the final movement (Allegretto) of Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major, K 331
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
musicrulez9 posted this video to YouTube on 13 June 2007 and writes:
I bought a copy of the sheet music for this piece then input the notes into Sibelius [a music transcription program, I'm guessing similar to Cakewalk]. A MIDI file was then exported from Sibelius and imported into Reason. From there I added a couple of effects and tweaked the MIDI data a little bit. The pics are scanned copies of the sheet music set to a transparent Mozart background.
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In other words, the video portion is just the sheet music with a "page turner" at the appropriate moments in the score.
I'm not much of a scholar or musicologist, but my guess is that since Mozart sent this tune to his publisher, it hasn't changed very much, or at all, in the written form. So this MIDI version must be very close -- as close as it's possible to get -- to Mozart's interpretive wishes. Courtesy of a couple of robot computer programs, this is exactly how Mozart wanted the Turkish Rondo played.
I shouldn't be too surprised that at first, I thought it was Glenn Gould playing. But of course I instantly realized it couldn't be GG. There's no humming. From the beginning to the end of his studio career -- from youthful Goldbergs to deathbed Goldbergs -- his studio recordings have a clearly audible accompaniment of his passionate humming as he plays. It's one of the things I love most about Gould's recordings.
Oddly enough Gould was savaged by the critics for the way he interpreted Mozart. And oddly enough Gould publicly claimed he didn't like Mozart's music, and thought Mozart's tragedy wasn't that he died too young, but that he died too old (and kept composing).
But when I listen to Gould hum as he plays the Mozart sonatas -- I know he was lying, and indulging his penchant for shocking his public. He's clearly in rapture and transport, and in ways even more passionate than when he hums along with Bach.
S.W.M.B.O. had a lot of childhood piano talent, and the first time she heard my CD of GG's Mozart, she thought the CD player's speed control was broken. By the mid-20th century, no famous pianists were playing Mozart this way, and no piano teachers were teaching this interpretation. Mozart died decades before the player piano was invented; if he'd just made it to that era, he would have cut rolls, and we'd have a much clearer idea of his interpretive wishes.
Mozart's piano pieces occupied a niche like CDs or juke boxes -- they were intended as commercial "hit parade" pop music. So he designed them to actually be easy to play on the home keyboard; the more amateur keyboardists could master his piano scores, the more he'd sell, the more people would hear his music and try to play it. During his brief lifetime, it was commonplace in Europe and North America to hear his music in the music room of upper-class homes. He was Elvis and the Beatles.
They are deceptively "easy" to play. One expert keyboardist and keyboard teacher tells me that at first glance, they seem very straightforward and logical, but they're secretly filled with all sorts of musical tricks and puzzles and jokes and surprises -- simultaneously intriguing and frustrating and annoying for the student. The long-dead composer is laughing at the student's difficulties understanding all his tricks and jokes, Mozart is laughing at the student slipping on all the banana peels he's left throughout the piece.
One reason he's able to torment students is that Mozart was a technically fabulous keyboardist, a real keyboard wizard. Contemporary accounts wrote that he was not just beautiful to listen to, but a delight to watch his small, dainty hands playing.
The Turkish Rondo was one of his all-time smash pop hits. It probably has utterly nothing to do with real Turkish music, but European aristocracy was experiencing a sudden trendy fascination with exotic, mysterious Turkey, and Mozart cranked out a lot of stuff with the Turkish flair people craved. One of his operas, "The Abduction from the Seraglio," is set inside a forbidden Turkish hareem.
Peter Shaffer's portrait of him is probably very accurate, including hints about his sexual fetish. He seems to have had the personality of a college fraternity boy, and it may not entirely be an accident that Tom Hulce, the star of the movie "Amadeus," had also been one of the stars of the wildly popular "Animal House." Larry Kroger the frat boy had a lot in common with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
He spent money faster than he earned it, and was always desperately in debt, particularly after he married (Constanz, one of his opera sopranos) and had kids. In his final years he was particularly vulnerable to accepting private commissions for screwy projects. The rich father of a blind girl who had mastered Benjamin Franklin's glass harmonica paid him to compose music for his daughter -- and it's gorgeous, both his compositions and Franklin's strange instrument are ethereal.
Clockwork music-making machines had become very sophisticated, and a nobleman paid Mozart to compose music for a grand, sophisticated clock on the estate -- impossible music for a human to play, but the machine could play 128th, 256th, 512th, 1024th notes, and Mozart probably enjoyed composing music no human could ever play, music for lightning robot fingers even faster than his own.
Since my keyboard expert friend asked me many years ago, I have been trying to figure out why I love Mozart more than any other composer -- more than Bach, far more than Beethoven (who knocked on Mozart's door and begged for composition lessons, but Mozart was too busy and told him to come back later -- and then died).
The answer still eludes me. I think part of the answer is mystical -- something about Mozart, conveyed through these lovely sonatas and symphonies and operas (I'm particularly entranced with The Magic Flute), just speaks to my soul and personality like my best friend, like someone I'm always delighted to see and talk to and go on road trips and little adventures with. We do share one thing -- we're both Show Folk, theater performers, so I understand that part of Mozart's life very well, the cliquish sense of ensemble, the love of performing before an audience, the wild all-night cast parties, the narcissism and egomania of stage performers. Another very interesting and funny glimpse into theater life is the 1999 movie "Topsy-Turvy" about the comic opera composers Gilbert and Sullivan and their opera company.
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