Dartblog

The English poet John Dryden once wrote that William Shakespeare was “the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” The significance of that is hardly appreciable unless we stop, at the end of this twenty-first century day, and take measure of what we heard, read, and said during that day. An unbelievable percentage of it is derived from the words, phrases, ideas—even the most basic motifs—which Shakespeare created. He is everywhere at all times, something that can be said of no other. But one. If there was ever a man who expressed that same human breadth so thoroughly and lastingly, and without the utterance of a single word, it is Mozart, whose birth was two hundred and fifty years ago today in the town of Salzburg. He lived for thirty-five years, his days roundly spent creating the best and most lasting music of any man before or to come. You hear him every day. The symphony number 41, the Jupiter, is one of the most recognizable piece of music in existence. If second to anything, it falls behind another Mozart piece, his serenade number 13, the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

But just as the lovers of Verona are first-blush figureheads for Shakespeare, hiding greater genius, so is the Jupiter for Mozart. Everyone owes it to himself to devote an evening to a Mozart/Da Ponte opera, if only to understand what those billions of people have been talking about these last two centuries.

We today are especially lucky for Mozart’s precociousness. True that it is too stolidly attached to his name, but though Mozart’s output was immense, it spans only three short decades at most. His early years are crucial. The young Wolfgang Mozart was first given a chance to create music with some degree of freedom in the mid 1770s. In the employ of both his father Leopold, who fostered his young genius and hardly abused the boy, and the Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo in Salzburg. Mozart wrote for the cathedral. He was not long content in the position, but before he quit those sinecure Kapellmeister positions in pursuit of absolute freedom to write partly secular works, Mozart provided the cathedral with beautiful, powerful, and musically advanced arrangements of the Psalms. My favorite has always been the Dixit & Magnificat, Psalm CIX. Mozart wrote two settings for the Archbishop. The first (and the most touching) is K. 193, completed in July of 1774. Mozart was eighteen years old.

The Collegium Intrumentale Brugnese and Capella Brugenis performed the rare piece under the baton of Patrick Peire in 2000 and Naxos captured it on disc. In celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday, I thought I’d offer up, for a short time at least, the first movement of that vesper, Dixit Dominus Domino Meo. [MP3] I think you’ll enjoy it immensely, and I hope you’ll purchase the disc as well. There are innumerable shadows of what was to come—from vocal manipulation and choral control perfected in the Figaro sextet to frosty second-violin glissandi so much loved in Jupiter to the heralding, dour, and glorious timpani and ghastly soprano soars of the Requiem’s Sequentia. It’s all there, in its infancy, from the teenage and churchbound hand of Mozart.