The Cambridge Companion to Mozart (Cambridge Companions to Music)

The Cambridge Companion to Mozart (Cambridge Companions to Music)

Language: English

Pages: 314

ISBN: 0521001927

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Bridging the gap between scholarly and popular images of Mozart, this volume provides comprehensive coverage of all of his important works; the reception of his music since his death; the contexts which inform his work and his significance as a performer. It paints a rounded yet focused picture of one of the most revered artists of all time and enhances readers' appreciation of his extraordinary output.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

figures of the German and Austrian Enlightenment, including Salomon Gessner, Christoph Martin Wieland, Joseph von Sonnenfels, and Aloys Blumauer, and it seems inconceivable that he would not have read from the works of people with whom he actually engaged in discussion. As for some of the other writers, such as Moli`ere, Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Pezzl, evidence suggests he knew their works; the closeness of his own Don Giovanni to Moli`ere’s Dom Juan or the telltale similarity between his

and individual phrases split between voices, we recognize that dialogue in K. 467/ii mainly constitutes a sophisticated version of Reicha’s third type, imitation.13 Above all, dialogic procedures witnessed in the opening ritornello (bars 1–22) – namely the F–A–C and C–C –D accompanimental figures in the lower strings in bars 1 and 18–19 taken up immediately in the first violin’s and winds’ melodic material respectively and the perpetual quaver-triplet accompaniment passed from strings to winds in

specifically to the style of these works. Crucially, Mozart’s ‘happy medium’ necessitates an integration of two different stylistic dimensions in his concertos, especially in the fast-paced first and last movements: display on the part of the soloist (without which a late eighteenth-century work’s generic status as a concerto would be called into question) manifest in the ‘spirited, lively’ and ‘glittering’ nature of the ‘brilliant’ style;18 and engagement between the soloist and the accompanying

a coherent period is an acceleration at the end to articulate closure, which is precisely what happens here: the peak of tension (the C s at bars 7–8) also has the slowest note values and the slowest harmonic rhythm. From this point of relative suspense there follows a stepwise melodic descent to the tonic (this makes the two halves of the period melodically symmetrical), an acceleration of harmony – from one to four changes per bar – and also one of rhythm – from minims to quavers with a

high tessitura as from other forms of compositional inventiveness; one aria extends higher than those of the Queen of Night in Die Zauberfl¨ote, a role created by her sister Josefa.12 Mozart set Metastasio’s text ‘Alcandro, lo confesso . . . Non so` d’onde viene’ for Aloysia (K. 294) in 1778, and then again in 1787 (K. 512) for the magnificent bass, Ludwig Fischer, who had created Osmin in Die Entf¨uhrung. The settings have little in common beyond the broadest aspect of form, a modified da 150

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