# Was Mozart ever polytonal?



## Wolfgangus the Great (Jan 4, 2022)

Please don't give me the Musical Joke as an answer. Other than that, did Mozart ever have a polytonal passage?


----------



## violadude (May 2, 2011)

No, and even if there is a passage in some piece by Mozart piece that's dissonant enough for it to sound "polytonal" to our ears, I don't think Mozart himself would have been thinking of it in those terms.


----------



## Livly_Station (Jan 8, 2014)

Maybe if the performers are out of tune...


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Wolfgangus the Great said:


> Please don't give me the Musical Joke as an answer. Other than that, did Mozart ever have a polytonal passage?


Yes he did. For example, the end of the masked ball at the end of of Act 1 of Don Giovanni, the last minute and a half or so. Tremendous music!


----------



## Forster (Apr 22, 2021)

Sorry, must share, thought this was asking if Mozart wore a 'ponytail'.


----------



## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Livly_Station said:


> Maybe if the performers are out of tune...


That's true! And in some groups you even learn that Mozart wrote microtonal music. He used quarter-tones and multi-meter works too! I remember all to clearly a horrid reading of a Mozart symphony - can't remember which, but in the 20s - where it took practically the entire first movement for the oboe player to figure out that there were three sharps she'd been ignoring and the incompetent conductor was oblivious. Polytonal indeed.


----------



## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

mbhaub said:


> That's true! And in some groups you even learn that Mozart wrote microtonal music. He used quarter-tones and multi-meter works too! I remember all to clearly a horrid reading of a Mozart symphony - can't remember which, but in the 20s - where it took practically the entire first movement for the oboe player to figure out that there were three sharps she'd been ignoring and the incompetent conductor was oblivious. Polytonal indeed.


I guess that at one time it was standard practice to hand out the music and have the musicians sight-read music for a performance, but for the last 100 years, give or take a decade, I'd like to think that an orchestra wouldn't attempt a performance of a symphony without any rehearsal.


----------



## Wolfgangus the Great (Jan 4, 2022)

Mandryka said:


> Yes he did. For example, the end of the masked ball at the end of of Act 1 of Don Giovanni, the last minute and a half or so. Tremendous music!


Give me a link with a time stamp, please!


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

About 1.50 or so to the end here


----------



## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

*Was Mozart ever polytonal?*

Not sure about that. But I do suspect he was a pollyanna, if his music is any representation of a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything!


----------

