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Mozart's operas and the myth of musical unity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

James Webster
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Type
Review symposium: Recent Mozart literature
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1990 , pp. 197 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

1 Webster, James, ‘To Understand Verdi and Wagner We Must Understand Mozart’, 19th-Century Music, 11 (1987–1988), 175–93 (here, 179);CrossRefGoogle Scholar the preceding paragraph summarises this item. On Verdi and Wagner analysis, see Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, ‘Introduction: On Analyzing Opera’, in Abbate, and Parker, , eds., Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner (Berkeley, 1989), 1–24.Google Scholar

2 In preparing this essay I have profited especially from discussions with Mary Hunter, Roger Parker and John Platoff. I also thank Thomas Bauman for making available the front matter to Daniel Heartz's volume.

3 Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

4 Hosler, Bellamy, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in 18th-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 1981);Google ScholarWinn, James Anderson, Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven, 1981), Ch. 5;Google ScholarDahlhaus, Carl, Esthetics of Music, trans. Austin, William W. (Cambridge, 1982), Chs. 4–6;Google Scholaridem, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Lustig, Roger (Chicago, 1989);Google ScholarNeubauer, John, The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, 1986).Google Scholar

5 Kliewer, Vernon L., ‘The Concept of Organic Unity in Music Criticism and Analysis’, Ph.D. diss. (Indiana University, 1961);Google ScholarDahlhaus, , ‘Schoenberg and Schenker’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 100 (1973–1974), 209–15;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSolie, Ruth, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis’, 19th-Century Music, 4 (1980), 147–56;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKassler, Jamie Croy, ‘Heinrich Schenker's Epistemology and Philosophy of Music: An Essay on the Relations between Evolutionary Theory and Music Theory’, in Oldroyd, David and Langham, Ian, eds., The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought (Dordrecht and Boston, 1983), 221–60;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPastille, William, ‘Ursatz: The Music Philosophy of Heinrich Schenker’, Ph.D. diss. (Cornell University, 1985).Google Scholar

6 A hint of this appears in Abbate and Parker (see n. 1), 4 n. 9, 13–16; it is developed in their essay ‘Dismembering Mozart’, published elsewhere in this issue.

7 Kerman, , Opera as Drama (1956; rev. edn. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), Chs. 4–5;Google ScholarRosen, , The Classical Style (New York, 1971), 290–312.Google Scholar That the reissue of Kerman's New Critical work is essentially unaltered despite today's changed critical climate only emphasises its dated qualities.

8 Figaro, nos. 7, 13, 18; Don Giovanni, nos. 1, 9, 15, 19; Così, nos. 1–3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 22. I omit Don Giovanni, no. 3 (Elvira's ‘Ah chi mi dice mai’), which is not a true trio, but an aria with occasional asides; in form it is a sonata without development.

9 On this subject, see Webster, , Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge, forthcoming), conclusion.Google Scholar

10 ‘The buffa aria in Mozart's Vienna’, elsewhere in this issue.

11 Ensembles and finales, 253–4, 258–71, 307–18; arias and duets, 279–307. Kunze's book is not easy to use. For 650 dense pages of text divided into very long paragraphs whose initial lines are not indented, the table of contents gives only the (eight) chapter titles (averaging eighty pages), and the text and running-heads offer only one level of subheadings (averaging perhaps twenty pages). Nor is there an index of works or of individual numbers (a necessity in a volume of this type, realised in every other book under review). The reader wishing to grasp the organisation, or merely to locate the discussion of a given number, must laboriously outline the entire volume.

12 His methods are indebted to the late Thrasybulous Georgiades, whose provocative but eccentric system was founded on the belief that Classical-period music simultaneously projects two complementary rhythmic domains: a ‘scaffolding’ (Gerüstbau) based on the unchanging ‘empty’ measure; and the infinitely flexible tonal-metric shapes of motives and phrases, which ‘fill’ those measures with ever-varying content. This is not the same as our distinction between metre and rhythm, although there are points of contact. Its great advantage for opera is that it is inherently ‘multivalent’. Mutatis mutandis, it also excels in disentangling the differentiated vocal parts of ensembles. Georgiades, , ‘Aus der Musiksprache des Mozart-Theaters’, Mozart–Jahrbuch, 1950, 76–98;Google Scholar rpt. in Georgiades, , Kleine Schriften (Tutzing, 1977), 9–32.Google Scholar

13 ‘daß […] sich zwei Prinzipien herausschälen lassen, die ihre Analogie auch in Mozarts kompositorischem Denken finden, namentlich der finale, zielgerichtete und prozeßhafte Charakter des musikalischen Baus sowie gleichermaßen die raumumspannende Herstellung eines Zeitbezirks in überschaubaren und insofern stillgelegten Raumverhältnissen, die Herstellung eben des Zeit- und Ereignisraums, in dem sich das Werk als Bleibendes konstituiert’ (311).

14 See Allanbrook, 93–9, and Webster, ‘To Understand … Mozart’ (n. 1), 181.

15 Platoff, ‘The buffa aria’, §§2 and 4; Hunter, , ‘Haydn's Aria Forms: A Study of the Arias in the Italian Operas Written at Eszterháza, 1766–1783’, Ph.D. diss. (Cornell University, 1982), Ch. 9.Google Scholar

16 See the differing accounts of this aria in Döhring, Sieghard, Formgeschichte der Opernarien (Marburg/Lahn, 1975), 97–8Google Scholar, and Hunter, 44–5.

17 ‘Das Finale in Mozarts Meisteropern’, Die Musik, 19 (1926–1927), 621–32.Google Scholar His ida had been anticipated in Wappenschmidt, Oskar, ‘Die Tonart als Kunstmittel im ersten Finale von Mozarts “Die Hochzeit des Figaro”’, Die Musik, 10 (1910–1911), 2nd quarter, 272–84, 323–40Google Scholar, whose account however was purely descriptive, without invoking ‘unity’ or ‘tonal forms’. In English, Rosen's assumption (301–5) of large sonata-form-like unities has been very influential.

18 The term ‘key-area plan’ was coined by Ratner to denote the common ground of binary and sonata forms; see his Classic Music (n. 5), Ch. 13.

19 Platoff, , ‘Music and Drama in the Opera Buffa Finale: Mozart and his Contemporaries in Vienna, 1781–1790’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 1984), 21, 82–3;Google ScholarHorsley, Paul Joseph, ‘Dittersdorf and the Finale in Late-Eighteenth-Century German Comic Opera’, Ph.D. diss. (Cornell University, 1986), 154–9.Google Scholar

20 Abert, Hermann, W. A. Mozart, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1956), II, 277–8.Google Scholar

21 In this, as in many other points to be taken up here regarding ‘tonal planning’ in Figaro, the authors under review explicitly or implicitly follow suggestions first made by Abert, in his introduction to the Eulenburg miniature-score edition (ed. Rudolf Gerber); and by Levarie, Siegmund, in Mozart's ‘Le nozze di Figaro’ (Chicago, 1952).Google Scholar

22 Levarie, 17–19; Noske, Frits, The Signifier and the Signified: Studies in the Operas of Mozart and Verdi (The Hague, 1977), Ch. 2;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, ‘Verbal to Musical Drama: Adaptation or Creation?’, in Redmond, James, ed., Drama, Dance and Music (Cambridge, 1981), 143–52;Google Scholar Webster, ‘To Understand … Mozart’ (see n. 1), 183–4.

23 Heartz, , Ch. 8; quoted from ‘Constructing Le nozze di Figaro’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 112 (1987), 90–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Admittedly, Edward T. Cone speculates about such matters in Verdi without assuming that they are nonsensical; see ‘On the Road to Otello: Tonality and Structure in Simon Boccanegra’, Studi verdiani, 1 (1982), 72–98.Google Scholar

25 Noske, Signifier (see n. 22); Heartz, Ch. 14, 18; see also his ‘Tonality and Motif in Idomeneo’, The Musical Times, 115 (1974), 382–6;Google Scholar Carter, 115–18.

26 My doubts depend on analytical considerations for which there is no space here; I discuss the topic in the context of a methodological study of the analysis of Mozart's arias, to appear in Eisen, Cliff, ed., Mozart Studies (Oxford, forthcoming in 1991).Google Scholar For the ‘high-note’ organisation of Tamino's scene with the Priest in the Act I finale of Die Zauberflöte, see my ‘To Understand … Mozart’ (n. 1), 188–90.

27 I have briefly sketched a subplot in Die Zauberflöte, involving Pamina, the Queen of the Night and the magic flute itself, in connection with Pamina's aria ‘Ach, ich fühl's’, in ‘Cone's “Personae” and the Analysis of Opera’, College Music Symposium, 29 (1989), 44–65.Google Scholar See also Allanbrook on Acts III–IV of Figaro, described later.

28 Ch. 2 and 49–53; Rushton implies (143 n. 8) that the error originated in Otto Jahn's Mozart biography.

29 119–20; the ‘progression’ in question was asserted by Levarie (see below).

30 Ch. 8; quoted from ‘Constructing Figaro’ (see n. 23), 83–4, 93–4. Compare his ‘Tonality and Motif in Idomeneo’ (see n. 25).

31 Favourable interpretations of the Act IV finale can be found in Noske, Signifier (see n. 22), 16–7; Allanbrook, 173–94; and Platoff, ‘Finale’ (see n. 19), 418–22.

32 Heartz, ‘Constructing Figaro’ (see n. 23), 83.

33 From this chorus I cite (more or less arbitrarily) Dahlhaus, , ‘Some Models of Unity in Musical Form’, Journal of Music Theory, 19 (1975), 2–30;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWhittall, Arnold, ‘The Theorist's Sense of History: Concepts of Contemporaneity in Composition and Analysis’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 112 (1987), 1–20;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Street, Alan, ‘Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories: The Resistance to Musical Unity’, Music Analysis, 8 (1989), 77–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 I broach this issue in a somewhat different manner in ‘To understand … Mozart’ (see n. 1), 178–9, 191–2.

35 I have attempted full-dress analyses along these lines in Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony (see n. 9); and in ‘Zur Form des Finales von Beethovens 9. Sinfonie’, in the forthcoming report of a conference on the nineteenth-century symphony, held in Bonn, 1989, to be edited by Siegfried Kross.