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The last four Mozart concertos are not only the high achievement of the classical form, they are also infectious, popular, seamless, and fun. You don’t want to think about them. You just want to hear them.
First among firsts, the 20th is also very different from the other three. It has the aura of death hanging over it, like the chromatic scale in Don Giovanni (1787), where you hear him going to hell from the first page of the opera. The ultimate dramatic foreshadowing. (Mozart wrote
the Overture to Don Giovanni in three hours, starting at midnight the day the opera was to open. He just pulled the important themes out of the opera itself.) Much of Don Giovanni is also in D minor, as is the Piano Concer- to No. 20. George Bernard Shaw said he wanted Mozart played at his funeral, because Mozart, more than Liszt, Beethoven, or Wagner, understood death.
You’d think that Mozart’s absolute and omnipresent joy would indicate a kind of Forrest Gump, immune to any seriousness, but in fact Shaw was prescient in seeing the skull lurking at the edge of the canvas. My own teacher
said you had to know Schoenberg to understand Mozart, because you had to know the void lurking just over the horizon of Mozart’s forced gaiety, the atonality that Mozart approaches at times but pulls back before he goes too far.
A tragedy is just a comedy gone bad, as in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, where the play is about to turn into a complete tragedy when the Duke gets home and all ends happily, if unconvincingly. The brutal role-playing in Così fan tutte (Much Ado About Nothing has essentially the same plot) ends in a very unconvincing about-face at the end, where the happy ending leaves the singers eyeing one nother warily in most modern productions. There has been too much “blood under the bridge” (in Edward Albee’s words) for happiness to be accepted without severe reserva- tions (the point of The Fantasticks). Happiness, like good- ness, is only a moral triumph when it is wrenched from the tragedy which is the human condition. Goodness isn’t a default setting: it has to be willed. It is a conscious choice.
And so the beauty of Mozart isn’t just the knee-jerk reaction
of a simpleton, a Lord Fauntleroy, a Pollyanna, an Emma.
The beauty of Mozart is wrested deliberately from darkness and death, two values which swirl like vampire bats around the great scaffolding of the 20th concerto. (Only the 20th and the 24th concertos are written in minor keys.)
The despair of the first movement is repeated in the mid-section inferno of the second movement, but in the final movement all is forgiven, and the concerto ends with absolute jubilance, a Viennese dance (Mozart spent his last decade in Vienna and in its suburb Alsergrund). The abyss is averted.
But is insouciance, indifference, a happy dance in D major enough to blot out the maw of hell itself which has been revealed to us? This is the eschatological question always introduced by D minor. Did he who made the Lamb make thee? How can the lord of the dance tolerate the devil? How can absolute evil (D minor) exist in a world where the purity of D major coexists with it? (That it can is the revelation of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet.)
It is psychologically interesting that Mozart doesn’t think the relative major of D minor (F major, the key of the second movement Romanze) is the solution to the horror of D minor. Somehow F major would be too pat, too tra- ditional, too expectable. What is needed is a one-on-one, a face in the mirror which isn’t yours, a chilling last-minute swap to make the redemption equal to the damnation.
D minor must convert to D major.
To paraphrase a quote attributed to St. Augustine (by way of Samuel Beckett, Noam Chomsky, and Leonard Bernstein): “Do not fear that one of the thieves (crucified next to Christ at Golgotha) is damned. But do not presume that one of the thieves is saved.”
We are left on edge, finally. Too much has happened to accept the happy lovers as the ultimate resolution of any story. Don Giovanni himself now dominates the narrative. It is time for high opera.
254 The Music at Tippet Rise