Mozart's Cold Weather & Mendelssohn's Sunny Italy

Vienna's Mozart Monument - in the snow...

This weekend's Masterworks Concert features Stuart Malina playing Mozart's Piano Concerto in D Minor (K.466) and Bohuslav Martinů's Sinfonietta La Jolla - you can read more about both of these works in the previous post - as well as conducting the Italian Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn on the second half - tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm. Assistant Conductor Gregory Woodbridge will assist by conducting the Martinů. Dick Strawser offers the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance.
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So you think it's cold, now?

When Mozart finished writing the D Minor Piano Concerto Stuart Malina both plays and conducts this weekend, “Vienna suffered a cold spell that lasted until the beginning of March, with heavy snowfall and temperatures so low that several people froze to death.”

Farm Show Weather aside – and that usually meant nasty amounts of snow in years past – a high barely 20° is one thing (at least Sunday's is expected to, if we're lucky, reach the Freezing Point), but the wind chills we've been experiencing across much of the country bring to mind that meteorological villain from last year, Paula Vortex...

While I'm not sure if musicologists have studied the impact of Central Heating on Concert Halls in late-18th Century Vienna, Volkmar Braunbehrens continues describing that cold February of 1785 in his book, “Mozart in Vienna”:

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“Despite the weather, Mozart's piano had to be taken out of the house to a concert every other day. ...In late March and early April there was again heavy snowfall, and Leopold Mozart [who was visiting his son at this busy time] contracted a severe cold. Yet attendance at the opera, theater, and [Masonic] lodge functions continued, all in miserable weather.”
– (Volkmar Braunbehrens: Mozart in Vienna (1781-1791). R. Piper, Munich, 1986. Timothy Bell, translator)
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Two friends shooting the freeze...

Knowing Mozart himself was dealing with bitter cold temperatures 230 years ago might not make us feel any better today, but certainly the music on this program should help warm us up as we head into the Forum or make the drive home. I rather doubt any carriage the Mozarts had access to back then was any warmer than a modern automobile.

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Mendelssohn was not only inspired by his visit to sunny Italy in 1830 to write what became his 4th Symphony – for once, the nickname “Italian,” so obvious, was given to it by the composer – much of it was composed while he was there.

That summer, Mendelssohn had begun another long, leisurely tour comparable to his trip that took him to England and Scotland the year before, where he'd stood in Mary Queen of Scot's chapel in Edinburgh and wrote down a theme that eventually found its way into his “Scottish” Symphony and where he experienced an enormous cave off the coast of the Hebrides where he wrote a letter home and added a theme that soon became the opening of Fingal's Cave.

Returning to the Continent, he was already at work on a new symphony – the one, however, that would become known as the “Reformation.”

After stopping in Weimar to visit Goethe, the 21-year-old composer left Munich where he composed his 1st Piano Concerto and then, by way of Milan where he met Mozart's son Karl who was a diplomat living there (and whose friends had very low opinions of Shakespeare's comedies, the lowest reserved for A Midsummer Night's Dream), arrived in Venice in early October. He went to Bologna and Florence with the idea of spending the winter in Rome where he arrived at the beginning of November.

View of the Cathedral of Florence, late October, watercolor by Felix Mendelssohn

“Like all fugitives from the dank north,” according to George Marek's biography, Gentle Genius: the Story of Felix Mendelssohn, “he marveled at the blue skies of Tuscany, the wealth of flowers still blooming, the opulence of the villas and palaces.”

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(...in this YouTube posting, chosen more for the images than anything else, the name of the conductor is not mentioned: it appears to be the Budapest Philharmonic and, if you follow enough links, a recording conducted by Rico Saccani)
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Once settled in Rome, he wrote home about his “small, two-window house on the Spanish Steps, No. 5. The sun shines warmly the whole day long. In my room on the first floor there is a good Viennese piano. ...When in the morning I come into this room and the sun sparkles brightly on my breakfast (in me a poet was lost), I feel wonderful at once. Is it not late autumn? Who at home would dare to ask for warm, clear skies, grapes or flowers? After breakfast, I set to work, I play and sing and compose until midday. After that, the whole immeasurable Rome lies before me like an exercise in enjoyment.”

And it was here – then – that he began work on the greatest souvenir one could imagine from such a journey, his Symphony in A Major, the one called “The Italian Symphony.”

One of the things I'll mention in my pre-concert talk an hour before each performance will be another detail of his visit to Rome – how he met the young French composer, Hector Berlioz, who was revising his newest work, which, rather than being called “Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 14,” has always been known as the Symphonie fantastique.

This caricature of Berlioz was drawn in Rome, so at least it's a fairly representative view of that composer at the time he and Mendelssohn were sitting in the taverns drinking wine and sharing their views on Shakespeare and modern music. Some sources indicate the caricature is Mendelssohn's own, but others don't mention it, so I'm not really sure. Regardless of their aesthetic differences, they became good friends and Berlioz always championed Mendelssohn's music to the readers of his Paris newspaper and Mendelssohn frequently conducted Berlioz's music in Germany and London even though he professed to not understanding it.

Curiously, it took Mendelssohn a while to finish this symphony of his: while in Rome, he'd left the slow movement go, hoping to find some inspiration when he went even further south to visit Naples (which he did). But still, the work wasn't completed until he returned to Berlin, struggling with it until 1833. Though he conducted it several times, he never published it, meaning to revise it. He did re-work the first movement but always meant to get back to the rest of it. He never conducted it in Germany and in fact never published the work in his lifetime, always dissatisfied with it!

Odd, for a work so many music-lovers as well as critics find to be, in a word, “perfect.”

– Dick Strawser