Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The Magic Flute

It never gets old listening to the remarkable music of Mozart, especially because of the great variety of his output, the brilliance of his compositions, and the range of emotional, humorous and series content that can be found in his work.  Whether it involves string quartets, symphonies, operas or whatever other form, Mozart's music is uniformly mindboggling.

The Magic Flute was the master's last opera and was still running in performance at Vienna when Mozart died in 1791 at age 35.  The popularity of German magic operas was at a peak at the time and the composer worked with a theater manager and director to mount the story.

It involved a Queen of the Night enlisting a prince to rescue her daughter from a high priest, though it turned out that the priest was actually leading a respectable and honorable order and the queen was evil and trying to regain control of her daughter.  A simple man accompanying the prince fails in a series of trials during the quest but is compensated with the love of a woman.

Mozart's masterful melding of instrumentation, massing and use of harmony and melody, with the voices is, even for this amateur, something to behold.  Yet, the opera is well-known for its extraordinary difficulty for vocalists because of the challenging ranges required.  From the outset, The Magic Flute was a resounding success and the composer attending many performances, registering his pride in the reception, though his death soon followed.

This recording, made in June 1993 in Budapest by the Failoni Orcehstra, conducted by Michael Halász, and the Hungarian Festival Chorus, is beautifully recorded and performed and the Naxos Records release is a pleasure to listen to.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Flute Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

Sometimes it's the lesser-known pieces in a master composer's catalog of works that are the most interesting.  This is certainly the case with these little gems, comprising the two concertos for flute and a short andante in C major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart released by the excellent Naxos label in the late 1980s.

The Capella Istropolitana, a chamber orchestra in Bratislava, Slovakia, conducted by Austrian Martin Sieghart, provides a fine accompaniment to flautist Herbert Weissberg, a native of Vienna, who remained in his music-rich hometown to study at the city's music academy and university and then became principal flautist for the symphony orchestra there.

The helpful liner notes state that Mozart wrote these pieces as part of a concerted (ha!) effort to break free of the limitations imposed upon him by his years under the patronage of the Archbishop in his native Salzburg.

In his very early 20s, about 1777, Mozart composed these concertos for a Dutchman named "De Jean," who was an amateur flautist and someone who had the kind of money Mozart craved, being perpetually in financial distress.

Evidently Mozart did not think highly of the flute and may not have put in the kind of passionate intensity in composition that he did many of his other works.  Still, these pieces are melodically solid and harmonically interesting, even if they don't rank among his greatest pieces.  The light, fragile sound of the flute dancing above the excellent orchestral background is pleasant and maintains interest.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Complete Piano Sonatas

Any appreciable amount of time spent listening to Mozart is an awe-inspiring experience considering how short a time he lived, the amount of varied music he wrote, and the fact that, as the notes to this great box-set indicate, "Mozart had little or not need to write down sonatas: he improvised them, making an impression on his audience on the spur of the moment . . . [he] only wrote down what he had to."  Obviously, he was a total prodigy--a performer and composer whose gifts come only on the rarest of occasions--and much of what made him such a legend in 18th-century music circles was done for the moment and then lost.

There were, in all, twenty-two sonatas by the master for solo performance on the keyboard, the four earliest, starting from when Mozart was ten years old, having been lost, leaving eighteen.  The last of the sonatas came in July 1789, a little over two years before the composer died.  This set, released in 1996 by the British Nimbus label and totaling a little over six hours on as many discs, is performed by the excellent Bulgarian-born Marta Deyanova.  The recordings were largely made in 1989 and 1990, with one track laid down in 1995 and the sound is superb.

The notes by David Threasher compactly and succinctly discuss the eighteen sonatas and a nice touch are quotes from letters written by Mozart to his father Leopold.  One of these is from 1777, in which the 21-year old informed his father that "I played all my six sonatas today" and then quoted from a Count Savioli who told Mozart that "I hear that you play the clavier [a precursor to the modern piano] quite passably."  The composer then merely stated that, "I bowed."  These six works came from two years prior to the letter.

Threasher pointed out that Mozart's earliest piano sonatas were influenced by a set of six sonatas published in 1774 by the great Franz Josef Haydn, although he also noted that Mozart's improvisatory powers were dominant in at least the first of the sextet.

In a letter to his father written four days later than the one quoted above, Mozart wrote that he had just composed a rondo for a sonata, this being a Sonata in C Major and for which he had totally improvised a rondo "full of din and sound" a few weeks prior.  This work was dedicated to a young pupil, Rose Cannabich, with a pretty andante which may have reflected strong feelings the composer had to his charge.  His next set of sonatas came, then, in 1777-78, during which time Mozart experienced difficulties working in Paris, where he was underappreciated and in which his mother died during a visit to him.

A few sonatas were written in 1783, just after his marriage to Constanze Weber and while the pair were living in Salzburg with his father.  Threasher wrote that "Mozart was aware that he would need a fund of new music for the purposes of performance, pedagogy and perhaps publication, and composed these three sonatas to fill such a need."  One of these, in A major, is among the composer's most-beloved pieces, featuring the stunning Rondo alla Turca finale.

Further works came later in 1783 and during the following year, including the famed C minor sonata and a stand-alone fantasia in that key that usually proceeds the other in performance.  This fantasia, even amongst the greatness of the other solo piano works, astounds with its jaw-dropping technicality and its beauty.

Finally, a quartet of sonatas came in 1788 and 1789 and characteristically at least one of these, the F major was written to pay off one of his chronic debts--in this case to his publisher.   Another, a C major, was intended for teaching and bore the title "Little Sonata for Beginners."  The final two, coming in 1789, remained unpublished until after Mozart's death and one, a B flat, appeared as a work for piano and violin, with the latter assumed not to have been the master's work.

As to Deyanova, who has recorded many albums of piano music for Nimbus, including works by Schubert, Scriabin, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, she was a prize-winning performer as a child in her homeland and then won international competitions in Italy, Paris and in Sofia.  After a 1969 prize-winning performance, Yehudi Mehunin wrote that "I wish Marta Deyanova the international career she so richly deserves."  Fortunately, that did happen, as she has toured the world over and, from 1978, recorded her extensive solo piano work for Nimbus.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphonies 35 and 38 and the Salzburg Symphonies

In 1990, when classical music was first being discovered by this blogger, one of the first recordings obtained was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Linz (or 36th) symphony and, within moments of listening to the theme of the first movement, it was extremely easy, as it has for many millions of people, to appreciate and enjoy the true genius of the composer.

Mozart (1756-1791), a child prodigy as a performer and composer, composed voluminously and with amazing creativity and was immensely popular.  Over 600 works were produced in about a quarter century and he was only 35 when he died--who knows how many more compositions, including masterpieces, he would have produced if he had lived as long as one of his mentors, Franz Josef Haydn?

He also composed extremely rapidly and completed his final trio of symphonies in only a month and a half.  His greatest work came in the final decade of his life, during which time, not coincidentally, he worked closely with the great Haydn, who, in turn, learned much from his much younger compatriot.

There is so much to discover and appreciate in the mountains of music, most of it of extremely high quality and so memorable, produced by the remarkable Mozart.  A nice collection of two of his most famous symphonies, the 35th (Haffner, from 1782) and the 38th (Prague, from 1786), as well as the so-called Salzburg symphonies, which are divertimenti or lighter music that run about half the length of the "mature" symphonies, can be found on a release by the German budget label, Pilz.

As a rank amateur, this blogger lacks the discernment to distinguish between good, excellent or superior playing in the way that a professional musician or a well-schooled aficionado can, so the Pilz disc may or may not meet the criteria called for by the latter, but for moi it works just fine.

The two symphonies on the first disc are performed by the Mozart Festival Orchestra, while, on disc 2, the Salzburg pieces are by a German orchestra called the Süddeutsche Philharmonie along with a thirteen minute Serenata Notturna by the Münchner Symphoniker that functioned more like a suite than a symphony and was "light music" that was performed in the evenings in outdoor settings, hence the name. 

Yet, even though the Salzburg "symphonies" and the serenades were usually thought of as ephemeral and not as important as "major" works like symphonies, concertos, sonatas and other more formally performed works, Mozart's skills with memorable melodies and unusual orchestration have made these pieces as timeless as the others.