Mitsuko Uchida

Piano Works by Mozart and Beethoven

Paul Thomason

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven both initially achieved fame as keyboard virtuosos, and so the music they wrote for the piano—both as a solo instrument and as part of an ensemble—inevitably reflected their ideas about performing. In 1798, Mozart’s first biographer, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, wrote, “In Vienna, above all, his piano playing was admired… His admirable dexterity, which particularly in the left hand and the bass were considered quite unique, his feeling and delicacy, and beautiful expression of which only a Mozart was capable, were the attractions of his playing.” Even rival composer and pianist Muzio Clementi was moved to exclaim, “Until then I had never heard anyone play with so much spirit and grace.” (For his part, Mozart did not think much of Clementi’s playing. In 1782 he wrote to his father, “Clementi plays well, so far as execution with the right hand goes. His greatest strength lies in passages in thirds. Apart from this, he has not a kreuzer’s worth of taste or feeling—in short he is simply a mechanicus.”)

Apparently Beethoven had a slightly less exalted view of Mozart’s skills at the piano. When Beethoven was 17 years old, he visited Vienna for the first time, and there is a possibility that he took some lessons from Mozart before being summoned back to Bonn where his Mother was extremely ill. In his Life of Beethoven, Alexander

Thayer writes, “According to a communication from [Beethoven’s pupil, Carl] Czerny to Otto Jahn, Beethoven had explained to him that he had heard Mozart play: ‘he had a fine but choppy (zerhacktes) way of playing, no ligato.’”

For his part, Beethoven’s piano playing was characterized by “a rare gift of singing legato,” says his biographer Jan Swafford, though during loud passages he could break strings and hammers of the instruments of the time. Czerny remembered that Beethoven “knew how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not a eye remained dry, while many would break into loud sobs, for there was something wonderful in his expression.” By the time Mozart and Beethoven wrote the two pieces on tonight’s program they had achieved a solid, sovereign mastery of their art. As such, it is difficult to escape the thought they both were having a marvelous time composing these works that took the piano into new realms, with their combination of subtly, quirkiness, and outright musical genius.

16 The fact that Mozart sort of backed into writing his F-major piano sonata K. 533/494 does not take away from the fact that it is a gem, filled with the emotional richness we have come to expect from his later works. On June 10, 1786, a month after the premiere of his opera Le nozze di Figaro, he noted the composition of a “Little Rondo in F major” in his catalogue. Apparently this had been written for his student Franziska von Jacquin. A year and a half later he revisited this charming Rondo, K. 494, extending it a bit, including a 27-bar cadenza, and making it the third movement of his 15th Piano Sonata, the first two movement of which he wrote in January 1788, between the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague and its first performance in Vienna.

“[Mozart’s] music for piano solo was the most direct, the most sensitive of all his tonal thoughts,” writes John Burk. “The keyboard was his closest confidant. The sonatas are an immediate, a personal emanation.” The intimacy of the opening of the F-major sonata turns out to be rather deceptive. It begins with the right hand playing the principal theme all alone, like the opening of a fugue. Five bars later, the left hand repeats the subject on its own. However, Mozart is not writing a fugue but a brilliantly worked out example of sonata

form, the second subject of which is also announced by the right hand alone, playing triplets. When this is repeated three measures later, the left hand introduces a rising scale passage motive that is eventually heard all alone in the left hand, as if to emphasize its importance. The way Mozart develops these themes, moving through a variety of different keys, is endlessly fascinating as well as beautiful.

The following Andante in three-quarter time is “one of the most broodingly introspective movements that Mozart ever wrote for the keyboard,” says Hermann Abert. It is in the development section that the piece sometimes seems dangerously close to coming off the rails, with unexpectedly jagged harmonies that at first hearing seem to appear in an almost random manner, as if Mozart has forgotten where he is in the scheme of things. “A feeling of the bitterest selftorment” and “a sense of emotional tension unique in Mozart’s sonatas” is the way Abert describes it. And he suggests it is in the first two movements of the sonata that “the mood associated at this time with Don Giovanni finds consummate expression.” Was Mozart giving vent to some very dark emotions, was he making a sardonic jest? Was he simply seeing how far out on a compositional limb he could crawl before it broke? Whatever the impetus, this second movement, especially, seems to open the door to music that would be written in the future. Perhaps music like Beethoven would compose decades later in his monumental Opus 120?

Hans von Bülow called the “Diabelli” Variations a “microcosm of Beethoven’s art,” and the piece has often been compared to Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. There is no doubt it is a profound, monumental work. But it is also one many music lovers struggle to embrace—which led the legendary 20th-century pianist Artur Schnabel to quip that once when he was playing the “Diabelli” Variations in a concert he was suddenly struck by the idea that he was the only one in the entire hall who was enjoying himself. In 1819, the Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli decided to capitalize on the patriotic fervor then in vogue in Vienna by issuing a publication called the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein (“Patriotic Society of Artists”) that would contain a series of variations on a “patriotic”

waltz composed by Diabelli himself. Part of the proceeds would be given to the widows and orphans of Viennese soldiers killed during the Napoleonic Wars, and Diabelli’s new publishing firm, Cappi & Diabelli, would have the cache of having the names of some very famous and popular composers associated with the company. Fiftyone composers were invited to contribute to the project. In addition to Beethoven they included Schubert, Hummel, Moscheles, Kreutzer, Mozart’s son Franz Xaver, Czerny, and his pupil Franz Liszt, who was all of eight years old at the time.

Beethoven, however, declared the theme a “cobbler’s patch” (Schusterfleck) and declined to participate. But the theme nudged at him, so he wrote to Diabelli, suggesting that he write his own set of variations, an offer Diabelli accepted gladly. Beethoven set aside work on his Missa solemnis to write almost two dozen variations, before tackling the Mass’s Gloria and Credo. It was not until 1823 that he returned to the variations project and finished it writing the variations we now know as numbers 1, 2, 15, 23–26, 28, 29, and 31. Diabelli was alarmed at the size of the work. Nonetheless “Thirtythree Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli” was published as Beethoven’s opus 120 in 1823—the year before the originally planned album finally appeared.

Diabelli’s waltz (labeled “Vivace” in Beethoven’s setting) is a commonplace ditty. It’s often derided as being repetitious and not having much of a melody at all. It is the sort of simple thing one would be likely to hear in a common tavern of the day. The variations Beethoven came up with are not the primarily decorative variations that were so popular earlier in his career, but a profound exploration of the very atoms of the music itself—its clunkiness, its angularity, the heavy-handed rhythms. It is interesting that Beethoven did not call his work Variations, using the term “Variationen” as he had so often for such compositions in the past. Instead he labeled it 33 Veränderungen über einen Walzer von A. Diabelli, “changes,” perhaps even “transformations,” rather than “variations.”

This almost obsessive exploration of every individual aspect of the theme sometimes results in marvelous bouts of humor alongside the profundity. Biographer Jan Swafford points out that Beethoven’s concern for simplicity was sometimes pushed “into irony, parody, even a kind of aesthetic cynicism: the implication that the fundamental material of a piece is not so important, that it may as well be one thing as another”—and that in the “Diabelli” Variations he was saying, in essence, “I can take anything at all, parody it, laugh at it,

and still make something significant out of it, far beyond anything anybody including its originator could imagine doing with it.”

From the very beginning—the first three variations—Beethoven lets us know the music refers not only to the original theme, but also to the variations themselves. The first variation abruptly changes the character of the theme entirely to a very grand, slow (“Maestoso”) march in 4/4 time (not the waltz’s 3 /4). It is pompous music to accompany a stiff, stylized procession on the parade grounds of a military regiment where everyone is taking the proceedings seriously indeed. The mood shifts abruptly in Variation 2, where we are back in a quick 3 /4 waltz tempo, the music is all light, eighth-note staccatos, and the dynamic marking is “piano.” The huge contrast between the first two variations is one of the keys to the work, the way individual variations often play off of what we have just heard. The third variation moves from the sharp scampering of Variation 2 into a contrasting smooth, lyric vein marked “dolce,” sweetly.

The variations also sometimes reference other composers, as in Variation 12, which is marked “Alla ‘Notte e giorno faticar’ di Mozart.” The first five notes in the left hand of Diabelli’s waltz are the same intervals (a fourth) as Leporello sings at the beginning of Don Giovanni when he complains of having to work night and day for his master. Beethoven not only turns Leporello’s grumbling about working too hard into a variation, he uses that as a sly dig at the piano exercises of Johann Baptist Cramer in the next variation, a parody of Cramer’s five-finger exercises that made students slave away.

The composer pokes fun at the very idea of a variation in number 13 with its long silences between thumping chords that mark the change in harmony in the original theme, shorn of any melody whatsoever. This is, of course, exactly the opposite to number 9 which consists of totally obsessing with the theme’s chirping gracenote opening (its four notes being the only “melody” in the theme), something that is obviously also explored (in a somewhat smoothed-out way) in Variations 11 and 12.

Variation 31 (“Largo, molto espressivo”) is like a tragic Baroque aria, with cascades of filigree flowing like so many tears, an almost shocking contrast to the strict fugue that is the following, penultimate variation. Anyone else might have ended the cycle by bringing this enormous piece to an appropriately rousing climax. And indeed, Beethoven seems to suggest that’s what he will do, throwing in a lavish cadenza after which we would naturally expect a suitably

grand close. But he has yet another trick up his sleeve. The cadenza leads, instead, to six very slow measures of transition, chords that begin fortissimo and then get softer, ending pianissimo—out of which comes a final variation, a sort of Epilogue. Diabelli’s waltz has become a minuet, suffused with a Mozartian grace that, at the end, evaporates into thin air, with a final chord bringing the whole composition to a close. The journey from Diabelli’s quirky beginning has been an enormous one, and along the way Beethoven has peppered the score with an astonishing number of things to draw our attention, enough to repay a lifetime of study, listening, and pondering—all originating from one of the most unprepossessing themes imaginable.

Paul Thomason writes for opera houses, symphony orchestras, and cultural centers in the U.S. and Europe, in addition to lecturing and teaching about music. He is based in New York City but visits Germany as often as he can.