Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four, Part 2 By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 11, 2011, 7:00 am

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four, Part 2 By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
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Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.

In an earlier post, Mr. Tommasini began a discussion on the Vienna four. It continues here with Mozart…

Mozart knew all about motivic development too. But the technique did not come as naturally to him. He was a theater man at heart. It’s inspiring to see the sketches for the Mozart operas, in which all he writes are the vocal lines fitted to the words, and a bass line below, with a few chords here and there. Clearly, setting the text and getting the dramatic structure of the opera was the first task and the hard part. Filling in all the rest came later, which, for Mozart, was fairly easy if time-consuming.

When Mozart wanted to write a symphony or chamber work in the Haydn manner, as a motif-driven entity, he could certainly do it. Think of his last three symphonies or the six quartets he dedicated to Haydn. But it took great effort, as he admitted in the moving dedication of those quartets.

Still, even Mozart’s sonatas and symphonies are full of operatic touches. When I was in music school, I was always baffled when fellow pianists who claimed to love the Mozart piano concertos and sonatas said that they had no real feeling for the operas, not being opera buffs. How can you play, say, Mozart’s Sonata in D (K. 311) without being immersed in the Mozart operas? The Rondo comes across like some duet from “The Marriage of Figaro.” In the main theme you can almost hear Susanna, as she coyly tries to charm her way out of a tight spot with her doting, jealous Figaro, who voices his suspicions in gruff bursts leading to the second theme.

The argument for Mozart as the greatest composer ever would be based on his astounding versatility: he is at the top, both as a maker of opera and as a composer of symphonic and chamber works. That he died at 35 was horrible. On the other hand, he had an early start. And how do you top “Don Giovanni” and the “Jupiter” Symphony?

But that Schubert died at 31 is for me the greatest loss in music history. Even though he wrote an astonishing number of works, in so many ways he was just getting going. In his last years he started to restudy counterpoint because he thought his skills were insufficient.

In his mature piano sonatas, chamber works and songs, Schubert, like Beethoven, entered some mystic place beyond era and cultural context. Think of the Sonata in A minor (D. 784), which in the opening movement veers with no warning from an eerily self-contained main theme through bursts of crazed chords and tremolos to a deceptively tranquil second theme, flowing by like some wistful folk song, only to be interrupted by slashing fortissimo chords.

If only for the hundreds of his songs that dominate the song repertory today and continue to stun, entrance and delight audiences, Schubert should make the cut. Right?

Yet one of these Vienna masters will have to be eliminated if we are going to leave spots for the giants of the 19th and 20th centuries. Might it be Haydn? Part of his legacy was carried on by his student Beethoven and his younger friend Mozart. I know musicians and critics who would howl at the idea that Haydn, who pioneered the string quartet and wrote some of the greatest works in that genre, would not be among the Top 5, let alone the top 10. What to do? For now, let’s put it off.