Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Overture [arr. Czerny for piano six-hands]
Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to pin down Mozart’s genius typically take the form of variations on the theme of “perfection.” The musical canon has readily acknowledged the genius of many master composers, but Mozart’s brilliance somehow stands apart from even the most celebrated voices. Mozart’s music glows with a transcendent otherworldliness that puts to shame attempts to capture it in words, but it is its paradoxical self-evidence — as inevitable and fundamentally part of this world as nature itself — that really makes it elude explanation. Mozart’s grace lies in his music’s effortless, unlikely cohabitation of opposites. It is at once scintillatingly fresh and deeply familiar, simple but not simplistic, and, in the words of Scott Burnham, “somehow both unerring and human…untouchable and touching.”
Alluding to his impeccably conceived musical characters and their rich development over the course of his music, Paul Henry Lang anoints Mozart “the greatest musico-dramatic genius of all times.” Nowhere are these interactions between musical and dramatic revelation more explicit than in Mozart’s operas. The Marriage of Figaro, completed in 1786 during his prolific Vienna period, marked the beginning of Mozart’s working relationship with Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The comic opera weaves a web of illicit seduction, deception and ridiculous contingencies, and the overture opens appropriately with scurrying, Presto eighth notes evocative of chattering gossip flitting about Count Almaviva’s estate. The mercurial overture vacillates between hushed scampering and eruptive tutti outbursts until a delightfully long-breathed theme in A major emerges. Floating atop a bed of constant eighth notes, this refreshingly tuneful melody seems to momentarily suspend time, only to evaporate just as quickly as it came, in true paradoxical Mozartean fashion. Virtuosity, with its inherent self-indulgence and exertion, has no place in the poised elegance of Mozart, but this unrelenting overture is a veritable tour-de-force for orchestras and pianists — here, in Czerny’s six-hand arrangement — alike.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to pin down Mozart’s genius typically take the form of variations on the theme of “perfection.” The musical canon has readily acknowledged the genius of many master composers, but Mozart’s brilliance somehow stands apart from even the most celebrated voices. Mozart’s music glows with a transcendent otherworldliness that puts to shame attempts to capture it in words, but it is its paradoxical self-evidence — as inevitable and fundamentally part of this world as nature itself — that really makes it elude explanation. Mozart’s grace lies in his music’s effortless, unlikely cohabitation of opposites. It is at once scintillatingly fresh and deeply familiar, simple but not simplistic, and, in the words of Scott Burnham, “somehow both unerring and human…untouchable and touching.”
Alluding to his impeccably conceived musical characters and their rich development over the course of his music, Paul Henry Lang anoints Mozart “the greatest musico-dramatic genius of all times.” Nowhere are these interactions between musical and dramatic revelation more explicit than in Mozart’s operas. The Marriage of Figaro, completed in 1786 during his prolific Vienna period, marked the beginning of Mozart’s working relationship with Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The comic opera weaves a web of illicit seduction, deception and ridiculous contingencies, and the overture opens appropriately with scurrying, Presto eighth notes evocative of chattering gossip flitting about Count Almaviva’s estate. The mercurial overture vacillates between hushed scampering and eruptive tutti outbursts until a delightfully long-breathed theme in A major emerges. Floating atop a bed of constant eighth notes, this refreshingly tuneful melody seems to momentarily suspend time, only to evaporate just as quickly as it came, in true paradoxical Mozartean fashion. Virtuosity, with its inherent self-indulgence and exertion, has no place in the poised elegance of Mozart, but this unrelenting overture is a veritable tour-de-force for orchestras and pianists — here, in Czerny’s six-hand arrangement — alike.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music