The German Genius

This may in part reflect his wide use of folk melodies—especially those from Croatia—which kept his music simple, direct and accessible. He was clear about his talent. “I was cut off from the world; and since there was no one to confuse or trouble me, I was forced to become original.” 11
    Despite his brilliance as an orchestral composer, Haydn himself had hope of writing a great opera. It was never to be realized, though there are, in The Creation , moments where this possibility is hinted at. It was instead Mozart who shone in that vein. Haydn and Mozart met several times in the last decade of the latter’s life (Mozart died in 1791). Comparing their output, it is clear each influenced the other, so much so that, as Malcolm Pasley says, “run-of-the-mill Haydn is barely distinguishable from run-ofthe-mill Mozart.” At their greatest, on the other hand, the two composers are unmistakable.
    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s short life (1756–91) was very different from that of Haydn. He was born into a cultured musical family in which his father, Leopold (whose works are still occasionally heard today), was a musician at the court of the archbishop of Salzburg. Wolfgang was an infant prodigy, “a prodigy among prodigies”: he could play the pianoforte at three and could invent short compositions at five. At seven he added the violin to the piano, accompanying his sister, Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, and together they were taken by their father on a series of sensational tours of European cities (he was eight when they started and eleven when they finished). Mozart wrote his first opera, La finta semplice , when he was twelve. He was appointed court musician at Salzburg and later at Vienna and, like Haydn, lived much of his career under a patron, many of his works being composed for particular court functions (this is true, for instance, of the three great string quartets, K. 575, K. 589, and K. 590). Mozart was nothing if not practical, and other works were written for specific outstanding performers, as with the clarinet concerto, written for the virtuoso Anton Stadler, the leading performer of the time on what was then still a new instrument. 12
    For musicologists, it is Mozart’s development of the solo part that comprises his most distinctive contribution. Traditionally, in the early eighteenth century, in a concerto the musical argument was passed back and forth between the soloist and the orchestra, a principle originally derived from the concerto grosso, in which a group of soloists is pitched against the orchestra. Mozart evolved the independence of the solo instrument by increasing the virtuosity required to play his beautiful themes. It was also under his guidance that the concerto acquired three movements, which became standard. The first movement was generally an allegro, followed by a second, slow movement, terminating with a rondo. This too became a standard pattern throughout the nineteenth century.
    Despite the popularity of his classical concertos, it is Mozart’s piano concertos (twenty-five of them) and his last three great symphonies—no. 39 in E-flat major (K. 543), no. 40 in G minor (K. 550), and no. 41 in C major (the Jupiter , K. 551)—that are generally regarded as the most beautiful music the world has to offer. For many people, however, even they pale alongside his achievements in opera. “In opera he had—many would say has—no equal.” 13
    It may have been Gluck who formally and originally spelled out what the new form of opera was trying to achieve, but it was Mozart who fulfilled the new ideal better—incomparably better—than anyone else. 14 In Mozart, musical characterization is so vivid and reflects and amplifies the text so much that it produces a psychological depth to his characters that is simply nonexistent in earlier composers, a depth from which the drama emerges “directly and urgently,” so that the music itself is the means by which motivation is conveyed. Arguably, it is in the greatest of his German operas, Die Zauberflöte ( The Magic Flute ), composed and first produced in the last year of his life, that Mozart achieves his most sublime work. If Haydn could rival him in instrumental virtuosity and Beethoven, as we shall see, in emotional depth, in the coloratura arias of the Queen of the Night there is something that has no counterpart anywhere. 15
    Haydn, Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are often pooled together as the “first Vienna