Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

SIGNIFICANT BIRTHDAY NEXT YEAR

W

e join Mozart again when he's twenty-nine. Twenty-nine! Remember, by his standards that's almost bus-pass time. He's really motoring, too. He's doing very well with his operas - the crowd just love them - although the first real belter, the first one that will really stay around for ever, has yet to come. He's already done the Haffner Serenade - a bit of background music, to be fair, written for one of the weddings of the powerful Haffner family - as well as The Abduction from the Seraglio, Idomineo and the? minor Mass, the latter just a couple of years ago. fi That's always baffled me, that one, cas curlers for her hair'. I mean, it's true, I'm sure, but how do you use, say, the score of the Clock Symphony as hair curlers7. Or maybe it wasn't the whole symphony, just the highlights. JUST THE HIGHLIGHTS!!!! Suit yourself.

The big things now, though, for Mozart are his piano concertos. Piano concertos for him were more or less party pieces, for when he stopped off on his travels to visit dukes and emperors and things. They were pieces which not only made him sound - and I imagine look -great, in that they were often technically difficult to play and yet had slow movements to die for. The slow movements, alone, had great, heart-rending tunes which had the genteel folk of the 1780s weeping into their snuffboxes. In one sense, they were the '45s' of then-period?", if you like, and, in another, they could be said to be the sort of 'spinal cord' of the body of music Mozart left behind - twenty-seven piano concertos, each one a chapter in the musical diary of his life. Each one can tell you a litde bit more about what was happening to him at the time. A little snapshot of him of that moment.

Take the one from 1785 itself, Piano Concerto No 21. A beautiful PC, with possibly one of the best power ballads of its type. Or should that be slow movements? It was written just weeks after Mozart had put the pen down on his previous Piano Concerto in D minor - he really was knocking these out - and it was not long after his marriage to Constanze. The outer movements are light and fluffy and full of the joys of spring, but the inner slowie has become justifiably famous not only in concert halls, but also in adverts and movies. In fact, it's often known as 'the Elvira Madijjan' concerto, just because someone used it in a Swedish film of the same name in 1967. Poor Mozart, I say. Although I suppose it could have been worse. The It Came from the Swamp! concerto is marginally less appealing, especially if it becomes 'your' tune.