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In Reply to: That's the "Mozart was CLEVER...not deeply dramatic" view... posted by SE on April 23, 2007 at 04:13:27:
HI SE,
Yes, I think you have said it well. "Clever" is the word. Can anyone hold Mozart and Beethoven in equal awe? It seems that they represent the two opposite ends of the emotional and musical language spectrum .Personally, I'll take Beethoven any day.
Follow Ups:
(and I mean this in no deeply technical way) the "Classical Style" and the "Romantic Style". Haydn and Mozart are considered to be, in many views I've encountered, the END of a style: the height of Classical as a style in terms of form, rules and range of expression. Beethoven, with his stretching of the rules and forms (outright breaking them apart in his Late works), opened the door for many more adventurous uses of harmony, timing, orchestration and outright DRAMA in music as an art form. This would be taken up later by Liszt, Chopin and -- perhaps more than anyone -- Berlioz and Wagner in their music-dramas.The result of all this is that Mozart (and Haydn...even Bach) CAN appear "boring", since they are definitely constrained, stylistically, by their own "systems". Germany/Austria were VERY conservative in the 18th and 19th centuries, at least in terms of those who actually PAID for music to be written and performed. On the one hand, history says that there was awareness of "intellectual value" in the forms preferred -- which is TRUE...as far as it goes. OTOH, conservative is (by one definition) a very limiting world view that doesn't invite new voices into a conversation. We need only look back at Biber, for example, to see that the "brains were there to do more with the music", but popular opinion ruled the day.
I think this is true in a way, but the genius of Mozart is his ability to create a huge variety of very subtle and beautiful and often quite complicated effects from what superficially appears to be a limited and simple system.It's very easy to compose or even improvise something that most people would recognize is in the "style" of Mozart, if you have some training and experience in playing Mozart's music. To compose on the level of Mozart hiself -- that is not so easy.
So it isn't surprising that many listeners, especially inexperienced or untrained ones (I'm not saying that applies to you) find Mozart "boring", at least at first.
and, personally, I like much of what Mozart composed, even through my 21st Century perspective (and THAT'S saying something)! By "constrained", I only meant that the type of music composed, for example, in the 20th Century was simply beyond "the possibilities" (or the willingness to explore them) of the earlier composers. I'll pull in Biber and Marais here: those composers had an incredible vision. Beethoven, of course, was incredible in this regard. Mozart, a highly gifted artist and techician, was "no Beethoven" -- VERY conservative by comparison, IMO. Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich...all of these composers were, to me anyway, more "pioneering" in terms of what they were willing to explore than Mozart. But, I agree (and to your point), composers like Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi were able to extract an amazing range out of *relatively* thinner materials.
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