Just the facts, ma'am, about the Mozarts

One of the best classes I ever took was called Music in the Middle Ages. It was my senior year at Eastman and the course was taught by Dr. Hendrik van der Werf. I learned a lot about medieval music, but the most important lesson was one that was more universal. Dr. van der Werf taught us to think critically about all the historical information and commentary we were reading, even when it was written by experts in the field. His big question always was: how do you know? Are you sure you know? What are you basing your ideas on? In the case of the middle ages, he pointed out that we use the music that has survived to draw conclusions. We don't know how much music originally existed, so we can't know how much was lost over time or what percentage of the original amount what we have is. Do we have 50% and 50% is lost? Do we have only 10%, or 75%? We don't know. We could be missing music that would throw a very different light on music in the Middle Ages. The message was, any conclusions we make from the existing evidence, including the artwork of the time, must be provisional and subject to rethinking.

This idea of examining evidence and also thinking critically about it obviously applies to many parts of life - politics, advertising, all those scientific studies that turn out to have been funded by an interested industry. However, I have been thinking about Dr. van der Werf's concept in relation to the Mozart biographies I have been reading.

I was impressed with Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart and his use of primary documents in making his points. I also thought that Jane Glover solidly supported her points with the use of letters and scores. But even as I read them, I wondered about how they used the letters of the Mozart family. The letters are so extensive and nearly everyone who uses them only quotes bits, often the same letters over and over. Even if you get a book of the letters, they aren't all in there because there are so many.

One of my summer projects was to find and read The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context by Ruth Halliwell. This was a "project" because it is a very expensive book, so I needed to find a library with a copy. This involved getting a library card for the Northwestern University Library and checking out the book, which is 788 pages long (though the very extensive bibliography is part of those pages). So there was a significant investment of time on my part in traveling and then reading, but it was worth it. The Mozart Family is a wonderful book. Halliwell has read all the letters, as well as Nannerl's diaries and other primary sources. She puts into context some of the quotations that have been used out of context, and she notes where a statement is just mysterious and we don't really know what the author was trying to say. Halliwell also gives an amazing amount of background information, such as the political situation, economics of the Salzburg area, and what daily life was like at the time.

One lesson I got from reading this was how broad and minutely detailed the historian's work is. Simultaneously! For an example of the minute details, Halliwell includes a long explanation of how Leopold and Nannerl communicated after her marriage and move to St. Gilgen, while Leopold remained in Salzburg. The two tradespeople who carried letters and parcels back and forth are identified and details about them are given, as well as the particular days and times they would come and go. How Leopold would quickly shop for Nannerl's requested items and send a response is also documented. It is an unexpected look into the 18th century. There are also highly detailed sections on the medicine of the time and smallpox, which crosses over into religion and the state of vaccines.

Echoing the problems of studying the Middle Ages, quite a few of the letters have been lost. We know this because in some cases the replies still exist. Scholars have actually worked out a chronological sequence of letters, giving numbers to both existing and missing letters, though there are missing letters that haven't been entered into this system.

I came away from Solomon's biography thinking that Leopold Mozart was a tyrannical control freak who interfered with both of his children's lives and happiness and that Wolfgang was a visionary musician with reasonable plans who finally had to escape from his family in order to write the music he needed to write. After reading Halliwell's look at the Mozart family (which is not a biography of Wolfgang Mozart) I had a more nuanced view of both men. Leopold had valid concerns about some of his son's plans, based on his own experiences touring with the family, for example. Wolfgang was neither an eternal child, as some writers depict him, but neither was he always kind and sensible. Does Halliwell draw her own conclusions, like other biographers? Yes, but as I read the book, it was always clear to me when she was giving her own opinion or interpretation. For example, she presents quite a bit of evidence that Leopold loved Nannerl and was a good father to her, as opposed to some other authors who present him as carrying little about her and her musical education. On the other hand, when the Mozart family arrived in Vienna during a smallpox outbreak, Leopold took Wolfgang and fled to a safer location. Halliwell states that the conclusion that Leopold valued Wolfgang above Nannerl appears unavoidable.

Author bias in biography is inevitable. Just as a reader needs to consider the source of the information being presented, so he or she also needs to be aware that no author is completely neutral. I find that this makes reading biographies more interesting. It's another layer to consider.

The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context is a wonderful book for learning more about the time and place of the Mozart family. Next - did people have more fun in the 18th century?

Mozart in Fiction: the LAST Nannerl Novel

The last of the novels about Nannerl Mozart, that I located is titled Mozart's Sister, (obviously a popular title), by Rita Charbonnier. I did not like this book.

While it is clear that the author knows something about Mozart and his family, the characters are two-dimensional caricatures of the real historical people. Leopold Mozart is depicted as uniformly stern, doting only on his son and treating Nannerl almost as if she didn't exist, interacting with her only to stifle her musical abilities. Anna Maria, the mother of Nannerl and Wolfgang, appears to be coarse and uneducated, her dialogue peppered with swearing. The first appearance of Nannerl shows her as a strange, possibly autistic, little girl with a gift for music. Wolfgang is self-centered and casually cruel to others.

The events also do not follow the historical record. Captain d'Ippold was in reality a lifelong friend of the Mozart family, as well as a suitor of Nannerl's. In this novel he rejects Nannerl and her family and deliberately moves to another city to get away from them. When Nannerl meets her future husband, Baron Johann Baptist Franz von Berchtold zu Sonnenburg, he is a charming, handsome man, though in reality he was quite a bit older than Nannerl and appears to have been somewhat of a curmudgeon. His children have all been given now names, too. That seems like a small point, but if the real names are easily available, which they are, and the book is filled with real people, why change their names?

Even before I finished the book, I started considering why I disliked it so much. I enjoy historical fiction and read a lot of it. I recognize that everything in a historical novel will not be true. How much needs to be true, or what aspects of history need to be preserved in a novel?

A problem with historical fiction is that readers take the fiction parts as fact. I recently participated in an online discussion thread on education in which one writer sited Salieri's killing of Mozart in the Amadeus movie to make a point about some people's jealousy of gifted individuals. The person making the comment and the person who responded to it both believed that Salieri really did kill Mozart. I jumped in with the generally accepted facts about Mozart's death as well as what we know about Salieri.

I used to have my 4th graders read Mr. Revere and I, a historical novel narrated by Paul Revere's horse. I really like this book and it brings parts of the American Revolution to life for young readers. It doesn't bother me that a horse is telling the story, though I made a point in teaching with the book to clarify aspects of the story that were not historically accurate, such as that the real horse that Revere rode on his famous ride was a borrowed horse, not his own. However, the Revere family and other historical figures, such as Samuel Adams, are depicted realistically, and the important events of the time are also accurate.

Then I began thinking about the other Mozart novels I read. They all include some fiction, of course. My favorite turns out to be the first one I read, Mozart's Last Aria. Notable fictions that author Matt Rees has created include Nannerl making a trip to Vienna after her brother's death and having one character die who in reality lived a reasonably long life. Both these elements are important to the plot, and Rees includes extensive notes in his afterword about the history behind the story that explain what he changed. He also has a discography of the music referred to in the story and an explanation of how he structured the plot. 

I find that whenever I read historical fiction I always wonder what's true and what the author made up. That is what inspired me to start reading nonfiction about Mozart. The afternotes and discography that Matt Rees included at the end of Mozart's Last Aria enhanced the reading experience for me and saved me from searching for some answers. I also think that including actual works of Mozart as important parts of the plot is excellent!

There is one more novel that I haven't yet read, this one being about Anna Maria Mozart. There's is also a movie titled Mozart's Sister that I haven't seen. For now, though, I'm reading another nonfiction work, The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context. The author has done extensive research with the primary documents. I'm looking forward to reading it and then writing about it!

Tribute Concert for Dale Clevenger

Dale Clevenger has retired from the Chicago Symphony; his last concert was Tuesday. The send-off at the tribute concert on Monday from the CSO, colleagues, students, and friends was awe-inspiring.

As a former Clevenger student I was thrilled to receive an invitation, not just to the concert, but to play in a large horn choir made up of his students, former students, and colleagues. My daughter Jamie was invited, too, as a current Clevenger student. Our piece was the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony, a work strongly connected with Dale. If you have never listened to the Chicago Symphony recording of Mahler's 5th with Georg Solti conducting, go do that right now! Here is the horn obbligato from the 3rd movement, with Daniel Barenboim conducting:


We all arrived at Buntrock Hall at Symphony Center for the rehearsal on Monday morning. Nearly 70 horn players had come from all over the country, Europe, and Japan to play in this concert. Buntrock Hall was filled with horn playing and conversation as we all reconnected with our colleagues. I talked with people I hadn't seen in 30 years, horn players I knew when I was in the Civic Orchestra, and friends of Jamie, people I had never met before -- all horn players!

After the warm-up time, we went onto the stage of Orchestra Hall and rehearsed the Adagietto with Dale conducting. It was exciting and a bit nerve-wracking to be playing on the stage with hornists like Norm Schweikert, Eric Ruske, Jeff Nelsen, Gail Williams, and the CSO horn section! In addition to being a great horn player, Dale is also a fine conductor and used our short rehearsal time to the best advantage.

After the rehearsal, while most of us went out to find some lunch, Sarah Willis (4th horn in the Berlin Philharmonic) held a special Horn Hangout via the Internet as part of the tribute. (I watched it later on youtube.) Many people in Chicago, Italy, and other places came on to offer congratulations, memories, and thanks to Dale. His son Jesse Clevenger, a fine horn player himself, talks near the end of the session; his thoughtful and deeply felt remarks go to the heart of why Dale is such a great musician. The entire video is well worth watching:

Cut to the concert! The horn choir, all dressed in black, were all given seats in the terrace (behind the stage). The CSO Brass opened the concert with a Gabrieli Canzon. Dale conducted the entire program except for the Mozart Symphony #25. He brought a box of tissues with him, which he showed to the audience. The CSO Brass were superb, as always. Next, the other five members of the horn section -- Dan Gingrich, Jim Smelser, Dave Griffin, Oto Carrillo, and Susanna Gaunt --  played the Mozart 3rd horn concerto arranged for 5 horns and strings by Dan Gingrich. This was such an inventive arrangement, with the solo phrases moving through the section and the horns taking the woodwind parts as well. A standing ovation followed. The CSO Brass came back on to perform parts of Der Rosenkavalier. Beautiful and impressive. Another standing ovation. During the applause, the brass gave Dale a tusch, an improvised fanfare given by brass (and sometimes percussion). It is a sign of the highest respect and is only rarely given. I have only seen a couple of tusches, one was for Carlo Maria Giulini when he stepped down as Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony, and one for Georg Solti when he retired.

The chair for the tribute video.

A video tribute, with interviews with a number of CSO players followed. Before beginning the video, the stage crew brought out a large, comfy chair for Dale. The video was both moving and funny. It has been circulated on Facebook, but here is the link:  http://cso.org/ListenAndWatch/Details.aspx?id=24191    

The concert continued with two movements of Mozart Symphony #25. This is the piece that opens the movie Amadeus.   Ricardo Muti conducted this piece, which features some high, acrobatic horn parts. The last piece on the program was the Adagietto. Ian Harwood, who was in charge of us horn players and did an awesome job with that, had told us that we needed to leave the terrace quickly, pick up our horns and music, and get on the stage as soon as possible. So at the close of the Mozart, most of the terrace stood up and left. We did move quickly, though most of us wanted to play a few notes before playing on stage! I ended up toward the back of the crowd and the sight of 70 musicians all carrying horns, streaming down the circular stairs of the rotunda and into the backstage area was a striking spectacle. I wish someone had been there with a camera. We crowded onto the stage and Dale gave the downbeat. Someone else will have to comment on how well we did. It was an intense experience that seemed to go by in an instant. Lovely arrangement for horn choir by John Schreckengost. Dale and the choir received a standing ovation.

Maestro Muti watching the horn choir

Afterwards there were greetings and farewells in the rotunda, and then about half of the 70 horn players went across Wabash to the Exchequer for pizza and more chatting. The next morning I said good-bye to my friend Henry, who drove 11 hours from Knoxville to attend and play in this concert.  

I know from talking with other horn players and friends in the audience that this was a truly special occasion for people. I think it's because of Dale's stature as a musician, a horn player  and a teacher. When I play horn, it's his sound that's in my ear and his voice in my head. But it's also because of the kind of person he is. He is a very generous, "people" person, always ready to include new people in his life.

Two nights after the tribute I was at a rehearsal with a young horn player, still in college, who had also played in the concert. We both agreed that we were still buzzing from the whole experience. We're not alone.  To echo my friend Henry, "It was a night I shall never forget."      

Joe Fournier, Joe Fournier Studios

                    

Rosetti Concerto for Two Horns

A week ago today my daughter Jamie Leff and Jesse Clevenger played two movements of one of Rosetti's concertos for two horns with the Buffalo Grove Symphonic Band. It's a charming piece and they played it beautifully. Here's a video of their performance (taken with an iPhone from the front row).

This is the concerto numbered C57 in Eb.

Mozart in fiction, part 5

I finished reading Mozart: A Life by Maynard Solomon, but I'm going to postpone writing about it until a later post. I will say that it's a fantastic book, with lots of research behind it. At times it was as gripping as a really well-written novel.

So, speaking of novels, I also finished another of the novels about Nannerl Mozart, this one being Mozart's Sister by Nancy Moser. This begins in the cemetery in Vienna, with Nannerl searching for her brother's grave, then flashes back to her childhood of exciting travels and performances with Wolfgang. This Nannerl is wide-eyed, describing the exotic cities, beautiful clothes, and stunning concerts that she and Wolfgang gave, while also making short asides revealing the negative. The novel ends with Nannerl having made a success of her marriage and step-children, with a brief coda taking place at the end of her life. Since she is a narrator, she naturally explains all her actions and decisions as being logical, or glosses over the parts of her real life history that put her in a poor light. Wolfgang (whom she always calls Wolfie though in actuality his family called him Wolferl) is the thoughtless, carefree prodigy who lives in the moment with no thought for the future. Leopold is definitely the boss in the family, whom Nannerl argues with as a young girl, but comes to rely on as an adult.

I am getting tired of novels about Nannerl, but maybe it's because I haven't read a really good one yet. There's one more to read, and there's also a movie. Perhaps I will decide that the truth is more interesting than the fiction.

Leopold Mozart: Tiger Dad?

I haven't read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, but I have read about it. And, it struck me as I was reading Mozart: A Life by Maynard Solomon, that Leopold Mozart was something of a tiger parent himself.

From what I gather, the thought behind tiger parenting is to demand the highest level of achievement from one's children, even when that means acting in ways that some would call unnecessarily harsh. For example, Ms. Chua told her daughter that the homemade birthday card the girl made for her wasn't good enough. (In her defense, she later explained it was a folded piece of paper with a smiley face drawn on it that had taken her daughter almost no time or thought to do.) The tiger mom also drills her children in areas like math both so they will get better and so they will feel more confident and like the subject.

The only acceptable musical instruments for the children of a tiger parent are violin or piano, or both, and hours of daily practice are required. Both of Ms. Chua's children demonstrated a high level of achievement in music, one performing at Carnegie Hall, though the other eventually rebelled and quit, taking up tennis instead.

Obviously, a tiger parent exerts a great deal of control over his or her children. The ultimate goal of the tiger mom is the success of her children, which she can take pride in. This mother seems to realize that in the end, her children will have their own lives, which she has worked hard to prepare them for.

Leopold Mozart was a working professional musician, with a home filled with music through friends and students. It was an ideal environment for the talents of his children to surface and be nurtured. The family letters and others' accounts show that Leopold loved his children dearly, especially Wolfgang, but that he was quite an autocratic parent as well. He did require hours of practice from both children. Wolfgang played both piano and violin extremely well, and Nannerl was an excellent pianist as well. (Most likely Nannerl did not play the violin because of the standard for the idealized female countenance, which the violin would have pulled askew.) He pushed them to work hard, which probably resulted in the several serious illness Wolfgang and Nannerl had in childhood. At one point on tour Nannerl received last rites. Leopold also took total charge of his children's education. Neither child went to school or had tutors. He appears to have done an excellent job. Wolfgang and Nannerl were well read and spoke several languages.

Unlike the tiger parent of the 21st century, Leopold could not let go of his children as they grew up. In Mozart: A Life, Solomon uses the family letters to show that Leopold tried to convince Wolfgang that he (Wolfgang) was incapable of managing on his own. Leopold wrote to him, arguing that Wolfgang had no experience arranging travel and would not be able to cope with these demands. He later tried to persuade Wolfgang that he should write pieces that people would like and not experiment with new ideas, and that he should move back to Salzburg and become a court violinist and organist. Nannerl didn't marry until she was in her 30s, very unusual for the time. Though there is nothing to indicate why she didn't marry earlier when she had suitors, some have speculated that Leopold either didn't find any of the potential husbands good enough, or he wanted to keep Nannerl at home to take care of him.

So was Leopold Mozart a tiger dad? He had some of the characteristics of one, but also had some unusual ideas about the goal of child rearing.

Mysterious Portraits

The New York Times recently ran an article in the Arts section titled "Portraits of Mystery: Wolfgang, Is that You?" The International Mozarteum Foundation, which is located in Salzburg, currently has an exhibition of Mozart portraits. According to the article, there are 14 portraits in various media that were done during Mozart's lifetime. The Mozarteum show includes 12 of these, nine of which belong to the Mozarteum. Recent research has revealed some new information about some of the images. The most famous portrait, the unfinished painting by Joseph Lange, Mozart's brother-in-law, was analyzed using x-rays and infrared. This showed that a smaller completed portrait had been mounted on the canvas, showing that the unfinished painting is an enlargement of the smaller complete work. Another painting was determined after cleaning to not be Mozart. A small portrait on ivory from 1783 that experts had doubts about is now proved to be authentic.

Portrait of Mozart by Joseph Lange

To me, as a non-expert, it is interesting how different the portraits look from one another. Most show Mozart with a full face and a bit of a double chin, though a miniature painted when he was about 16 years old depicts him as thin. Though the article doesn't address this, I thought it may have been taken after one of Mozart's illnesses. He had a number of serious illnesses as a child. The portrait from 1783, when he was about 26 looks very young -- I thought it was of him as a child.

A portrait that I find truly mysterious is the one at the Sibley Library in Rochester, New York. Sibley is the music library of the Eastman School of Music. When my husband and I went back for a reunion in 1991, the new library had been recently completed and we were able to take of tour. Going around a corner, we came to the bottom of the stairs and a striking view of a large portrait of a smiling Mozart. Everyone in our group exclaimed over it -- it's a beautiful painting and he's smiling! According to the library's web site, the painting is by Johann Heinrich Tischbein, a German painter of the 18th century. The library has no image of the painting on its website, and I have not found the picture that I remember anywhere else. Is it authentic? Tischbein died in 1788, so he would have had to paint  it during Mozart's life (as he died in 1791). If so, it should be counted among the 14 portraits painted during his life. There is no mention of it in the New York Times article. Further investigation is needed!