Dartblog

What does it look like when a person who has never played an instrument, never sung, and never read a note, tries to do a thorough analysis of a piece of classical music? It looks a lot like Mozart & Micromanagement, which is, well, three things: The final oeuvre I’ve just submitted for Music 36, a class all about Herr Mozart, the sire of recent light updates on this page, and the reason I’ve been playing with Flash-based audio players (e.g., here and here).

The project is my small contribution to a decades-old movement to force out of favor the liberal, romanticized, interpretation of Mozart’s music. Fact is, the man wrote out just about everything exactly the way he wanted it played—why not respect that? My aim here was to investigate Mozart’s composed vocal embellishments. As our dear Scarlett Johansson is today, so was Mozart’s Caterina Cavalieri. The sopranos were utter stars, and as directors today dote on the finest leading ladies, so did composers on the great songbirds of 18th century Vienna. (A fact which, in the case of Mlle. Cavlieri, annoyed Joseph II’s court composer Antonio Salieri to no end, because he loved the girl and here was Mozart writing for her more gorgeous music than he could ever find in himself—though to be fair Salieri’s material around this time was really excellent; just not timeless.) And it was common practice, especially in baroque and continuing into the classical period, for sopranos to be able to “decorate” their arias with all manner of wild vocal olympics—the style called coloratura singing. In many cases, either the composer or the gal wanted these decorations planned and written out in advance so that she wouldn’t have to improvise. Mozart generally obliged, but his decorations are rarely used today.

However, Aussie maestro Charles Mackerras, perhaps the world’s most thoroughly knowledgable Mozartian and a man who it is said has every note and every word of every Mozart opera firmly in his head, recently recorded original, historically-authentic versions of Mozart arias for a small non-profit British label called Opera Rara. Diana Montague and Elizabeth Futral are his singers, and his players are the excellent Hanover Band, which performs with period instruments. In Mozart & Micromanagement, I looked at the decorative choices Mozart made (with audio samples attending) and also give some enjoyable history about how each of the three arias were initially forged, from Mozart’s notational cast to real-world music. It was to be a written essay, but since I quickly realized the benefit the audio samples would afford, I decided to make it into a small web site. I thought that some Dartblog readers would be interested in seeing it, if only to hear some fascinating singing.