“The Tonal Analogue of Emotive Life” Works for Violin and Piano
Har r y Haskell
Are musical form and feeling two sides of the same coin, or are they separate spheres that coexist in a perpetual state of unresolved tension? For Mozart and his contemporaries, the question hardly arose; composers in the late 1700s viewed musical form as the conventional vessel into which feeling was poured, to be decanted later in performance. By the time of Guillaume Lekeu a century later, the formal vessels of the Classical era were bursting at the seams under the explosive pressure of Romantic emotion. And by the middle of the 20th century, composers like John Cage and George Crumb were radically redefining the relationship between form and feeling, in part by basing their musical structures on extramusical sources such as the I Ching. In her classic philosophical text Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer postulates that “music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.” The four works on tonight’s program remind us that musical feeling can take many different forms—or even, in the traditional sense, no form at all. “No One Can Play an Adagio with More Feeling…” Over the course of his career, Mozart wrote some three dozen sonatas for violin and piano. Most were designed to showcase his own virtuosity at the keyboard and cast the violin in a subservient role. But in 1784 Mozart met his match in the brilliant Italian
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