No post tomorrow, but this, my third of today, is a deep dive for 'the advanced class.'
Over a conversation with UCM denizen ---- ---- I realized that, like so many Bach masterworks, there was not a single recording of Cosi Fan Tutte which doesn't in some ways drive me crazy. I had a similar conversation about Figaro the other day with another UCM denizen
----- ------
. And with ----- ------
I've basically had this conversation every day for a year. I suppose I have all three of them to thank for the fact that every day my tastes change, and I can't stop listening to this infinite-sided music which day to day drives me crazy in a new way. One day I think I understand it, the next day I check back and they're completely different pieces of music and theater and art. Every day, it's a new revelation that completely scraps what you thought you knew the day before. It's both delightful and maddening.
When dealing with the type of infinite human achievement you get from Shakespeare or Mozart, you're dealing with works greater than they can ever be performed. The art in art is how the artist exaggerates certain sides of life while minimizing other sides. But certain geniuses are so very infinite that from their work is an infinite multiplicity of meaning. It is as though Mozart has concealed nothing about us, and yet we are so unworthy of it that we cannot apprehend the whole Everest except for part of one side at a time. All we can do is climb and expend extreme effort to get us to the view from the top.
So what are the side views? On the one hand, I don't much like a lot of HIP Mozart opera. It goes in the face of Mozart's extremely slow indicated tempos (except when they're much faster than generally played...), it's much too light, there's much too much indicated comedy, it's Mozart as Rossini. Maybe I've just listened too much and can no longer enjoy things on their own terms, but when I hear these zippy romps with small voices and cantabile-less strings, I just can't imagine this is what Mozart meant, it's not what Da Ponte meant, it's not even what Metastasio or even Schikanader meant. It takes some of the most profound, saddest music in the world and lets you be delighted within a world of comfort. No longer does this music report to us from the front of the French revolution, it's a modern one of laissez-faire frivolity that divorces us from engaging with the world.
Then there's the bad old world against which such conceptions were rebelling. The world of German bourgeois and burghers, a worldview seen not from atop Everest but atop the Magic Mountain, the rarefied world of thin air and extreme ponderousness so preoccupied with ideas and soulstates that it divorces itself from the world of living, and consequently views those not atop the Zauberberg with the kind of disdain that rationalizes killing off those below. It's so divorced from excitement and dance that we never hear anything but the claustrophobically thin air of heavy strings and semi-Wagnerian voices.
I often think to myself that we rarely ever get a Mozart performance that gives us any more than 25% of the music. Mozart is neither Rossini nor Brahms, he is Mozart, the most infinite music there has yet ever been. And furthermore, Mozart is a creature not only of the 18th century, but the very late 18th century when it was all breaking apart. He is just ten years removed from Beethoven, and to a large extent must be played like Beethoven's better-adjusted older brother, a 'happy warrior' who lays explosives down at the wall of the Bastille with the optimism that a new world can be built which by the rise of Beethoven, the world no longer held. For Mozart, the music need dance and lightness, but it also needs force and impact. The music need song and breath, but it also needs pellucid clarity of detail.
Additionally, the music needs to be expressed not with refinement but with ecstasy, yet it must also not become reckless. It is one of the most terrible paradoxes of music, the greatest and most compassionate music forgives nothing in its performers. You don't have to play things as literal by Mozart's tempi as Nikolaus Harnoncourt does, but I often think that Harnoncourt is the only major conductor truly aware of Mozart's full expressive potential. Some conductors have two sides, occasionally you hear a third, but only Harnoncourt in my experience gives the whole equation. He's not much of a technician, and he is an Austrian count who clearly does this repertoire because he's deeply uncomfortable with all kinds of modern developments, but within his repertoire he is easily one of the most insightful musicians to ever stand in front of an orchestra, if not the most...
So listen to what Harnoncourt does with the last three symphonies. It has mistakes, it makes the most fastidious composer in the world a little sloppy as Harnoncourt's performances always were, but the whole Mozart, standing aside the guillotine, is here - so a creature of the 18th century that he know everything wrong with it, and is all too willing to blow the whole thing up. This is the sense you need from Mozart operas as well as the symphonies, and no one, not even Harnoncourt, has gotten there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhFu8wC5Big
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