Woody Allen once said that Mozart's Symphony 41 proved the existence of God.
Did he really? It's a nice quote but I can't verify it. Googling it comes up with a host of sites paraphrasing it exactly as above. For instance, from a post at Good-Music-Guide:
Woody Allen once said that Mozart's Symphony 41 proved the existence of God. The reason being that the combination of the five themes in the five-part counterpoint fugato is so complex that it is impossible for the human ear to sense everything that is going on. Only God could completely grasp its profundity. I also heard just recently from several people that Mozart's 41st is so perfect that it is even scary.
Well... We're not afraid!
We're going to get very geeky today. My Bach diary of last week was very geeky indeed and set a new record for hits at a time of what has been dropping activity. I wanted activity to come up before doing this, because I cherish the Mozart #41. This is the serious heavy-duty stuff.
I'm going to do things differently this time. We're going to START with the music (just as I did with the Mozart 40th diary). THEN we are going to analyze it. And THEN we will listen to it again -- if you still want to. And we'll hear my favorite recording of it.
Mozart Symphony #41 in C major, "Jupiter" K. 551, Fourth movement Molto Allegro. Conducted by George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra 1955
The recording we're listening to is conducted by one of the great Mozart interpreters, George Szell. I couldn't find it on Youtube so, out of frustration and stubbornness, I decided to upload it myself. The conductor today with (probably) the best reputation as a Mozart interpreter is Karl Bohm. Bohm does a "serviceable job," so to speak, but he doesn't bring out the rampaging incandescence in the Jupiter finale the way Szell does, here.
What is Mozart's Jupiter Symphony about?
Let's ask Mozart!
Dumbo: Dear Wolfgang, it's a pleasure to meet you at last! I'd love to talk to you about your Symphony #41.
Mozart: Oh, it's a pleasure to meet you, too, and I love talking about my music, although it's hard to remember a single work. I've got so much crap around here. Constanza threw out a box of symphonies and concertos just last night to make more room for her Hummel figurine collection.
Dumbo: Ew. That's dreadful. Uh, my first question is, why did you compose the Symphony #41?
Mozart: Well, Symphony #40 was done, and we needed money, so I thought to myself, Wolfgang, you're a composer who needs money! Compose! So, two weeks later -- tada! Slap a K. number on it!
Dumbo: We're all dying to know what the Symphony #41 is about.
Mozart: About?
Dumbo: Yes. What's it about? Like, for instance, Mahler's Symphony #9 was about man's relationship with death. Or like how La Mer was about impressions of the ocean...
Mozart: Uh, it's not an opera. You do know that? The Symphony #41 is a symphony so...
Dumbo: Yes, yes... But what's it about?
Mozart: About... About?
Dumbo: Yes! What's it about?
Mozart stares blankly for a minute. Coughs
Mozart: Oh... I know what you mean. It's about da-da-DA-dah! And then there's a part that goes dit-dit-dit, dede da da da da...
Dumbo: Uh huh. [Groan.]. But what's it... Aw screw it.
Mozart: Dude, can you loan me a few kronen till Saturday?
Music doesn't have to be about anything. I may even go further and say that sometimes, when it is about something, the something can be a distraction from the music. Absolute music presents an opportunity to clear our heads and focus.
Here's another sweet quote about the Mozart Jupiter, this one by Sir George Grove, he of the famous Grove Encyclopedia of Music that many of us gleefully plagiarized from in college. (Oh how little things have changed.)
In an article about the Jupiter Symphony, Sir George Grove wrote that "it is for the finale that Mozart has reserved all the resources of his science, and all the power, which no one seems to have possessed to the same degree with himself, of concealing that science, and making it the vehicle for music as pleasing as it is learned. Nowhere has he achieved more." Of the piece as a whole, he wrote that "It is the greatest orchestral work of the world which preceded the French Revolution."[4]
It says very little for the music itself if all we can do is quote people praising it. Perhaps it will inspire you to pay the closer attention that this work merits. The finale of this, Mozart's last symphony, may be the greatest achievement of his career. It's beautiful to listen to, but you can't possibly hear it all the first time. In this form, without the formal repeats (which I prefer for a first listening), it's only six minutes of music. The orchestra itself is a very small one compared to the orchestras of later composers. But it sounds enormous! And this is because of the densely woven counterpoint.
What is counterpoint?
A technical phrase. Counterpoint is the art or craft in music of combining separate distinct pieces of music, in layers atop each other, like "Row, row, row your boat." Done in such a way that the notes combine vertically to make harmonic sense. Bach was the master of counterpoint. Mozart, who studied the works of Bach even after Bach's music had fallen out of style, infused part of that style into his late seventeenth century classical style, especially in his latter years.
When I say latter years, I mean before he died. At thirty-five. Of strep throat. Think about it. Strep throat. When I heard that, I wondered, why couldn't it have been something cooler like consumption or being gored by a bull. Mozart died from something that the cheapest antibiotics would cure today. And then he was buried in a pauper's grave because he was poor. His wife, Constanza, was surprised when, in the following years, people expressed interest in her late husband and his music. She knew he was good, but she didn't know he was THAT good.
You could understand her confusion maybe when you realize how easy it was for Mozart to compose. His last three symphonies, Numbers 39, 40, and 41, were all composed in the space of six weeks between gigs. This works out to an average of two weeks per symphony, including this one. One reason Mozart could compose so quickly was because he didn't need an instrument at hand to test things -- all he needed was paper and quill pen. Everything flowed straight from his noggin to the paper. Maybe he hummed it while he composed. Unlike Beethoven who left multiple drafts of his works with comments and alternate passages written in the corners and other passages crossed out and plastered with curses, Mozart wrote these symphonies down the first time just the way he wanted it.
Because he had no clients for these three symphonies, he never made a penny off of them, and he probably never heard them performed. Except in his head.
Relax. You don't need to be able to read music.
All the above you could learn from liner notes or from symphony program notes, so it might not be new to you. What may be new, though, is that we are going to get under the hood of this work. Don't freak out on me if I post some musical notation. I don't expect or want you to be able to read music. I'm going to assume you're musically illiterate, (or barely semi-literate, like me), and provide this as a sort of rough guide, like a roadmap with the legend in Chinese.
This is a simplified form of score from the Coda of the Jupiter finale. I stole this from Wikipedia, where they had already done a lot of my work for me by marking up the fragments in colored highlighter.
One page of the score of the Mozart Jupiter finale coda
"Oh Dumbo, we can't read all that gibberish!" I know! Bear with me, patient readers! Look at the colors, not the notes!
The most complicated moment in the final movement is the coda, the tail ending (coda being Latin for tail, as all good SAT students know), which begins at 5:00 in the Szell recording clip at the top. As the music reaches its resting point where the ending should be, it gets a second wind and reemerges as a fugue. However, a Mozart fugue sounds very different from one of Bach's fugues, which tended to have simpler rhythms and a more complicated main line. This fugue is made from the basic building blocks of the movement as a whole, five different musical fragments marked in the above score page in different colors.
Now maybe you can see why I started with the music itself. To help identify the fragments, because I know you can't read music, I've made a youtube clip to identify four of them. (I skipped the fragment in black because I can't really tell where it comes from or what it's importance is. I'm dumb that way. I'm not Leonard Bernstein.)
What the different colored fragments sound like
I told you you didn't need to read music!
Obligatory Dumbo anecdote
My mother used to cut up my pancakes in a tic-tac-toe pattern for me when I was a kid. Now, when she wants to get me to come over, she tells me, "If you come over, I'll even make pancakes and cut them tic-tac-toe for you." My mom. Sweet. I'm quite capable of cutting my own pancakes, but there is something magical about pancakes cut tic-tac-toe by your mom. So here I am, cutting up your Mozart for you tic-tac-toe.
Now that we know what the building blocks of this masterpiece of abstract music are, maybe we can talk about it intelligently. Let's hear the whole thing again, one more time and follow these four building block fragments. The regulars here know that I usually try to break down the music by its Sonata-allegro form. This might be a little different. And try to just groove to the dense weave of this music. If you pay attention, it will overwhelm you. Enjoy and love the details. That's what it's all about in Mozart.
The same music clip as at the top.
Mozart Symphony #41 in C major, "Jupiter" K. 551, Fourth movement Molto Allegro. Conducted by George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra (1955).
Exposition first theme (0:00 to 1:00)
The first theme begins with the red fragment. At 0:16 the first theme ends with the yellow fragment. At 0:44, we get the bridge passage, made up of the red+green fragments, transitioning us from the home key of C major to the second theme (in G major).
Exposition second theme (1:00 to 1:35)
The second theme begins with a different repeating fragment. (I think it may be what was meant to be the black fragment, in the coda score, but it's slightly different), combined with the green fragment.
(Are you getting lost with the fragments? Go back and play the fragments again if you need to; there are only four. Too much work? Bah. You philistine.)
Exposition codetta (1:35 to 2:10)
This is a long and very contrapuntal codetta. It ends very softly on the yellow fragment played by woodwinds.
Development (2:10 to 3:06)
Using the red+yellow fragments, the development darkens the mood as it takes us from the bright, cherry, G major to the minor keys of G minor, and then B minor. At 2:24, we get overlapping out of sync variations of the yellow fragment as the development begins to fly through many keys. At 2;35 to 2:38, the strings abruptly hit an air pocket, the first of four, and in their brief silence, we can hear that underneath this the woodwinds are (and have been) playing a variation on the red fragment, something you might have missed before. The yellow fragment, then another air pocket with the red fragment, then yellow again, air pocket with red, yellow again...
At 2:55, at the end of these dramatic key changes, the yellow fragment gets its last say as it finally comes back (at 3:02), with a twist, to C major.
Recapitulation first theme (3:06 to )
The first theme is back, but it gains some extra drama as it suddenly changes to G major before transitioning back to C major for the second theme.
Recapitulation second theme (3:47 to 4:21)
Same as the first time, only in the home key of C major now.
Recapitulation codetta again (4:21 to 5:00)
Same as first time. Now in the home key.
Coda (5:00 to 5:99)
Ah! And here we are at the coda, finally. The violins play alone, at first, as the rest of the orchestra hushes. They play a strangely familiar four note melody. Wait! That sounds a lot like the red fragment, only different... Yup. It's inverted, upside down, going down down down up rather than up up up down. Slicker than snot, that Mozart guy!
And now, at 5:11, as the horns enter rather majestically, playing the red fragment, the fugue begins in earnest. The deeper strings (violas) play the purple fragment atop this. The purple fragment gets passed to successively higher strings.
At 5:22, the yellow fragment enters the mix, hard to hear at first, but adding to the growing vertical complexity.
At 5:26, the basses take up the red fragment while the trumpets come in atop all this with the green fragment.
And at 5:37, this fugal section ends with amazing gracefulness, all the loose ends tied together as if it wasn't the hairy ball that it is! As the symphony comes to its end, we hear the section from the codetta (based on the yellow fragment) repeated, but now with drums and trumpets in full force to bring this to a forceful conclusion. THE END!
Normally I would end the diary here, as well. But I couldn't resist passing on this blog posting that helped inspire me to start the Thursday Classical Music series. It was a blog post on Broadstreet Review about Mozart's Jupiter, analyzing ONE TINY THING about the Jupiter finale, comparing it to a Bobby Fischer chess move. And it wasn't the coda. It was that final magical little chord that brought us back to C major at the end of the development. (3:02 to 3:07 in our clip).
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/...
Much from little: the challenge Mozart set for himself
One of the tasks Mozart seems to have set for himself in this development was to see how many different keys he could cover in the least amount of time while using this minimal amount of material. At the very end of the development, Mozart uses an augmented sixth as a way of linking two crucial dominant seventh chords, thus bringing off one of the greatest magic tricks in all of music. The rabbit that Mozart pulls out of his hat is the tonic, the home key, in the form of that embellished major scale, restored to its original form.
Here are the details of how he does it. [...]
I imagine it might be boring after a while hearing people talk about how brilliant Mozart is, how brilliant his music is, all the dumb geeky hero worship. Remember Salieri at the beginning of the Oscar winning film, Amadeus? When he passes by a room where a Mozart Sinfonia is being performed, and he thinks he hears "the voice of God."
Well, I can perfectly well understand how Mozart seems bland to many people at first. It did to me. But as I said before, the magic of Mozart is in the details. And you don't need somebody like me to analyze it for you to appreciate them. I do this because I can't resist doing it. Believe me, I've pissed off people before ranting about Mozart or Mahler this way. All of this is there, though, in the music, in the sound that reaches your ears. You don't need to see it on paper, you don't need to have me cut it up tic-tac-toe for you, to experience that moment of divine grace. It's all there to be heard, if you listen for it. I can't say that about all music. Most music is rather shallow, entertaining you with what's on the top, but with nothing underneath to keep you listening to it for years, discovering new things. This is music that you get to live with for the rest of your life, that becomes part of you. The Jupiter Symphony is a part of whatever it is that makes Dumbo Dumbo.
Next week: More Mozart! Although it will be much easier music.