Whatever Mozart does, he, like Raphael, to whom he has been compared, is always beautiful. He is sunny and fresh and smiling, clear and delightful. His melodies, moreover, are like a never-failing spring,—they flow from an inexhaustible source.
Stendhal wrote in 1808:
“Like Raphael, Mozart embraced his art in its whole extent. Raphael appears to have been unacquainted with one thing only,—the mode of painting figures on a ceiling in contracted proportion, or what is termed foreshortening. As for Mozart, I am not aware of any department in which he has not excelled: operas, symphonies, songs, airs for dancing,—he is great in everything. The most remarkable circumstance in his music, independently of the genius displayed in it, is the novel way in which he employs the Orchestra, especially the wind instruments. He draws surprising effects from the flute, an instrument of which Cimarosa hardly ever made any use. He enriches the accompaniment with all the beauties of the finest symphonies.”
MOZART
By Cignaroli
What did Mozart do towards the development of our modern Orchestra? The question is easily answered. Mozart gave the Orchestra tone-color.
We have seen that Bach’s Orchestra and Handel’s Orchestra were both neutral in tint; or, if we prefer, black and white. The instruments all played their separate parts, but their individual voices had as yet hardly been discovered. It is true that Bach and Handel had written solo parts for various instruments, but, as a general thing, the melodies could be sung by one instrument as well as any other. But Mozart had very different ideas regarding instruments. To him a violin was a violin, a flute was a flute, a bassoon was a bassoon and a clarinet was a clarinet. Each instrument had to speak for itself and with its own true voice, or tone-color. Mozart originated what we may call an orchestral palette.
We have all seen a painter’s palette, with the colors arranged in groups of reds and blues and greens, and so on, in their different gradations, or shades. Mozart’s orchestral palette was arranged similarly, only instead of paints he grouped his instruments—his strings, his woodwind, his brass—as he pleased; and he mixed these tone-colors or conspicuously exhibited one of these splendid hues, keeping the others subordinate as an accompaniment.
We all know that light—perfectly white light—can be divided into the seven colors of the rainbow and that all the manifold and varied tints that we see in the world of nature—in sky and earth and sea—in every flower and every fleeting hue that falls upon it—comes from those seven colors. Now Bach and Handel and all the other composers who lived before Mozart had never thought of music as anything but white, so to speak. It was Mozart who broke up this white light into its prismatic hues. It was Mozart who brought the new beauty of color into music.