• 2 months ago
The Joy of Mozart
Transcript
00:00Mozart.
00:02Otherworldly genius.
00:06Childlike naïve.
00:09Divine gift from God.
00:13Serene marble bust of transcendent perfection.
00:19Or even a bowl of perfectly smooth chocolate.
00:23All of it, the stuff of myth and legend.
00:27Mozart, you see, was a human being, just like you and me.
00:31Except he could express the pain and pleasure,
00:35the joy and darkness of being human,
00:38more completely and more humanly than any other composer.
00:43His music isn't merely perfect or beautiful or genius.
00:48It's visceral.
00:51Violent.
00:54Avant-garde and powerfully expressive.
01:00And it was written by a composer and a person who's still modern today.
01:05Someone who made mistakes
01:07and who tried unbelievably hard to make them right.
01:12Welcome to the joy of Mozart.
01:24Vienna put up this statue in 1896.
01:28It's a monumental fiction about Mozart's life and music,
01:32an excrescence of marble, bronze and gold leaf
01:36that turns Mozart into a hyper-romantic genius,
01:40someone literally and figuratively above the rest of humanity,
01:44someone different from us.
01:46It's ludicrous.
01:48So what we have to do, for Mozart's sake and our own,
01:52is take him off the plinth.
02:00It was a strange revelation the first time I heard Mozart's music.
02:04I've spent years trying to explain why Mozart's A-major symphony, K201,
02:09affected me so deeply when I heard it played
02:12by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the age of seven.
02:16I do know, though, it wasn't about beauty or perfection.
02:20It was about exactly the opposite.
02:27To try to find my Mozart, the one who explains who I am,
02:32I'm starting at the end, here in Vienna,
02:34where he lived for the last ten years of his life from 1781.
02:40In a house on this spot, on the 5th of December,
02:431791, Mozart died.
02:45And at the same moment, something else was born.
02:49The Mozart myth.
02:51The myth becomes powerful because people want to believe it.
02:55I don't think you should dismiss the myths
02:58simply because they are factually not completely true.
03:05They tell us an enormous amount about what we want to believe
03:09about great composers.
03:11About inspiration, about people who die young,
03:14about people whose work is unfinished.
03:18And some of these myths are absolutely reflected in fact.
03:23Mozart, the child prodigy, was a fact.
03:26Born in Salzburg in 1756,
03:28he composed over 600 pieces of catalogue music
03:32in a life lasting a mere 35 years,
03:34starting at the tender age of five.
03:37The infant genius was mythologised most vividly
03:40in Hollywood's Oscar-gobbling movie Amadeus.
03:46This lavish biopic imagined all the tricks
03:49that Wolfgang and his sister were made to perform
03:52by their father Leopold as he paraded them
03:54around the courts of Europe,
03:56travelling from country to country by carriage.
04:00By the age of ten, Mozart had already written
04:03some astonishing sonatas and symphonies.
04:08It's a powerful story that could apply to so many artists
04:13that here they are, divinely inspired geniuses
04:17whose worth is not reckoned with.
04:20It's a powerful story that could apply to so many artists
04:24that here they are, divinely inspired geniuses
04:28whose worth is not recognised
04:30and they are continually exploited by people
04:34who take advantage of them.
04:36It makes him appear at once human because of this innocence,
04:42but divine because his music comes from another source.
04:47Maybe it's unprecedented, this talent to come from wherever,
04:51and for it to be so perfect and just to come out like that
04:55and to write these works at such a young age.
05:01Mozart's favourite string instrument was the viola.
05:05It's musician Lawrence Powers too.
05:08He's often played Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante,
05:11written in response to the composer's early experiences
05:14of adult life with its disappointments and tragedies.
05:21It's a big responsibility when you play this music.
05:24I don't know why, but there's an extra level
05:27of sort of adrenaline and nerves when dealing with that music.
05:31His mother had just died while he was away.
05:33He was looking for employment. He didn't find employment.
05:36He was looking for a wife who turned him down.
05:38I'm sure he would have performed this with his father
05:41and I think there's some sort of role there.
05:44The viola has this wonderfully sort of conciliatory role.
05:48It's always sort of looking after the violin
05:51which is somehow more worried and questioning.
06:04You already start to feel that the viola's sort of answering
06:08in a very sort of fatherly way.
06:22And the conversation becomes sort of heartbreaking at points.
06:26It's very special.
06:37It's this sense of dialogue in that piece, I think,
06:41that sort of make it sort of his first mature piece.
06:51VIOLIN PLAYS
07:08Why do you think Mozart wanted to play the viola himself
07:12as opposed to the violin or even the cello?
07:15It's a very sort of emotional-sounding instrument, I think.
07:19It's very close to the speaking voice.
07:21It has a certain amount of pathos to it,
07:24just naturally, even when you tune a viola, it has that.
07:37I mean, I was thinking on the way here,
07:39he was 22 when he wrote Concertante,
07:41which is obviously a masterpiece.
07:43You know, I can't sort of get my head around that.
07:47I mean, it opens up lots of questions, not just musical.
07:55Another stubborn Mozart myth
07:57is that his music was written down perfectly first time,
08:01as if dictated directly by God.
08:04I met Professor Cliff Eisen in the British Library
08:07to discover first-hand the scribbled, scratchy truth.
08:11Have a look at this, then.
08:13This is the final page of Mozart's own manuscript
08:17of the Hantz Quartet,
08:19which is the B-flat major vocal rating 458.
08:22Now look, this is the most defiant crossing out.
08:25This goes beyond a mistake.
08:27He didn't want anyone to see.
08:29Even through all this cross-hatching,
08:31you can hardly see what he's trying to rub out.
08:34This is actually a passage that was meant to be inserted
08:37earlier in the piece, and then decided
08:39that he didn't want that insertion after all.
08:41He made a lot more attempts to kind of go through the piece
08:44and decide what works and what doesn't work.
08:46He's changing his mind.
08:48He's not always sure, far from being always sure, he's not.
08:51In fact, many other pages in these 6 quartets
08:54dedicated to Haydn reveal the same thing.
08:56All of these documents that are spread around us
08:59are treated and have been treated for close on 200 years
09:03as relics that we don't interrogate in any way
09:06to find out more about the person or more about the times,
09:09and yet they aren't relics.
09:11They're living documents of a variety of different processes
09:14and a variety of different times, places,
09:17activities that Mozart was involved with.
09:22One of the most touching documents in all of Mozart's life
09:27is that thematic catalogue
09:29where he writes out the beginnings of his pieces
09:32from 1784 onwards.
09:34And the touching thing about that document,
09:37which is in the British Library and can be seen,
09:40is not the lists of works,
09:43but the fact that when you get to the end of it,
09:46there are pages and pages of empty, unfilled staves.
09:51The thematic catalogue of all of my works
09:54from February 1784 until the month when he's left a space for the year,
09:58he's written one because he wasn't sure
10:00whether this was going to be still the 17th, the 18th century
10:03or indeed the beginning of the 19th century and then a full stop,
10:06but he never finished because he died in 1791.
10:09So the first page then is the first list of pieces.
10:12He lived to complete, he lived to fill in 29 of the 40 or so pages.
10:19Here's the very final page.
10:21Now, in a way, the most obviously moving thing about what happens
10:24is the empty pages.
10:26Look at the empty staves, the pieces he wouldn't write.
10:30This doesn't conjure up for me the last moments of Mozart
10:38and the idea that it's some kind of testamentary page.
10:45The other thing that I'm impressed with
10:48is what people want to make of this.
10:51It becomes one of the living,
10:55surviving artefacts of the fact of Mozart's premature death.
11:01It conjures up this story that we want to believe,
11:07this idea of a life cut off.
11:09But Cliff, what's the problem with this?
11:11Clearly, look, just turning to this page of the next catalogue,
11:14this is a life unfit, it doesn't matter how we play it.
11:17In a way, to take the idea of what we might feel about it
11:20out of the equation, you know, this was a life cut short.
11:23No, no, I don't mean in any way to diminish the impact
11:28of Mozart's premature death
11:30and all of the perfectly natural feelings and wishes and desires
11:34and hopes and aspirations that we might have
11:36that were unfulfilled because of it.
11:38Rather, I think what I'm saying is that Mozart becomes reified,
11:42Mozart becomes removed from...
11:44This is just, this is a great heroic mythical story in some ways.
11:49And so we then are afraid to approach Mozart
11:52because of the power of this story.
11:54Because he's not like us.
11:56He's not like us, he's not like us.
11:58And yet that seems like such an uncommonsensical thing.
12:03And it's an idea we don't attribute to other artists.
12:06We've discussed, you know, Shakespeare was a real person.
12:09Leonardo was a real person.
12:11They were all real people.
12:14But somehow Mozart became not an engaged,
12:19living, genuine human being anymore.
12:27And here is the myth made real.
12:30These chocolate Mozart balls are the tip of the Mozart mythberg.
12:35Mozart reified into little gold-wrapped confections
12:39and the sound of saccharine
12:41and the soupy recording of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
12:45Lovely.
12:49It occurs to me what these things actually are.
12:52They're transubstantiations of the Mozartian myth.
12:56People literally want to eat a piece of him.
12:59So the question is, of course, what they in fact taste like.
13:03Rather nice dark chocolate on the outside.
13:07Incredibly sweet.
13:09Marzipan and praline.
13:13Really quite sickly, in fact.
13:15These are really the confectionary embodiment of sentimentality.
13:20I mean, I'm going to finish it, obviously.
13:23Mm, not bad.
13:26I think Mozart himself would have been, A, astonished,
13:29but, B, really chuffed to know that,
13:33for perpetuity, he was going to be in a chocolate ball.
13:37I mean, that would have amused him on many levels.
13:41Or that all this sort of tackiness, actually,
13:45I think he would have loved it.
13:48But there's a bitterness in that sweetness too.
13:51Mozart may have been born in Salzburg,
13:53but the city treated him as no more than a hired hand when he was there.
14:04It was only on the 50th anniversary of his death in 1841
14:08that they claimed him as their own.
14:10Salzburg erected this statue in his honour in the old market,
14:14which they renamed the Mozart Platz.
14:20That, I think, was the beginning of the Mozart industry.
14:24And after that, you know, it has just steamrolled and steamrolled.
14:29And it's almost as if they're toting for all those years
14:32when they behaved so badly to him.
14:35We can't be completely sure what Mozart looked like,
14:39but we can be sure that he didn't look like this.
14:43This, though, is the single most reproduced image in today's world
14:47of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
14:50This is the face of Mozart bowls.
14:53And the bowls here really is to do with the relationship
14:57between image and reality.
14:59Contemporary accounts of Mozart say that he was small,
15:02that he was pockmarked, that he had a large nose,
15:04that he had protruding eyes.
15:06None of that is reflected in this Errol Flynn airbrushing
15:10that's going on here.
15:12The one thing I think I am pretty certain of is that if Mozart
15:15were to see this, the face of a more than five billion euro
15:18industry of Mozart brand, he would simply say,
15:21who the hell is this guy?
15:24And, look, Vienna's got in on the act just as much as Salzburg.
15:30Nice wigs, guys.
15:38I can't take this any longer.
15:40I can't stand the Mozart industry,
15:43not just because it airbrushes his image,
15:46but because it airbrushes his music
15:48and how we think about what it says.
15:50It airbrushes his music and how we think about what it sounds like.
15:54The industry wants you to believe that Mozart is a superficial,
15:58sentimentalised, nostalgic, courtly entertainer.
16:01But that's the exact opposite of what he spent his whole life doing.
16:05He was trying to express the full range of human expression,
16:08ambiguities, doubts.
16:10He confronts us with all of that in our essential humanity,
16:13and all of this is a betrayal.
16:21MUSIC CONTINUES
16:27But popular culture doesn't just promote an easy-listening Mozart.
16:31In the early 80s, Austrian performer Falco
16:34turned him into a new romantic hell's angel.
16:38But for Paul Morley, after a lifetime immersed in the pop industry,
16:42there's no need to turn Mozart into anything.
16:44Just take Wolfgang on your own terms.
16:50I realised that this music that I'd previously ignored or reviled
16:53because it sounded quaint or peculiar or because I didn't understand it
16:56was actually really radical,
16:58and actually mostly where the avant-garde had gone.
17:01The avant-garde, oddly, had gone into the past.
17:04You know, well, let's try Mozart then, because, you know,
17:07it's this all the time, it's souvenirs, it's the past, it's quaint.
17:11So how did you get past that?
17:13Because Mozart has had the old toghold here and there,
17:16thinking of Falco's Rock Me Amadeus,
17:18thinking of the fact that this or this bust or a version of it
17:21is on the desk of Mr Garrison in every episode of South Park.
17:24The chocolate box tinkly, powdered wigs, child genius.
17:27And I realised, of course, that everybody makes up a Mozart,
17:30so I'll make up my own Mozart.
17:32I'd strip away everything. I'd strip away this,
17:34I'd strip away the cute pictures, I'd strip away the academic side.
17:38I'd even strip away the music to an extent and just begin again.
17:42And there was a way that I could begin again, I found, very quickly,
17:45which was something I found very contemporary,
17:47very modern and very abstract, which was the K numbers.
17:52Ah, yes, the K numbers.
17:54The chronological catalogue of Mozart's works,
17:57as documented by this man, Ludwig von Kirchhoff,
18:0070 years after the composer's death.
18:03From K1, a minuet for piano written when Mozart was five,
18:07to K626, the Requiem,
18:10unfinished on his death only 30 years later.
18:16The K numbers, in a way, was my way of coming into it,
18:19like it was a little factory record,
18:21you know, a catalogue of amazing moments.
18:26And I would get to, let's say, a piano quartet,
18:29and that would be, say, 491, say, and then I would start to wonder...
18:32493. 493, OK.
18:34Then I would start to wonder, what's around it, then?
18:36And what I found startling, which really blew my mind,
18:39is that if you just go one way or the other,
18:41which means it was written more or less at the same time,
18:44on one side, you'd say, correct me again, Tom,
18:46cos I'm not good on the titles, you'd get Marriage Of Figaro.
18:49492. OK, and on the other side, oh, my God,
18:52you'd get a concerto, maybe 24?
18:54491 is the piano excerpt.
18:56I mean, but isn't that amazing?
19:05Doing the K numbers is not unlike watching an entire series
19:08of Breaking Bad over the weekend.
19:10You can do the K numbers in a week.
19:12I can do them very quickly, actually, quite a few.
19:15And if there is a way, and I'll throw it back to you, Tom, again,
19:18of explaining that the K numbers, to an extent,
19:20it's like binge-watching, it's that exciting.
19:22You know, for me, some of the K numbers,
19:24they are like a great series of Game Of Thrones.
19:31K219 is his fifth, and I think his finest, violin concerto.
19:37But it's not the numbers that excite violinist Nicola Benedetti,
19:42it's the wildness of that solo part,
19:44the different characters he's creating
19:46in just a few seconds of music.
19:49To me, it sounds like so much enjoyment
19:52in his ability to create these voices.
19:55He's just toying with the listener, with himself.
19:59He's constantly working at,
20:01how can I make this as varied as possible,
20:04as expressive as possible, and enjoying it.
20:08You can sense the almost euphoria.
20:13And I answer...
20:15It's the same material, but mine is instantly feminine, and then...
20:21And then again, low, and then...
20:31VIOLIN PLAYS
20:41It's really very extreme.
20:43You couldn't play this, like...
20:45No, well... Like, nicely. It can't be nice.
20:48Some do.
20:50I just don't ever hear Mozart like that, ever.
20:57I just don't... I don't hear it in his voice.
21:00I don't hear it in his character.
21:02There's too much natural wildness.
21:06And I think...
21:08I think Mozart, with caution, is just not doing him justice.
21:12I actually nearly hyperventilate.
21:14No, what's the thing when you stop breathing?
21:17It's the opposite of that. Yeah, you kind of asphyxiate.
21:20Right, I stop breathing. That's what I do.
21:23During the development of this second movement.
21:26The slow movement of the A major concerto, his last concerto,
21:30to me is just one of the most...
21:34VIOLIN PLAYS
21:41And now...
21:57VIOLIN PLAYS
22:04And here's when I stop breathing.
22:06VIOLIN PLAYS
22:26VIOLIN PLAYS
22:40You have a long held note in the winds.
22:45And now syncopation.
22:50And at the end of it all, silence.
22:54From the whole orchestra.
23:00And then back.
23:03And it is just the most...
23:05It's just so shocking and it literally takes your breath away.
23:08It doesn't matter how many times you hear it.
23:10One of the most unexpected and just glorious developments
23:14of a second movement ever.
23:16CHOIR SINGS
23:24From the sublime to the holy.
23:26This is Salzburg Cathedral, with its five organs,
23:29which Mozart would have played
23:31and where much of his early sacred music was first performed.
23:37It's grand, yes, but only occasionally inspired.
23:41The teenage Mozart had to write
23:43what Prince Archbishop Colorado and his court demanded.
23:46Not a recipe for commitment.
23:49So what of Mozart's relationship with Catholicism, with God?
23:53Well, I think it's possible that Salzburg turned Mozart away
23:57from the institutions of the church and of writing sacred music.
24:01It was in his unfulfilling years here,
24:03working for Archbishop Colorado in Salzburg,
24:06that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his church music,
24:09because he had to.
24:13In fact, in his later life, there are just two major sacred works,
24:17both astonishing masterpieces, but he didn't finish either of them.
24:22There was the Mass in C minor, composed with soprano solos
24:26for his wife Constanze to sing when they came to Salzburg in 1783,
24:30for the only time in their lives together,
24:33to meet Wolfgang's father, Leopold,
24:35who had disapproved of their marriage, and his sister, Nannerl.
24:39The C minor Mass was first performed here at St Peter's
24:42on 26th October 1783.
24:47PIANO PLAYS
25:18CHOIR SINGS
25:21CHOIR CONTINUES
25:44Magnificent though it is, what audiences then and now hear and heard
25:49in the Mass in C minor is only an incomplete torso.
25:52Mozart, for some reason, couldn't complete the Mass in C minor,
25:56and he never returned to it either.
25:58And then there's the Requiem,
26:00unfinished notoriously at Mozart's death on 5th December 1791,
26:05parts of which were performed for the first time
26:08here at St Michael's Church in Vienna,
26:10conducted by his friend, the librettist of the Magic Flute,
26:13Immanuel Schikaneder, just five days after he died.
26:16CHOIR SINGS
26:47PIANO PLAYS
26:52I had real problems with the religious music,
26:56because I think Mozart himself had problems with it.
26:59I mean, think of his religious music and think how unreligious it is.
27:03CHOIR SINGS
27:11His earlier pieces are not that good.
27:14Get to the C minor Mass.
27:17Written for Costanza and Salzburg? Absolutely.
27:20Unfinished? Unfinished.
27:22I mean, it starts off like an epic.
27:24You think, this is going to be colossal.
27:27And it gradually runs out of puff.
27:30The same with the Requiem.
27:33What is it?
27:35CHOIR SINGS
27:45CHOIR SINGS
27:50Is that about a relationship with God, Catholicism?
27:53I think it's to do with, in light and thought,
27:56I think it's to do with Freemasonry.
27:58I think Freemasonry is a much more important
28:03kind of centrifugal environment for Mozart.
28:10I think the religion is much more superstitious.
28:13It's more Masonic, it's more rational.
28:16Mozart has a tremendous fear of authority, a fear of dread.
28:23He can't really subscribe to the whole theological package.
28:37Mozart, the Mason, was a humanist at heart
28:40and his music is a consecration of humanity
28:43in all its messy, joyous ambiguity.
28:48I think that's closer to his true spirituality
28:51than his relationship with organised religion.
29:02Beautiful, isn't it?
29:04But I think there's something claustrophobic about Salzburg.
29:07It's hemmed in on three sides,
29:09by the fortress and by the mountains that surround it.
29:12And I think Mozart felt that sense of claustrophobia too.
29:15Ultimately, this was a place he had to escape,
29:18from his employer, Archbishop Colorado,
29:20from his father, Leopold, and his family too.
29:23Born in Salzburg, maybe, but Mozart, the musician, the composer,
29:27was formed everywhere else, in Paris, in London, in Milan,
29:30in Mannheim, in Munich, and, above all, in Vienna.
29:33Mozart had to get out.
29:38EXPLOSION
29:50Mozart arrived in Vienna in 1781,
29:53determined to rewrite the musician's rulebook.
29:59He probably performed here, in the Sala Terrena.
30:03After years of needling and frustration,
30:06Mozart made the astonishingly self-confident decision
30:09to become a freelance composer, independent of any court,
30:12a completely new phenomenon in Vienna.
30:15He knew he had as much honour as any nobleman,
30:18so why shouldn't he be their equal, rather than their lackey?
30:22Now, this really is the key moment of Mozart's adult life.
30:28His path towards personal and musical fulfilment and emancipation,
30:33from Salzburg, from his father, towards new kinds of expression
30:36and his marriage to Constanze Weber, had begun.
30:43This building was a symbol of Mozart's self-confidence,
30:47the grandest of the 14 apartments in Vienna that he lived in.
30:50He was the only composer at the time
30:52who could afford to live within Vienna's city walls.
30:55In demand was teacher, performer, impresario,
30:58as well as husband, father, pet owner and billiard player.
31:04MUSIC PLAYS
31:07This house would have thrummed and thrilled with noise all day and all night.
31:12It's also the place where some of Mozart's most important compositions
31:16were heard for the very first time.
31:18MUSIC CONTINUES
31:34MUSIC CONTINUES
31:56On the second day of his father's visit here,
31:59on the 12th February 1785,
32:01there was a performance of incredible significance
32:04that probably happened on the floorboards I'm standing on.
32:07The first three of six quartets, Mozart would dedicate to Josef Haydn.
32:12Haydn came here to watch this performance.
32:15Leopold Mozart played one of the violin parts
32:18and Mozart himself played the viola.
32:27These string quartets meant so much to him as a composer,
32:30meaning that he spent three years refining them.
32:36It's hard to imagine the effect of hearing that music for the first time,
32:40but we do have Josef Haydn's reaction.
32:43He said simply to Leopold,
32:45your son, before God, is the greatest composer I have ever known.
32:53Fine.
32:55Christian Beseidenhout's living room in London
32:58had an instrument that also came to define Mozart's life
33:01as both composer and performer, the fortepiano,
33:04a much more intimate and colourful instrument than the modern-day grand.
33:10The piano, as a piece of equipment,
33:12had evolved during Mozart's short life
33:15and he, in turn, would fulfil its as yet unrealised potential.
33:20We just have to get this one fully operational.
33:23So I tend to lift the pedal just to be sure.
33:26But there it is.
33:28This is the piece of equipment that might best serve
33:32the unbelievably mercurial and highly changeable surface texture
33:36of Mozart's music
33:38better than any other piece of equipment I'd ever played.
33:41I started learning pieces on it
33:44and that was a fascinating journey to kind of go to zero
33:48and delete the preconceptions that we have
33:50from the world of playing the modern piano
33:53without working on a piece, on this piece of equipment
33:56and see what it tells us about Mozart's playing,
33:59his conceptions of sound, his approach to the piano
34:02and how all of this is so deeply linked on every level.
34:063-3-3.
34:13This is where all this stuff happens.
34:172-83.
34:20A piece like 2-82.
34:40Mozart is one of these amazing people
34:43who bridges an incredible gap, historically speaking,
34:48and is at a sort of fascinating kind of crossroads
34:52in terms of instrumental equipment.
34:55This is an action that requires a lot of finger spitzengefühl,
35:01I mean, fingertip sensitivity,
35:03lots of finger work, hand delicacy.
35:06There isn't much of this kind of, you know,
35:09smashing and upper body activation
35:12that you might see on the Steinway.
35:14Mozart grew up with an unbelievably precise keyboard technique.
35:17When you want to write beautiful music, you write it here.
35:22When you're trying to express true trauma...
35:27..you do it down there.
35:29I will say that this is a slightly later instrument
35:32than the one Mozart was writing about when he writes to his dad,
35:36and there are a lot of modifications in an action like this.
35:39This is a real prototypical Walther piano from the 1780s.
35:42The action remains essentially unchanged
35:44until the beginning of the 19th century.
35:46It's a coming together of technology
35:48with what he can do as a composer and who he is as a person.
35:51All of those things come together.
35:53It's a magic moment.
35:55The other thing about it that's so extraordinary
35:58is Mozart's gift at predicting these kind of blockbuster trends.
36:02In the decade from 81 to 91,
36:05the piano becomes the most important solo instrument
36:09for public consumption, essentially.
36:11I mean, it eclipses all other equipment in this period
36:15as the number one way to make your name as a massive virtuoso, really.
36:19From that point forward, he really writes exclusively for the piano.
36:23He somehow gets a new piece of equipment
36:25and understands immediately what makes it tick.
36:35Mozart's own piano, the one he played in Vienna,
36:39is now in Salzburg in a large apartment
36:41where the Mozart family once lived.
36:44It's now a museum where I can literally hear the ghost
36:48of the actual sounds that Mozart created
36:51with the help of its head of research, Ulrich Leisinger.
36:55Ulrich, this is Mozart's Vienna piano,
36:58the piano that he had with him from virtually the time
37:01he moved to Vienna until the end of his life.
37:04Just thinking about what he played,
37:06this instrument and the music that happened here,
37:09it's just an astonishing thought, really.
37:11Whatever we have from Mozart, if we have the portraits,
37:13they are not photographic.
37:15If we have the letters, Mozart tells us some things,
37:18but he conceals others, and from time to time,
37:21he's not telling the truth.
37:23But the instrument is telling the truth about Mozart's music,
37:26at least about the keyboard music, and so we can really learn a lot
37:30from carefully looking and listening to this instrument.
37:33This is really the instrument
37:35where all these great piano concertos were conceived,
37:39where they got their premier performances
37:42and many follow-up performances during Mozart's lifetime,
37:45and so it's really a big stroke of luck
37:48that this instrument has survived in almost original shape.
37:53This isn't a concerto.
37:55No, no, no, it should not be a problem.
37:58I'm not Christian Besolden.
38:02PIANO PLAYS
38:23Mozart obviously loved this instrument.
38:25I mean, it was his constant companion for that decade in Vienna.
38:29He would have had enough money to replace it if he'd wanted to.
38:32Why did he stick with this Anton Walter instrument, its maker?
38:36Why did he love it so much?
38:38Apparently it was one of the best instruments that Walter ever built.
38:42It's one of the earliest of his fortepianos,
38:45and it has a very easy action, a very even action,
38:51and when Leopold visited his son in 1785,
38:55he wrote to his daughter that this very instrument
38:58was carried out of the house practically every other day,
39:02set up in a theater here, in a concert hall there,
39:05in a private place there,
39:07and that Mozart was practically giving a concert every other night.
39:12PIANO PLAYS
39:14PIANO CONTINUES
39:25Wunderschön!
39:39For Mozart, music was part of a bigger world of ideas,
39:43of culture, of feelings, of people,
39:45and that was true in his earlier life too,
39:48in Salzburg as well as in Vienna.
39:50The thing is, when Mozart was back in Salzburg,
39:53when he came back from his travels,
39:55especially as a teenager,
39:57he was part of a wider social and cultural scene here.
40:00He used to socialise with the family who owned this cafe,
40:03used to play billiards with them upstairs
40:05and dance with them, parties, basically.
40:07Now, it's inconceivable to me that Mozart,
40:09as a supremely intelligent young man,
40:11wouldn't have been talking to his friends
40:13about his frustrations with his employment in Salzburg,
40:17about the poor quality of the musicians here,
40:19and maybe also the new political ideas
40:21that were emerging all over Europe.
40:23Mozart, in other words, was part of cafe culture.
40:32Nicholas Till thinks that Mozart's intellectual curiosity
40:35is a crucial part of how we should hear and think about his music.
40:41If you look at his library, it's not large,
40:44he didn't own a huge number of books,
40:47but the books he owned were really quite current, contemporary thinking.
40:53Mozart is hanging out with the Austrian Empire's
41:00education minister once a week.
41:03Going round to his house, playing music.
41:07He was a very keen music lover,
41:12introduced Mozart to Bach and Handel's music,
41:15so he's right in the heart of the most progressive aspects
41:21of Viennese life at that time.
41:25And at that time, Europe was at a foment of pre-revolutionary fever,
41:29which Mozart caught in his opera The Marriage Of Figaro in 1786.
41:38ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS
41:46In the kind of coffeehouse culture and the intellectual culture
41:49that Mozart was part of then,
41:51I mean, do you think he was sympathetic
41:54to the ideals of the French Revolution?
41:57Do you think Mozart was fundamentally a kind of revolutionary...?
42:00Well, of course, we can't project a difference.
42:03He ends up right at the end of his life.
42:09But, yes, both at a personal level,
42:13he felt that it was wrong that certain kinds of people
42:17had power and control over someone like him that they had,
42:21and that would have translated into the broader political agenda of the period.
42:26ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS
42:56Mozart single-handedly dragged opera, kicking and singing,
43:00into the present day by hijacking a high art form,
43:03taking it away from gods and kings
43:05and handing it over to the lives of ordinary people
43:08and their complicated, chaotic relationships.
43:15He put his own life and the lives of people he knew on stage for all to see.
43:20Servants became heroes
43:22and women were written with a unique empathy and understanding.
43:29That's no surprise.
43:31Mozart fell in love with, married or wrote music
43:34for three of the Weber sisters,
43:36Aloysia, Constanze and Josefa.
43:39I think we should be extremely grateful that he was surrounded
43:43by all these fantastic women who could sing and could portray,
43:48because one thing with Mozart also, if you read his letters and everything,
43:51he really wanted people to be sincere.
43:57Cosi Fantute, with an original text by Lorenzo da Ponte,
44:01is about a quartet of lovers.
44:03The boys are persuaded to test their beloved's fidelity.
44:09And the result is confusion and turmoil for all four of them,
44:13including Fior di Ligi.
44:16ORCHESTRA PLAYS
44:21OPERA SINGS
44:46When she struggles, she realises that she has actually fallen,
44:52but she's just desperately trying to hold on to the love for Guglielmo.
44:57I think Verpietà is just one of the most amazing artists
45:01to actually show that.
45:03But she always comes back to, always, always comes back to this,
45:07that she feels ashamed, that she has this, you know, massive shame
45:11that she has, you know, gone towards Fernando
45:15rather than staying constant.
45:17OPERA CONTINUES
45:42It's about us. It is about normal people.
45:45They are fighting, they are, you know, they are in love,
45:48they are arguing, they are... It's just about normal life.
45:52They are betraying, they are being betrayed, they are...
45:55So it's basically like he's just making an opera
45:59about everyday situations,
46:02which I think that's why it's so easy to take to heart,
46:07you know, take to your heart.
46:12OPERA CONTINUES
46:23I remember once when I was doing Susanna in Berlin
46:26and I just felt as if everything just parted away from me
46:30and I was just sitting there.
46:32I could almost see myself as an out-of-body experience
46:35and when I looked down, I realised that Barenboim had stopped conducting
46:39and I was just sitting like this.
46:41And that's the moment when you realise that Mozart music,
46:45when everything is right, when everyone feels the same,
46:49it just becomes one body.
46:51And I'm sure that the audience felt it,
46:53the orchestra felt it, I felt it,
46:55and we all sang and did the same thing.
46:58The whole theatre were just there in that moment.
47:01That's one of the most, like...
47:03..experience that I've ever had in my life.
47:06What's different in the Mozart operatic women is, as I say,
47:12is this tremendous sort of emotional veracity
47:16and a sympathy for them.
47:26The Countess in The Marriage Of Figaro, I mean, she...
47:30Again, it's another of these places in Mozart
47:33that gives you so many different feelings somehow.
47:35How does he do it?
47:37Well, the first time we meet her, as you say,
47:39we meet her in soliloquy,
47:41just telling us again in a very short, slow, 90-second aria,
47:48very difficult to sing,
47:50that her life is really ghastly.
47:53I mean, her husband is...
47:55Two years younger than me, married a couple of years,
47:58and already her husband is bonking every woman on the estate
48:02and is behaving appallingly to her,
48:05and she's isolated and miserable,
48:08and although she has a wonderful best friend
48:11in her maidservant Susanna, she's essentially alone,
48:16and there is really nothing more lonely than poor Germain.
48:33SINGING CONTINUES
48:57Women loved him and he loved women,
49:00and we can certainly see that in his operas.
49:03What I don't want to do, however, is overstress this at all,
49:08because he was also a really good bloke,
49:11and he had a lot of good bloke friends too.
49:14I mean, the whole Masonic thing, after all,
49:17was like the ultimate men's club.
49:31In Salzburg, there's another piece of Vienna
49:34that Mozart's birthplace has uprooted.
49:39A little hut that looks like something out of a German fairy tale.
49:45And, funnily enough, it's where an operatic fairy tale came to life.
49:51This is Das Zauberflöte Häuschen, the Magic Flute Hut,
49:55where, in the summer of 1791, Mozart wrote the Magic Flute,
49:59in Vienna, in the grounds of the Freie Theater,
50:02where the opera would have its first performance
50:04on 30 September that year.
50:12Now, he would write a little clavichord in there
50:14and he'd invite the singers in to try out things,
50:17what aria he was going to write for Josefa Weber,
50:19his sister-in-law, who was singing the part of the Queen of the Night,
50:22and the rest of the cast.
50:23And, really, the experience of the Magic Flute for Mozart
50:26was being part of an artistic collective.
50:28It was one part of this huge, popular, populist,
50:31and Masonic theatrical mishmash, glorious theatrical hybrid
50:35that is the Magic Flute.
50:37And this is where it happened.
50:50And, as if by magic, here is the Queen of the Night's Act II aria,
50:54the one that goes...
50:56I can't even whistle that high.
51:20The thing about this is, you know,
51:22he was writing absolutely specifically for his sister-in-law.
51:25Only Josefa, only the Weber girls could get up that high.
51:29And, well, I can't even whistle there.
51:33Salzburg also houses the delicate instrument
51:36on which Mozart composed the Magic Flute,
51:39his tiny, treasured clavichord.
51:43Clavichords were meant for private use.
51:46They do not carry, the sound doesn't carry.
51:49And I show it to you because it's really remarkable.
51:55If you open the lid, we see a small paste in,
51:58and Constanze Mozart tells us that...
52:01This is Constanze Mozart's handwriting?
52:03This is Constanze's handwriting,
52:05and she tells us that her husband had composed the Magic Flute,
52:09the Requiem and the Freemason cantata on this very instrument
52:13during the last months of his life.
52:15So small was this instrument.
52:17It would be quite possible to carry it to the hut,
52:20the Zauberflöte-Häuschen, where he composed much of the Magic Flute
52:23in the summer of 1791.
52:25Definitely, this may weigh some 40 pounds, 50 pounds,
52:28so you can really take it with you.
52:30It's easy to tune,
52:32so it's a very practical instrument for this purpose.
52:35And if you should carefully open the lid.
52:39What does it sound like, Ulrich?
52:41I know it's a quiet sound, but what does it sound like?
52:45CLOCK TICKS
53:04And in this same room,
53:06there's the most moving, honest likeness of the composer.
53:10This is as close as we have to a real-life picture of Mozart.
53:16This is really as close as we're going to get
53:18to what he actually looked like.
53:25It was painted from life around 1789
53:28by Mozart's brother-in-law, Josef Lange.
53:31It's an encounter with a real,
53:34as opposed to airbrushed, idea and image of Mozart.
53:37His hair is loose, there's no wig here,
53:40you can't see pockmarks on his skin,
53:42but there's grey in the hair,
53:44and this is a really tender picture
53:47of who this musician, who this composer was.
53:53This picture is usually called Unfinished,
53:55but in fact you can see very close up
53:57that the head and shoulders
53:59are really a complete little portrait of Mozart.
54:08PIANO PLAYS
54:13Violinist Paul Robertson has a relationship with Mozart's music
54:17that most of us will never have.
54:20Hopefully, an appreciation that can come only
54:23from the outer limits of life itself.
54:28I used to, as it were, preach the idea
54:31that music should be played to people in coma.
54:34And I remember a lovely lady whose husband fell into a coma,
54:38played his favourite piece,
54:40which was the slow movement of the Mozart clarinet quintet.
54:43She very kindly used our recording as it happened, and he recovered.
54:46He came round into consciousness
54:48during the course of that movement.
54:50And my family, when I was in coma, were playing the same piece.
54:54It was a drug-induced coma
54:57that then became an out-of-reach coma.
55:00So I was not actually, strictly speaking, alive.
55:03So they played me Mozart and I was responding.
55:06So I didn't actually have the registration of listening to Mozart.
55:10I mean, to be honest, what I was...
55:13Well, what I was hearing was an Indian,
55:16beautiful Indian female voice singing ragas with exquisite microtones.
55:20Which you remember?
55:22Oh, I remember that most distinctly. It was so beautiful.
55:25And you remember it as if it were a performance,
55:27or as if it was happening, or it was...?
55:29Oh, it was almost more real than life, you know.
55:34Paul, I spent a lot of this film thinking about Mozart's humanity
55:40and how that's expressed in the music,
55:43how grounded it is and how grounded he is.
55:46But can we talk also about a transcendence in Mozart's music?
55:50And if so, what might it be?
55:54He, despite all the mythology,
55:57he strikes me as being what you might call supranormal.
56:01You know, he wasn't just normal, he was what normal ought to be.
56:05Anyone who could be playing billiards, drinking coffee,
56:09writing a great symphony at the same time,
56:11caring about his family and their aspirations,
56:15also longing for independence.
56:18This is a very high-functioning man indeed,
56:21caught in a particular web of history, as we all are.
56:25So the transcendence is more than just musical.
56:28I think it actually runs throughout and across his life.
56:32There are these beautiful individuals,
56:35sometimes weird and wacky individuals,
56:37who just have a whole range of abilities, skills, insights,
56:44cognitive function that are always going to be something
56:48we just get a crick in the neck looking, because it's so elevated.
56:52He began to prove that a composer
56:55could actually live an independent creative life.
56:58Now, that takes a different kind of genius,
57:01because that's imaginative in terms of conceiving of a state of life
57:06that is beyond the one that you currently know.
57:09What would he be doing now?
57:11You know, a Mozart now?
57:13I mean, my own belief is he'd probably be writing for computer games,
57:19because I suspect that he would be drawn to the most creative area,
57:24probably the most lucrative area,
57:27and the place where he really needed to exercise all his skill
57:31to the very extreme.
57:38After his death,
57:40researchers have put forward over 100 potential causes.
57:44Mozart's body was interred in a mass grave, unmarked and unremarkable.
57:49This wasn't the romantic fate of an artist misunderstood
57:53but common practice in Joseph II's Vienna,
57:55the result of liberal reforms to show that in death all men are equal.
58:02Vienna put up this statue to Mozart here in St Mark's Cemetery,
58:07where he was buried somewhere on 7th December 1791.
58:11But it can only ever be a best guess as to where his bones actually are.
58:17I like the fact that Mozart's grave can never become a fetish
58:22for memorial in the way that Oscar Wilde's, Jim Morrison's
58:26or Ludwig van Beethoven's are.
58:28We may not know where his body finally came to rest,
58:32but we do know where his music is,
58:34thanks to its virtuosity of empathy, of compassion, of humanity.
58:38Mozart's music rightly belongs in the bodies, the minds
58:42and the imaginations of anyone who loves it.
59:12© BF-WATCH TV 2021