Mar
21
Mozart’s Late Style
Filed Under Classical Music |
One classical music reviewer that I’ve been reading with pleasure is Bernard Holland of NY Times. His reviews usually are shorter than most, but he is remarkably deft at describing the compositions under discussion with concision and understanding. I learn a lot from reading his reviews. Yet he is also one reviewer I disagree with the most. For example, this Glenn Gould assessment. And this morning, in the review of Brentano String Quartet’s concert featuring “late style” compositions by Brahms and Shostakovich, Holland had this to say about Mozart and late style -
Late style is less appropriate to composers who might have thought they had another 20 years to go when unexpected deaths turned middle periods into late ones. Mozart had no late period; he died suddenly in his prime.
This seems like a preposterous claim to me. I am no Mozart scholar, but there are many indications that Mozart was very much aware of his failing health and mortality in the last years. Some of his last letters to Constanze are bone-chilling, and they contain none of the youthful exuberance of his earlier letters -
If people would see into my heart, I should almost feel ashamed… To me, everything is cold - cold as ice. Everything is empty.
The letters are quoted from Andrew Steptoe’s Mozart-Da Ponte Operas, and the icy emptiness which Mozart wrote about is again described by the composer as “a kind of emptiness which hurts [him] dreadfully - a kind of longing, which is never satisfied, which never ceases, which persists and increases daily.” Late style I’d say so. Edward Said, in his magisterial On Late Style which I’d briefly discussed in a previous post, writes about the last of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas, Cosi fan tutte, as the exemplary work of the composer’s late style. In short, Said describes Cosi as a work that bears its composer’s icy sense of control and rigor, cold-heartedness disguised as comedy, and refusal to bend toward customary views of emotions, especially, of love.
I suspect that Bernard Holland’s refusal of Mozart’s late style stems from a rather elementary view of what late style might be, insofar as today’s review is concerned. He describes Mendelssohn’s late quartet as “bitter and death-ridden… an act of mourning,” and Shostakovich of the Quartet #15 as “a man writing his own obituary.” Which are apt descriptions for those particular compositions, but I wonder if those phrases color the Holland’s notion of late style, as well. Not every work of late style veers toward mourning. Beethoven’s last works, for example. Yes, there is the mournful Richard Strauss of Four Last Songs and Metamorphosen, but also of Der Rosenkavalier: rigorously technical, impenetrable.
And there is Mozart.
(Image: by Anthony Goicolea)
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