Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Masonic Funeral Music, K477 (1785)

First of all:  did you know that Mozart was a member of the BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI?  OK, so they were just a group of Masons who were more into Enlightenment rationalism than occultism, but still, as a former Robert Anton Wilson fan, I think that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, Masonic Funeral Music is an odd little piece, written for the funeral of two of Mozart’s friends and fellow Masons.  It’s scored for an unusual mini-orchestra — oboe, clarinet, basset horn (basically sounds like an evil bass clarinet), two horns and strings — and contains a Gregorian chant melody used as a cantus firmus, 14th-century-style.  It starts out pretty dark, with big minor chords and melodies full of crying appoggiaturas (echoes of the “Crucifixus” from Bach’s B Minor Mass…), but later it spends a surprising amount of time in the relative major, sounding balanced and neutral and Enlightenment-y.  I did a little Googling and found that the Masons at the time believed that music should “inculcate feelings of humanity, wisdom and patience, virtue and honesty, loyalty to friends, and finally an understanding of freedom”  I also found that a few years later, Mozart wrote: “Death, if we think about it soberly, is the true and ultimate purpose of our life. I have over the last several years formed such a knowing relationship with this true and the best friend of humankind that his image holds nothing terrifying for me anymore. Instead it holds much that it is soothing and consoling!”  Given all of that, what’s surprising about Masonic Funeral Music isn’t that parts of it are calm and objective, but that parts of it are pained and tragic.

The piece has some odd moments in its basic musical material, too.  If the “Dissonance” Quartet felt too much like a collection of stock phrases, this piece errs on the other side of the spectrum and feels downright awkward at times.  I’m thinking particularly of the use of chromatic scales.  At one point, the strings play the figure do-ti-do-re-me-mi-fa-fi under a sustained minor tonic chord (when the melody resolves to sol, the harmony moves to the dominant);  a bit later, they play do-me-fa-fi-sol-le-la-ti-do, also under a sustained minor tonic chord.  In the first figure, the cross-relation created by the chromatic note mi against a minor triad isn’t sustained for long enough to feel like an intentional dissonance, but instead comes off (to my ears at least) as sloppy.  And in the second figure, the fact that le moves up to la rather than resolving back to sol robs it of its plaintive quality, which seems to me to be the last thing you’d want to do in a funeral piece.  Later in the piece, Mozart has the oboe play the figure le-la-te-ti-do, changing chords halfway through the bar so that the te-ti is part of a v chord that turns into a V chord, which feels to me like trying to have your cake and eat it too.  Earlier in the piece, there’s another passage that’s strange for reasons that don’t have to do with chromaticism:  the music moves from the tonic to the relative major by going i – VI – III – i – VI – III.  Shouldn’t there be a V between the third and fourth chords?  As it is, the sudden move back to the tonic seems very abrupt and unprepared.  And what’s particularly baffling is that this kind of thing is extremely unusual for Mozart.  I can’t think of any other piece by him that I would describe as “awkward.”  Even in the weird, drunken piano minuet, K355 (1787), all the jarring augmented chords are resolved exactly the way they’re supposed to be — not to mention that they’re emphasized in a way that makes it clear that Mozart was deliberately flouting harmonic convention.  So what’s going on here?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – String Quartet #19 in C Major, K465 “Dissonance” (1785)

I can’t bring myself to care about this piece.  I just can’t.  It’s not that it’s too polite:  I listened to energetic, rough-around-the-edges performances by the Budapest and Takácz Quartets, and it didn’t help.  It’s not that it’s unimaginative:  I see all the creative things Mozart does with form, phrase structure and harmony, but I’m just not excited by them.  It’s not that it’s too early in his career (Mozart being a composer whose late work I prefer by a huge margin):  the 20th and 21st Piano Concerti, which I love, were written in the same year, and the K332 Piano Sonata, another old favorite, was written two years earlier.  It’s not that I don’t like Classical-period string music:  I’m a fan of Mozart’s G Minor and C Major String Quintets (both 1787) and Haydn’s Op. 64 No. 2 quartet (1792), among other things.  And this quartet even has a great little slow introduction full of chromaticism and unexpected harmonic shifts, which is where it got its nickname.  But after that passage, I find that I have to force myself to pay attention.  As obviously well-written as the music is, the materials it’s made of just seem so incredibly generic.  I know there are people who are enthralled by the way Mozart manipulates stock phrases — and hell, I’m fascinated by the way a lot of pop music (broadly defined, from 40s big-band to 00s club music), and notated music that draws on pop music (from Milhaud to JacobTV) does the same thing.  But these particular stock phrases — diatonic arpeggios and scales, chromatic appoggiaturas, cadential formulas — don’t have the kind of cultural resonance for me that the standard materials of the 20th century do, and that means I need more than clever or elegant arrangements of them to keep me interested.  Go ahead and break them down into their constituent elements, like middle-period Beethoven, or skew them into impossible paradoxical weirdness, like late Beethoven.  Just don’t leave them intact, or I’ll be bored stiff.

All of this raises the question:  how come I’m such a fan of the 21st Piano Concerto, which isn’t really all that different in style or technique from the “Dissonance” Quartet?  Well, for one thing, there’s a lot more timbral variety in a piano concerto than a string quartet.  But that can’t be all, because I remember nearly being put to sleep by the 17th Piano Concerto when I saw it performed live.  Much more important is the fact that the basic materials of the concerto don’t feel generic to me.  The themes are memorable, distinctive, and somehow charged with emotional content, rather than feeling like assemblages of parts from a Do-It-Yourself 18th Century Sonata Movement Kit.  The wistful second-exposition second theme, in particular, has always had a powerful effect on me — maybe it’s just the way Mozart uses the ii and vi chords, but it feels like something that goes beyond analysis.  There’s also a passage based on a descending-fifths progression, with spiky little bass-notes that jump out of the left hand’s sixteenth note figurations, that I’ve always found both incredibly satisfying and strangely moving.  It’s not the progression itself, which is commonplace, and which in fact appears many times in the Quartet.  It’s something inexplicable in the way the progression is realized.

Maybe instrumentation has more to do with it than I realize, though.  The string pieces I mentioned liking above are either in minor keys  (which automatically improves Classical-period pieces for me about tenfold) or just plain weird (the C Major String Quintet).  Bowed string instruments have always felt a little alien to me — I’ll pretty much always pick something for a keyboard instrument, something with electronics, or something with a variety of timbres and instrument types, if given a choice.  So really, if I want to get to know more Mozart, I should probably listen to more of the late piano concerti.  I used to know them all fairly well, but I haven’t heard any except the two I mentioned for ages.  I also ought to give a good listen to the C Minor Mass (1783), which really impressed me in a live performance a few years ago.