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MOZART 101

With Classical 101, Amazon.com's expert editors introduce music fans to key composers and performers, important stylistic movements, and milestone recordings in the history of classical music. In this mailing, editor Robert Levine offers an introduction to the piano concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), a master of the theater of emotions.

Opera in Disguise

Aside from playing billiards and telling dirty jokes, composing operas was the most satisfying thing in the world for Mozart. It's easy to see why. Opera is the theater of emotions, and Mozart loved to portray emotion in music. He also loved the challenge of suiting his music to the action onstage, so that a listener could visualize what was happening just by listening.

In fact, Mozart loved to compose this way in his instrumental works as well, particularly in his piano concertos. Each one is virtually an opera in disguise--with witty, incisively characterized exchanges between the piano and the orchestra, beautiful slow movements patterned after arias of love (the slow movement of No. 21 was used rapturously and unforgettably in the 1967 film "Elvira Madigan"), and, with few exceptions, vivacious, bubbly finales. In terms of their expressive content, the piano concertos are a microcosm of Mozart's world.

Take the opening of that same concerto. As Mozart and his audiences well knew, the important affairs of 18th-century life were conducted either on the battlefield or in the boudoir, so it's not a huge surprise that Mozart chose to begin the concerto with a march. It is stated, at first, rather matter-of-factly in the strings, then restated with greater emphasis using all the martial trappings in Mozart's arsenal--including, of course, trumpets and drums. But Mozart takes something as familiar as a march and uses its regularity of rhythm as a point of departure for a solo piano part which seems, especially by comparison, improvised. Once it enters, the piano is in constant motion. Where is it going? Well, sometimes it alights, hummingbird-like, on a melody; elsewhere, it engages in an exuberant play of razzle-dazzle passagework and ornamentation. Stunning, lyrical, and, in a few instances, deeply touching, the sense of spontaneity is remarkable; it always seems new. You would swear that the piano had a personality--a point of view, almost--which is just the effect Mozart intended.

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On Wings of Song

Mozart was particularly close to the opera house in the slow movements of his piano concertos (Leonard Bernstein even once singled out the Andante from the Concerto No. 17 in G as his "all-time favorite piece of music"). Many of them are conceived of as miniature operatic scenes, with the piano singing a melody as if it were an aria, punctuated by the soft, poignant utterances of the woodwinds. And that's just what happens in the slow movement of the Concerto No. 24 in C minor. The piano introduces a gentle, aria-like subject and is answered by the strings and winds. As the dialogue unfolds, there are two wonderful serenade-like passages for the winds alone: the oboes are highlighted first, then the clarinets, instruments that in Mozart's music are often associated with love (clarinets were a rarity in the Austria of Mozart's time; he "discovered" them only in his 20s!).

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The Final Curtain

The opera house also shows up in the spirited finales of Mozart's piano concertos. One of his sunniest, most energetic and confident works is the Concerto No. 23 in A Major; in the concluding rondo, the clarinets play a prominent role, imparting a luminous quality to the orchestration and sometimes breaking through the texture in a particularly ebullient way. The music inhabits the same world as the finales of "Cosi fan tutte" and "Le nozze di Figaro": all hustle and bustle, humorously down-to-earth, and at the same time elevated.

But Mozart could also be, by turns, wistful or stormy and dramatic in his finales. Drama comes through in the last movement of the Concerto No. 20 in D minor. Here, the orchestral writing is full of fiery passages in the strings that anticipate the demonic music of the opera "Don Giovanni." Pathos and torment are felt in solely musical terms. At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is the finale to the Concerto No. 27 in B flat. The melody is taken from a song Mozart wrote called "Longing for Spring." He could hardly have known that he would live to see just one more spring in his own young life, yet there is a feeling of leave-taking in this music that makes us wonder. The expression is radiant but chaste, and the spirit of yearning for what may not be seems as strong as the spirit of celebration. Listen and feel, Mozart always seems to be saying, listen and feel.

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