By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is Assistant Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is the author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, published by Harvard University Press.
Leoš Janáček was only twenty-three years old when he conducted the choral society of the Brno Beseda in an acclaimed performance of Mozart’s Requiem in 1878. One of the first major performances in a grand, newly constructed concert hall in the city center, the event was also notable for its scale: Janáček recruited students from Brno’s monastery and local teachers’ institute to augment the choral society’s numbers, ultimately assembling a group of 250 singers. This decision was no doubt inspired by the fact that just a decade earlier, Janáček had been one of those students—he moved to Brno as a choral student at the age of eleven and was later educated at the teachers’ institute. Nearly a half-century later, he returned to this formative experience in his music. His woodwind sextet Mládí, which he described as “a kind of memory of youth,” reminisces upon his childhood years in Brno. And when Mládí premiered in the very same concert hall where Janáček had once conducted, perhaps that Mozart performance also surfaced in his mind.
If Mozart and Janáček seem like an unconventional pairing due to their vastly different aesthetics, this biographical story shows how Mozart’s work informed Janáček’s musical life in other ways. Not only did he conduct and program Mozart’s music, but he also discussed it in his writings on music theory—for instance, by noting Mozart’s influence upon Wagner’s harmonic language. This evening’s program brings these two composers together once again, elucidating not only their distinctions but also their commonalities. Both worked fluently across a wide range of genres but maintained a lifelong passion for opera. That fondness for vocal music pervaded both composers’ other musical works, shaping their approach to melodic writing more broadly—a stylistic choice that can be heard in each of the works on this program. Listening to their music in close proximity offers an intriguing sense of a shared creative sensibility, even across the stark differences we hear.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-Flat Major, K. 456 (1784)
Mozart took up residence in Vienna late in the fall of 1783, and performance quickly came to occupy a central role in his life. He gave subscription concerts in public halls, while also maintaining a busy schedule of private events and frequent commissions from visiting performers. The constant demand for new music spurred him to write a dozen piano concertos within a three-year period between 1784 and 1786. The composer himself was the soloist at most of their premieres, and many scholars and performers believe that these performances involved a great deal of off-the-cuff improvisation, from ornamentation throughout the piece to wholly new cadenzas. The pianist Robert Levin has argued that Mozart “was respected as a composer and lionized as a performer, but it was as an improviser that he was on top of the heap”—an intriguing way to imagine the unpredictability and excitement that must have characterized these events.
Some speculate that this particular concerto was written with an additional performer in mind: Maria Theresia von Paradis, a renowned musician who had lost her sight in childhood. The first movement is abundantly graceful. Strings and woodwinds share the spotlight in the orchestral introduction, and the pianist soon echoes and embellishes upon the themes they have introduced. The woodwinds, in particular, continue to engage the pianist in a mannered dialogue throughout the movement, trading phrases often and leading the orchestra back into motion after the soloist’s cadenza. The second movement, although no less elegant, reaches new depths of melancholy. Not only is it in a minor key, but its theme-and-variations structure sets it apart from the conversational feel of the first movement: instead of listening to a cohesive narrative from start to finish, we have the sense of a single voice returning again and again to a scene of profound sadness. Good cheer returns in the third movement, a rondo with an upbeat (yet always slightly restrained) feel. Most of the episodes remain in sunny major keys, and there are flashes of humor, even impudence—a set of impish grace notes, an extra-dramatic trill—throughout.
Leoš Janáček, Mládí (Youth) (1924)
Leoš Janáček was a music theorist as well as a composer, and one of his more original approaches to thinking about music emerged in his concept of “speech melody.” Beginning in the late 1890s, he would transcribe bits and pieces of overheard speech in musical notation, noting both the social context of the utterance and the psychological state of the speaker. He did not quote these found melodies directly in his works, but rather used them as inspiration for the composition of vocal lines, particularly in his operas. The resulting melodies retain the pattern and general feel of actual speech, lending his work a naturalistic tinge.
Even Janáček’s instrumental writing makes use of this concept; his wind sextet Mládí (Youth) is a prime example. Composed when he was seventy years old, it begins with a prominent theme in the oboe meant to evoke the phrase “Mládí, zlaté mládí,” or “youth, golden youth.” The addition of a bass clarinet to the typical wind quintet gives the movement a grounded feel, even as it veers off in playful directions. The second movement is slower in pace and serious in mood. Four variations on the opening theme are pensive, yet unsettled: individual players embark on flights of fancy above an ever-shifting canvas of repeated rhythmic patterns, and all six players join together for a solemn conclusion. The third movement contains a more direct reference to the composer’s childhood, specifically his experience as a choir student at Brno’s monastery. It quotes his March of the Blue-Boys, an early work for piccolo, bells, and tambourine, and includes the inscription “The little singers of the monastery cheer as they march—blue like bluebirds.” The fourth and final movement gets off to a rumbling start, then blooms into a bouquet of sustained melodic lines. The “youth, golden youth” motif returns multiple times, as if to reiterate the work’s overarching mood of affectionate nostalgia.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 (1785)
“We never get to bed before one o’clock,” Leopold Mozart complained in a letter to his daughter. “The weather is horrible. Every day there are concerts…it is impossible for me to describe the hustle and bustle.” He wrote from what seems to have been a rather unpleasant visit to Vienna to see his son Wolfgang, who was busy composing, teaching, performing, and socializing at a relentless clip. This piano concerto dates from that period of Mozart’s life, and its mood could not be further removed from the day-to-day chaos that Leopold described. Rather, the concerto’s blissful second movement (popularized by its inclusion in the 1967 Swedish art-house film Elvira Madigan) now features prominently in compilations of Mozart’s music with titles like The Secret to Sleep, Adagio Chillout, and The Most Relaxing Piano Album in the World—Ever. Which is it: the music of sleepless nights or the stuff of slumber?
It is a measure of Mozart’s remarkable versatility that his music is able to span these contexts. Not only is the concerto untethered to the immediate circumstances of its creation, but it also evokes a breadth of musical forms and sensibilities. While it is often characterized as the sunny counterpart to the brooding d-minor Piano Concerto No. 20, written just a few weeks earlier, it is emotionally complex in its own right. “It is a place where genres meld,” music critic Alex Ross has written of Mozart’s music, “where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where comedy and tragedy, and the sensual and the sacred, are one.” The concerto fits this description exactly. It begins with an extended orchestral introduction that could be the start of a symphony. The piano makes an unassuming entrance before blossoming into an intricately textured conversation with the orchestra. The second movement – familiar as it may be – retains an enthralling sense of intimacy. The songlike melodies are languid but not untroubled, with underlying pulses of dissonance that compel the listener’s close attention. The concluding rondo sparkles, each hint of minor-key trouble quickly brushed aside in favor of grace and cheer.
