Extraordinary Rendition
BBC Radio 3 is now well into its celebration of the Genius of Mozart, which involves playing every note he wrote over 12 days. I’m a devout admirer of Mozart, but I’m not sure that uninterrupted diet like this is actually a good idea. It is in danger of doing something that I wouldn’t previously have thought possible – making me bored of Mozart.
I’m a firm believer that you should just an artist, composer, musician (or scientist, for that matter) by his or her best work and by that reckoning Mozart is among the greatest of them all. But I have to say among the glorious masterpieces there’s also quite a lot of quite dull stuff. Take the symphonies, for example. Mozart wrote his First Symphony when he was only 8 years old. That fact on its own makes the work worth listening to. However, in my humble opinion, you can fast forward through at least twenty of the following compositions before finding one that’s really worth listening to, and even further before you find the really brilliant ones.
I’m not saying that the lesser works of Mozart shouldn’t be played. In a balanced programme, contrasted with works by other composers, they are interesting to listen to. It’s good to hear the rarely performed works from time to time, if only to understand why they are rarely performed. However, with only Mozart on offer day after day the effect is only to lessen the impact of the great works by surrounding them with hour after hour of lower quality music. I don’t think the BBC has done the Mozart legacy any favours by revealing that he actually wrote too much music, a lot of it not particularly good.
After that, I’m about to duck back down below the parapet but before I do, I thought I’d make my contribution to the ongoing Mozartfest with a piece from my favourite Mozart opera, The Magic Flute, in a version that’s itself very rarely heard. Fortunately. This is what Florence Foster Jenkins – the opera singer to end all opera singers – did with Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen. For some reason Sony admits to owning the copyright of this, so you’ll have to click through to Youtube to hear it in its full glory.
In the Dark 
January 10, 2011 at 1:31 pm
That launch at the top F is worth waiting for. You can sometimes sense the pianist speeding up between the vocal sections – I wonder why?
January 10, 2011 at 1:41 pm
It always makes me laugh to hear the guy speeding up. He clearly wanted to get it over with. I don’t blame him.
January 11, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Didn’t I once read that Florence Foster Jenkins’s pianist used to play for laughs and sometimes used to pull faces behind her back?
January 10, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Maybe it will to do some good in getting rid of the myth that Mozart was a superhuman capable of creating masterpieces at the snap of a finger. People might realise that for every masterpiece (as per some sort of consensus, of course) he wrote perhaps ten duds (the same). And, of course, those are rough numbers.
January 10, 2011 at 1:45 pm
I agree. I think the play and film Amadeus helped establish the myth of Mozart and refuting that myth doesn’t mean thinking any less of the genius that he was. If the only good thing he’d ever done in his whole life was write The Magic Flute, I’d still think of him as a genius, and he did much more than that.
January 10, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Not in his last 8 years he didn’t write 90% duds.
January 10, 2011 at 2:33 pm
My guess is that if Shakespeare had only written Julius Caesar, we’d remember that period more for Marlowe than Shakespeare. Then again, I hacked through that one for O-level, so maybe I’m biased. On the other hand, I think if Shakespeare had only (only!) written Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, he would still be remembered as a giant.
January 10, 2011 at 5:32 pm
“Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” is the only piece of Mozart on the Voyager interstellar record, 2 copies of which are heading out of the solar system as we speak.
Both Beethoven and Bach got 2 of their “greatest hits” on there but Mozart only 1.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t use this particular version though!
January 10, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Too bad she was never accompanied by her orchestral equivalent, the magnificent Portsmouth Sinfonia.
January 10, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Or the great Les Dawson..
January 10, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Peter (and any regulars) – Have you ever wished you could be out there singing in the Magic Flute? And which part?
January 11, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Why does Les Dawson’s piano playing remind me sometimes of Charles Ives?
January 17, 2011 at 6:00 pm
Steve, I think I’ll have to agree with Peter that Papageno probably has the most fun. It also happens to be a baritone role. I have used “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” as audition piece for choir auditions for a few years, so I guess I’ll pick Papageno. I would love to be able to do a good Sarastro, but I am not a basso anywhere near as profundo as that role requires for sufficient gravitas.
One role in the Magic Flute that is generally underrated is that of The Speaker, who gets to sing some subtly elegant and dramatically most important music in the entire piece. Most notably the exchange with Tamino that turns the entire drama around when Tamino is told that he has misunderstood who Sarastro is.
January 10, 2011 at 7:25 pm
I think Papageno has the most fun on stage.
However, I’ve always thought of the Queen of the Night as a role model. In fact, I usually have Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen playing when I’m writing referee reports.
January 11, 2011 at 9:52 am
I hope there’s some Les Dawson on the Voyager disks. Sadly they were put together too early for there to be any Fawlty Towers or Blackadder, or even Mr Bean.
January 11, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Peter, It shouldn’t be a criticism of Mozart that “only” a minority of his woks are immortal masterpieces. Even disregarding the extreme juvenilia, mature works were often written just for money to live, and at a ridiculous pace. And scientists don’t do much better with the masterpiece fraction: most people who live long enough stick out 100-200 papers, and
the greats are those where the number worth reading gets into double figures.
But having said that, it makes the consistent level of inspiration in Bach even more of a miracle. Radio 3 did all his notes a while back, and it was almost all fantastic – even though he too wrote under huge pressure (a new cantata every Sunday). I don’t think they’ve done a Schubert-fest yet, but I’d bet the masterpiece rate (M-index?) will be high there too. Interesting to wonder what our view of Mozart would be if he’d had as short a life as Schubert. But then Bruckner didn’t write a masterpiece until he was about 10 years beyond where Mozart stopped. The thought of all the unwritten great music from those who died too young (and perhaps from Schubert, above all) could drive you mad.
January 11, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Agreed. Radio 3 did a similar Bach celebration some time ago. I didn’t feel bored at any point at all in that. Quite the reverse. I found it awe-inspiring.
I don’t know Schubert’s orchestral pieces very well, but just between the songs, chamber works and keyboard pieces there’s a staggering amount of wonderful stuff.
January 12, 2011 at 10:47 am
Who else do you think would earn a similar every-note-he-wrote jamboree from Radio 3? I vote for Shostakovich….