On Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and Mass in C Minor

Musicologist Scott Burnham opens his book Mozart’s Grace with a caveat from theologian Karl Barth: “Whoever has discovered Mozart even to a small degree and then tries to speak about him falls quickly into what seems rapturous stammering.” Indeed, it’s difficult to find words on par with music that, in Burnham’s estimation, “seems somehow pre-made, [which] glows with a self-sufficiency that has less to do with ‘unity’ and more with apartness: untouched, untouchable.” But I shall try.

Of the two works on today’s program, the Concerto for Clarinet in A Major is perhaps the easier of the two to discuss. It provides a window onto the “mature” Mozart, or at least Mozart as mature as he would ever be: Written in 1791, the year of his untimely death, it was the last work he would ever complete and not leave unfinished (as were the Requiem of that same year and the Mass in C Minor). It was born not of financial necessity but of friendship and enchantment. Mozart wrote it for his close friend and Masonic lodge-mate Anton Stadler, a virtuoso on a then relatively new and (by Mozart) much-loved instrument, the clarinet. The piece combines lyricism, verve, humor, and melancholy in a manner that has endeared it to audiences for two and a half centuries.

The Concerto is a masterfully polished gem of a work and a perfect showcase for its featured instrument. As he did in the instrumentation of his Requiem, Mozart leaves out the more plaintive and penetrating sound of oboes. Omitting, too, any additional clarinets, as well as trumpets, trombones, and drums, Mozart scores the Concerto for a complement of flutes, bassoons, horns, and strings that places the character of the solo clarinet front and center. Rivaling the flexibility of a solo violin, the clarinet can sound cheeky and ebullient one second, melancholic and lonesome the next. A skilled player can employ a rich and varied palette, ranging in shade and intensity from the brightest, most saturated oil-paint fortissimos to the faintest, most translucent watercolor pianissimos. The clarinet’s range stretches as high as the oboe’s but adds nearly another octave on the low end, covering with equal power a vast span of pitches encompassing the operatic soprano, mezzo-soprano, and tenor ranges. In the allegro outer movements, athletic arpeggios triple-jump from low to middle to high register and sprint back down again in a jolly flash—coloratura even the most virtuosic soprano could never execute. By contrast, the long, arcing, unhurried phrases of the adagio put it on par with Mozart’s most poignant, slow, and lyrical operatic arias. Mozart’s life was famously roiled by mixed fortunes, from financial ups and downs to the great tragedy of dying well before the age of forty. One can’t help wondering if the coexistence of joy and sadness animating the Concerto for Clarinet (and indeed forming the essential sound of the instrument itself) reflects his own inner crosscurrents at the time of its composition. Whether or not there exists any autobiographical strain, the Concerto for Clarinet captivatingly reflects the bittersweet, tragicomic fullness of life.

Describing the Mass proves more challenging. It appeared at a time when Mozart’s musical style was not inchoate but was, shall we say, flexible—susceptible and welcoming to the allure of new and exciting influences. Rather than demonstrate a single, fully formed stylistic modus operandi, the Mass shows Mozart trying on several for size. Austere movements hearkening back to the Baroque are juxtaposed with sensuous operatic arias. Melancholic movements grounded in counterpoint stand alongside fanfare-driven pomp. It is incomplete: Mozart did not finish setting all of the typical movements of the Mass ordinary, and some of those he started remain fragmentary. What he did leave us suggests a Mass setting far grander than the church music conventions at the time would admit. The first three movements are scored for four choral voice parts and solo sopranos. Subsequent movements increase both counts, to eight choral parts and a full quartet of soloists. Had Mozart continued apace on this colossal scale, the Mass in C Minor would easily have been the longest piece (aside from operas) he’d ever composed.

Those who love the sacred choral works of J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel will find much to admire in the Mass in C Minor. The Vienna Court Librarian, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, introduced Mozart to the choral music of Handel and Bach in the early 1780s. Mozart’s admiration for and fascination with the compositional procedures he encountered in those earlier scores is clear in the movements of his Mass in C Minor that are built upon fugal techniques. Both the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” and the “Osanna” fugues present the machinations of a deft composer eager to test out all the procedures he might have encountered in the fugues of Bach—myriad permutations of subject and counter-subject, right-side-up or upside-down; variations in minor keys and fragmentary, exploratory episodes; excitement built via the foreshortening effect of stretto overlaps; and the splendid, satisfying return of the main thematic material, writ large. Both fugues present their subjects straightforwardly at the outset, in the bass section, build steadily, and careen to a close with reiterations of the main subjects in as many as four voice parts at once. The “Qui Tollis” and the “Gratias” pay homage to a grand and severe style that Handel deployed in his oratorios; it features a stark contrast between the choral and orchestral layers of the musical texture, resulting in great dramatic effect. In these two movements, the voices plead, in long, sustained lines, while the orchestra churns through harmonically anguished arpeggios set to an insistently snappy rhythm. Neither group succumbs to the other’s style. That Mozart so unrelentingly sustains, for well over five minutes, the tectonic friction between these two monolithic strata of sound suggests a young composer brazen enough to push a Baroque Affekt to its limit.

If the aforementioned movements are tributes to the expressive capabilities and dexterous counterpoint of Handel and Bach, then the “Christe Eleison” and, especially, the “Et Incarnatus Est” are love letters to the sublime possibilities of the soprano voice. Indeed the origins of the Mass are entangled with Mozart’s falling in love with a soprano—actually two sopranos, and sisters, no less. In 1777 a twenty-one year-old Mozart visited Mannheim and fell under the spell of the teenage soprano Aloysia Weber, but she did not return his affection. When they met again a year later, she rebuffed him decisively. Several years later (after Aloysia had married someone else), Mozart actually lived with her family briefly after he was turned out of the household of his patron, Archbishop Colloredo. Now, it would seem, Mozart showed interest in Aloysia’s sister, Constanze—also a soprano. The young women’s meddling mother, fearing impropriety, asked Mozart to move out of the house, at the same time nudging him and Constanze towards marriage. Mozart’s father, Leopold, was less keen on the match. Wolfgang wrote to his father that the wedding should take place sooner rather than later, because “all the good and well-intentioned advice you have sent fails to address the case of a man who had already gone so far with a maiden. Further postponement is out of the question.” They married on August 4, 1782. Leopold’s consent wouldn’t arrive in the mail until the next day. Hoping to smooth things over, Mozart vowed to compose a Mass to be performed when he and Constanze made their first visit to Salzburg as husband and wife—a composer and his promising soprano.

Thus the C Minor Mass became one of the greatest showpieces for sopranos in the choral repertoire. In the “Christe Eleison,” “Laudamus Te,” and “Domine Deus,” for instance, the sopranos’ voices must flip, spin, and leap across chasms from the ledger lines below the staff to the ledger lines above it, from one extreme of register to another, while maintaining the weightless grace so characteristic of Mozart. It is as though they were executing elements of both an Olympic gymnastics routine and a grand ballet solo, magically free of the force of gravity. But because Mozart supports them with just the right amount of orchestral accompaniment and weaves them into the harmonic narrative, these cadenza-worthy acrobatics feel not superfluously decorative but fully integral to the musical line. Standing apart from the entire Mass, on par with Mozart’s greatest opera arias, is the “Et Incarnatus Est.” At once sensuous and sublime, it lulls us into levitating from the loamy earth of its orchestral introduction up into its gently swirling zephyrs of voice and woodwind quartet. Musicologist Alfred Einstein’s summation of Mozart’s music provides an apt description for this movement: “Here is pure sound, conforming to a weightless cosmos, triumphant over all chaotic earthliness.”

In contrast to the Baroque-inspired movements and the operatic solos, the “Credo” and “Gloria” present Mozart’s grand, ceremonial style. In the “Credo,” Mozart lets the orchestra do the work: The choir recites the long creed text in straightforward homophonic blocs while the orchestra sustains forward momentum with fanfare figures and high-velocity passagework in the strings. Mozart dispatches the first part of the lengthy “Gloria” text in somewhat similar fashion, but with more imitation in the choral texture.

While it’s gratifying to hear Mozart’s engagement with Baroque, operatic, and ceremonial styles, it’s the opening “Kyrie eleison” that, for me, demonstrates Mozart’s most compelling compositional style—one that has fully synthesized all its influences, concentrating them into an expressive, dramatic musical language. Here Mozart uses music theatrically, establishing in just a few measures a strong sense of atmosphere and setting. The shadowy C minor tonality dims the lights. A hesitant, resigned melody in the violins opens the work, accompanied by a loping ostinato pattern of chords in the lower strings. The melody descends through a C minor triad in the first bar and then searches through the darkness for a sense of Mozartian grace, but the flowing sixteenth notes at the end of each bar lead only to poignantly dissonant appoggiaturas on the downbeats. The choir’s entry loudly corroborates the pervasive C minor tonality with overlapping, widely yawning arpeggios. Where Mozart omitted oboes from the orchestra for the Concerto for Clarinet, he uses them to great effect here, along with trombones, trumpets, and timpani, but, notably, without the softer sounds of flutes and clarinets. A fugal subject emerges from the sopranos—a slow-moving, plaintive melody outlining a chromatic descent. As the orchestra continues its churn, each section in the chorus in turn presents the fugue subject. A gentle scale ushers in the relief of E-flat major, clearing away the storm clouds and welcoming the soprano solo, whose wide-ranging scales and roulades point up the constricted quality of the fugue subject. The choir picks up again in the soprano’s warm E-flat major but then winds it way back to C minor, ending the movement in the somber atmosphere in which it began.

The Mass in C Minor has not come down to us in complete form, and it’s possible that it was never completed. In January of 1783 Mozart admitted to his father that he had “the score of half a Mass . . . lying here waiting to be finished.” While it’s certain that an entire liturgical Mass was performed during the Salzburg visit, it’s uncertain whether Mozart had in fact completed the work—parts of which were subsequently lost—or whether he fashioned a complete setting by filling in the missing movements with other extant works. (The fragmentary state of the sections that do exist suggests the latter.) While Mozart was writing the Mass, Emperor Joseph II instituted reforms reining in the length and scope of sacred music. Then, in 1783, he cut funding for church music in half. Perhaps Mozart saw no financially viable future for the work. Writer Michael Steinberg puts forth two other hypotheses for Mozart’s failure to complete it: The composer worked on the Mass in the period immediately following his wedding, during which, at least insofar as he reports to his father, “I found that I have never prayed so fervently or confessed or communicated so devoutly as at [Constanze’s] side, and it was the same for her.” Steinberg suggests: “It may be that some months into his marriage his observances cooled into their previous less-fervent and less-devout temperature, with the consequence that he found it impossible to continue with his only liturgical work written not on commission or contract but ex voto.” Another possibility is that the work, written during a time when Mozart had completed other style studies and exercises, had served its self-educational purpose and lacked the tailwinds to go any further. Steinberg surmises:

It is not difficult to imagine [Mozart], early in 1873, looking through the growing pile of manuscript pages of the C-Minor Mass, scratching his head, wondering where in the world this monster wanted to go, and then, in the absence of a strong inner compulsion to move forward, deciding either to put off thinking about the problem for a while or to abandon the project then and there. After all, there was so much else to do, and surely the problem of what to perform in Salzburg would solve itself somehow.

Mozart would not compose any more works on sacred texts until his Ave Verum Corpus and the Requiem, both written in the last year of his life. The two movements that, to me, most clearly embody Mozart’s mature style—the “Kyrie” and “Gloria”—were in fact repurposed in a later cantata, Davidde penitente.

Given the evidence of absorption of new (yet old) musical styles in the Mass in C Minor and the compelling stylistic synthesis exhibited by the Concerto for Clarinet (not to mention the Requiem and other works written near the end of Mozart’s life, such as The Magic Flute), I can’t help but mourn the many musical monuments that we, lovers of Mozart, were deprived of due to his untimely death (an event that musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon labeled “the greatest tragedy in the history of music”). I admit to feeling disappointed by various editor’s “completions,” demanded by the lacunae in Mozart’s unfinished works. They’re generally excellent. But oh, that we had complete works from the composer’s own quill! Moreover, as a late thirty-something just starting to figure out what he really wants from music, I pine for the works of “maturity” that never were. What might Mozart have done in his forties? His fifties? It was shortly after Mozart’s death that Haydn made his greatest contributions to the Mass genre and then penned two magnificent oratorios—a genre into which Mozart ventured but once, at age fifteen. A young Beethoven arrived in Vienna the year after Mozart’s death. What might that relationship have fostered? What new musical languages might Mozart have fashioned from his fecund imagination and compositional facility? Alas, we can only imagine. In the meantime, how lucky we are that so many scores remain from this once-in-a-century, gorgeous musical mind. Mozart’s music has always been and will remain, for millennia to come, the epitome of Enlightenment balance and the paragon of grace. Reviewing the Concerto for Clarinet at its 1791 premiere, Bernhard Weber wrote: “Such an abundance of beauty almost tires the soul, and the effect of the whole is sometimes obscured thereby. But happy the artist whose only fault lies in an all too great perfection.”

Copyright 2019, Ryan James Brandau

For information about using these notes, please contact Ryan at ryanbrandau@gmail.com.