# The “personal” Mozart?



## ribonucleic (Aug 20, 2014)

This Uchida performance of the slow movement of K.545 gives me a sense of the personal man in a way his other music, for all its splendors, has not.

Anything else you think might fit the bill?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I'd be cautious about taking a composer's skillful exploitation of the expressive elements of music for the attempt to communicate a personal message or private feeling. I hear nothing more in the above example than a typically suave, well-shaped melody in Mozart's characteristic manner, lacking even the harmonic surprises that in some of his works might make us - probably mistakenly - imagine that he is betraying a particular urge to "say something" (a few examples of this for me might be the slow movement of the Sinfonia Concertante, the String Quintet in g-minor, or the larghetto of the Clarinet Quintet). What is it about this movement that makes it seem unusually "personal" to you? Would it seem equally personal if it had been written by someone else?


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

_"People criticize me sometimes for a Mozart that is too Romantic. But I would say these stylistic divisions are completely relevant, and what is Romance for one person is an enlivened and rhetorically varied performance for another. I think those are very individual, subjective yardsticks. Ones that cannot be fixed in stone."_


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

I found this an exquisite, heartfelt performance by Uchida of this achingly beautiful sonata movement-so perfect, tender, elegant and refined. It was breathtaking how she brought out its deeply felt qualities. Perhaps it takes patience to fully appreciate its perfection and sublimity. It sounds like she was feeling every note because Mozart knew exactly where to place each one. No one else could have written this but him or play it with such freedom and depth in this encore by her. I have yet to hear a performance by anyone else quite like this. I think her self-expression was highly personal, exceptional, and this is what music is about-finding a way to make it your own. Nor does anyone know exactly how _Mozart_ would have played it.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

ribonucleic said:


> [The] Uchida performance of the slow movement of K.545 gives me a sense of the personal man in a way his other music, for all its splendors, has not.
> 
> Anything else you think might fit the bill?


How about this?






Same artist, but with the 'Andante cantabile con espressione' of Sonata No. 8 in A minor, K.310.

Just throwing this out as a possibility. I actually find all of Mozart's music to be personal statements. After all, nobody else but W.A.M. _could _have or _did _write the stuff!

By the way, I bring this up after spending part of this Christmas day listening to









a rather recent release of the Mozart Requiem (René Jacobs, Freiburger Barockorchester on Harmonia Mundi 902291), a re-completion of the work from 2016 by young French composer Pierre-Henri Dutron who persuaded conductor Jacobs to perform his revision of Süssmayr's more familiar Requiem completion. Hearing this work today for the first time had brought me round to once more contemplating Mozart the man and Mozart the composer. And then I saw this thread on the Forum.


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## jenspen (Apr 25, 2015)

ribonucleic said:


> This Uchida performance of the slow movement of K.545 gives me a sense of the personal man in a way his other music, for all its splendors, has not.
> 
> Anything else you think might fit the bill?


I find the comments of the previous posters insightful. A possibly tangential remark: I am trying to get Mozart's Adagio in B Minor K540 under my very amateur fingers, a work full of expressive possibilities. Of it, Alfred Einstein wrote:

"one of the most perfect, most deeply felt, and most despairing of all his works. About this latter work it is hard to arrive at a definitive conclusion. Its major ending indicates that it may have been intended for a sonata in E minor. But such a piece, without any further ʻpurposeʼ, may simply have flowed from Mozartʼs pen in an hour at once tragic and blessed."

So here is Uchida, again, breaking out hearts with it:






But I find attempts to limit the feeling in this composition to Mozart's own feelings about his late father demeaning of an imaginative genius of his order of magnitude. An example I found:

_Does your imagination make you hear "Pa-pa, Pa-pa, Pa-pa, Pa-pa!"
in the two semiquavers just before the final measure? 
And in the final measure, a serene "Pa-pa, Pa-pa"? 
Mine does now every time I listen to it. _

No, it bloody doesn't.

Shakespeare gets the same treatment.


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

The minuet of the E minor violin sonata is I think the most unguarded and rawest Mozart ever got.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

ribonucleic said:


> This Uchida performance of the slow movement of K.545 gives me a sense of the personal man in a way his other music, for all its splendors, has not.


How can you tell that it's "the personal man" just by listening? There's nothing in the music to suggest that in fact Mozart was expressing anything he actually felt when he was writing it is there? It's a fiction, a creation.

And maybe more interestingly, why does it matter if it's personal or not? What do you learn about the poetry of the music if you make a connection to the composer's biography?

For a sense of how Mozart himself, "the personal man", may have expressed his music, then clearly Uchida is the wrong place to look, this is the recording to try


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Gallus said:


> The minuet of the E minor violin sonata is I think the most unguarded and rawest Mozart ever got.


I think you are so right. I've never heard him sound so natural, open and free. I think it's one of the best sonatas I've ever heard by him. True mastery. The interaction between the piano and violin is just magnificent as the violin plays a more prominent role than it usually does. It seems to defy any category or style in music in its purity and perfection. If I'd never heard this work before, I might never have guessed that it was by him. Just lovely beyond belief.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

I think Mozart must have drawn upon his inner world of feelings to compose much of the music he did - and he was so good that he could imagine what the feelings of others would sounds like in music.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Gallus said:


> The minuet of the E minor violin sonata is I think the most unguarded and rawest Mozart ever got.


It's interesting you say this about the second movement rather than the first; I'm not sure I agree actually. I like this KV 304, some of his piano sonatas aren't half bad at all, with or without a violin.


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## CnC Bartok (Jun 5, 2017)

Immensely debatable, of course, but the opening of this wonderful piece fits the bill....


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> For a sense of how Mozart himself, "the personal man", may have expressed his music, then clearly Uchida is the wrong place to look,


I don't think it's clear at all. Actually, the thrust of this thread is buried in mud.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Bulldog said:


> I don't think it's clear at all.


But Mozart, "the personal man", didn't use a piano like hers. How can she express his music like he did?



Bulldog said:


> Actually, the thrust of this thread is buried in mud.


The thrust of this thread being what? What does it mean, exactly, to say that Uchida K.545 "gives a sense of the personal man in a way his other music, for all its splendors, has not" if it's not that her K 545 expresses something essential about him, something which as a matter of biographical fact he actually held dear? It's like a claim about truth, the truth of the performance to the essence of the man Mozart . . .


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Interesting thread - interesting to me, because I like to share others' experiences and try to see things from their point of view, and of course, still being pretty ignorant of classical music, I'm always grateful for recommendations. 

I listened to the OP video & I think it is a beautiful & sensitive performance. I think it gets over the spirit of Mozart's music but not in a highly personal way that is so special that other videos don't. 

It is obvious from her expression that the pianist is feeling the music deeply, and maybe it's this emotion that's coming across, rather than Mozart's personal feelings. I chose not to look at the video after the first few seconds, so as to hear the music speak for itself a little more.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> But Mozart, "the personal man", didn't use a piano like hers. How can she express his music like he did?


It's all speculation. I just don't think that the type of piano tells us anything about the personal man.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

it sounds more Uchina than Mozart to me, and sounds, in fact, kind of melodramatic. The most personal Mozart, to me, is sinfonia concertante and string quintets.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I enjoyed the take! I don't think the work is allowing it to be romantic, no matter how hard she tries, but I still enjoy it!


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

_I'd be cautious about taking a composer's skillful exploitation of the expressive elements of music for the attempt to communicate a personal message or private feeling. _

I'd say this is good advice and, in the bigger picture, any advice to see Mozart's music as personal sometimes and sometimes not. He wrote wonderful slow movements all the time.

I don't note a "personal" and perhaps public Mozart the way I do Brahms. I think anything Brahms wrote in a big vein -- the symphonies, concertos, some of the choral music -- is public but his personal music is what represented either his longing (like the Alto Rhapsody) or his melancholy (the clarinet pieces he wrote late in life.) I don't note same for Mozart anytime, anywhere.


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

I must confess that I tend to find Uchida's Mozart a bit too precious, like she is playing Schubert instead of Mozart.


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