dominated by a strong rhythmical motive throughout, used with fiery effect in the development section over a series of rumbling pedal points. There is something assertive and martial about it, like the ring of trumpets over a great confusion. The second theme seems to be but an expression of energy in more civilian strain. It is perilously near virtuoso stuff; but the movement as a whole is splendid by reason of its force. It is Mozart in a very unusual mood, however.
The second movement is a picture in music, according to Mozart himself, of a charming little girl, who has ‘a staid manner and a great deal of sense for her age.’ Yet something of the boldness of the first movement still lingers. The mood is beautifully lyrical and poetic, the style, however, very free and broad. It lacks the intimate tenderness of most of Mozart’s slow movements. The last movement is magical. The fine, delicate scoring, the short phrases, as it were breathless, the beautiful shifting of harmonies, the constantly restless unvaried movement, weave a texture of music that must make us ever wonder at the nature of the mysterious, elusive spirit that whispers all but unheard behind so much of Mozart’s music.
The sonata in F major and that in A major were written the following year, and are of strikingly different character, both speaking of the Mozart whose playing was long remembered for its quality of heart-melting tenderness. Unlike the first movement of the A minor sonata, the first movement of the F major is full of a variety of themes and motives. It is rather lyrical in character. The first theme has a song-like nature; and a beautiful measure or two of folk-song melody makes itself heard in the transition to the second theme, which is again lyrical. The development section opens with still another melody. There is an oft-repeated shifting from high register to low. The whole is wrapped in a veil of poetry. The slow middle movement is unexcelled among all slow movements for purity of style, for perfection of form, for refinement, but also tenderness of sentiment; and the last movement flows like a brook through Rondo Field. One cannot choose one movement from the others as being more beautiful either in spirit or workmanship; and the three together compose one of the flawless sonatas of pianoforte literature.
The more familiar sonata in A major is more irregular. It has, by the way, no movement in the triplex form. The first is an air and variations. It has long been a favorite with amateur and connoisseur alike. The naïve beauty of the air is irresistible. The variations throw many traits of Mozart’s style into prominence, particularly in the first and fifth, his love of entwining his harmonies, so to speak, with shadows and passing notes. The scoring of the fourth is wonderfully beautiful. The sixth is perhaps unworthy to follow the fifth. After the almost inevitable monotony of the variation form, it is perhaps to be regretted that the second movement, a minuet, continues the key of the first. The movement itself is of great charm. The trio is happily in D major. One would be glad to have it in any key, so exquisite and perfect is its beauty. The last movement, a rondo alla Turca, takes up the key of A again. That it is in minor, not major, hardly suffices to break the monotony of tonality which may threaten the interest of the sonata as a whole. The rondo is engagingly jocund, but more ordinary than Mozart is elsewhere likely to allow himself to be.
Two later sonatas have a more serious allure than these earlier ones. That in C minor (K. 457), composed in 1784, is commonly considered his greatest sonata. Why such a distinction should be insisted upon, it is difficult to see. The C minor sonata is more weighty than the others, but is it for that reason greater? Must music to be great, hint of the tragic struggles of the soul? Such is the merit often ascribed to this sonata, as if there were no true greatness in a smile. Without setting up a standard of the great and the trivial in music, we may grant that the work has a compelling force. Let us not liken it to Beethoven. It still has the charm of which only Mozart was the master, that charm which remains one of the intangible, inexplicable things in music.
A sonata in F major (K. 533) was composed in 1788. The whole work is characterized by a possibly too prominent contrapuntal ingenuity. There is besides a boldness in harmonies, especially in the slow movement, which makes one wonder into what strange lands Mozart strayed when he sat improvising at the keyboard.
The sonatas as a whole rest, as we have said, upon a harmonic foundation which is relatively simple. The great Fantasia in C minor differs from them in this regard more than in any other. If, as Otto Jahn suggested in his ‘Life of Mozart,’ this fantasia may offer us some suggestion of what Mozart’s improvisations were like, we may be sure that such outpourings wandered into harmonies rich and strange.
The fantasia was composed in 1785, the year after the C minor sonata, to which it was at one time thought to have been intended as an introductory movement. An earlier fantasia in D minor is fragmentary. It ends abruptly and leaves an impression of incompleteness on the mind of the listener. The C minor fantasia is without definite form, but the return of the opening motive at the end gives it a logical balance. It divides itself into five or six sections. The tempo is not very fast in any one of them, but there is an uneasy current of unrest running under the whole.
It would be foolish to attempt an analysis of what may be its emotional content. It calls for no such analysis, but stands as another instance of the strange power Mozart’s music has to satisfy of itself alone. It must remain, like his other work, mysterious and of secret origin. Only one section is given a key-signature. The others are without harmonic limitation. Perhaps the opening section, and the brief part of it repeated at the end, are the most impressive. The motive out of which they are built is of unfathomable significance; their harmonies rise and fall as slowly and mysteriously as the tide. Of the quality of other more melodious sections, of the occasional charm and grace that here and there rise, as it were, on the wings of light; of the passionate harmonies that die away into silence before the slow opening motive returns inexorably, nothing can be said. There comes over it in memory the light that never was on land or sea. It is a poet’s dream.