Mozart & Britten
Written for a concert featuring Mozart’s Adagio & Fugue and String Quartet in G major, K. 387 and Britten’s Three Divertimenti and String Quartet No. 3.
Mozart & Britten
“I cannot understand why one should want to reject the past… I’m given strength by that tradition. I know it changes—of course traditions change. But the human being remains curiously the same.”
- Benjamin Britten
From the beginning of Benjamin Britten’s career, it was apparent that there was a deep connection between the English composer and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In a book published when Britten was only 39, musicologist Hans Keller wrote, “For the first time Mozart, the universal musician who masters everything with a somnambulistic surefootedness and grace, has found a companion.” He wasn’t the first critic to feel this way.
The tie between the composers is most apparent in their approach to composition. Mozart and Britten were both admired by their contemporaries for an instinctive ease in writing music. And for both artists, this seemingly casual technical mastery was rooted in dedicated study from a young age—both Britten and Mozart composed their first pieces at the age of five.
Critic John Amis laid out the parallels between the two composers in his memoirs. “Ben corresponded with Mozart… Ben worked his compositions in his head… Ben always knew where he was going with every bar of the piece in advance…Ben knew when he put a note on paper what finger would play it, on what string or with what technique… where the singer would breathe, how the choir would find the pitch.” Composer William Walton observed similar traits, commenting “I do envy Ben Britten his—not facility, but being able to do it all in his head, like Mozart.”
Britten was an enthusiastic champion of Mozart’s music, recording it more often than any other composer’s except his own, and he spoke frequently of his admiration for the classical master. When the actor David Spenser effused about Romantic composers, Britten chided him, “One day, David, you will realize that Mozart is the greatest composer that has ever lived and that Brahms is easily the worst.” (Britten may have been shy, but he rarely lacked opinions.)
Far from believing this connection to be unique, Britten was baffled that his affinity for Mozart wasn’t shared by everyone. Discussing a fellow composer’s struggle with writer’s block, he commented that “it seemed to me very strange that he didn’t want to go and see how Mozart solved his problems. If he were setting out, from here to Newmarket, to drive, naturally he would use maps to find out how to get there. I know he was trying to say something different, just as we are probably driving a different car to Newmarket from the mapmaker’s... I would think, even though he may have rejected it—just as one can find a new way of going to Newmarket—that it’s useful to know how someone else has gone there.”
This afternoon, the Fry Street Quartet has selected four works—two from the height of Mozart’s success, and two that bookend Britten’s career—that help to illuminate this kinship between composers separated by two centuries.
Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor was composed in 1788, elaborating on a fugue written five years earlier as a piano duet. This fugue betrays Mozart’s close study of Bach’s contrapuntal techniques. When joined with the dramatic dotted rhythms and harmonic structure of the newly-composed Adagio, the two parts form an elegant homage to the French overtures of the Baroque era.
In 1973, Britten underwent heart surgery and suffered a stroke from which he would never fully recover. Once he had regained some strength, he asked to be taken to Venice, a city filled with fond memories for him. It was here, during his convalescence, that he completed the String Quartet No. 3—his final instrumental work. The piece quotes extensively from his final opera, Death in Venice, and in its simplicity of language and yearning for serenity, it isn’t difficult to hear a great artist pondering the end of his life.
Structured in a five-movement arch, the Third Quartet is a work made up of questions without answers. The first movement, “Duets”, is constructed from all six possible duet combinations within the quartet and alludes to the Death in Venice protagonist’s anxious search for the object of his obsession. “Ostinato” begins by confidently trading a repeated pattern amongst the musicians, but it ends suddenly with a discomfiting break in the middle of a thought.
The third movement is marked “very calm”, but there is little peace in this calm. The first violin soars high above the tonal harmonies of the other three instruments, but it pointedly avoids bringing its melody into line with these harmonies. This solo is followed by the “Burlesque”. Throughout his career, Britten’s music featured many “dances of death”, and now, on the threshold himself, he returns once more to the genre. This frantic music is made even eerier by the viola’s high whistling arpeggios, played on the “wrong side” of the bridge.
It’s in the final movement that the connection to Death in Venice becomes most explicit. “La Serenissima” (a common nickname for Venice itself) is structured as a recitative and passacaglia. In Death in Venice, the music’s struggle to reach E major symbolizes the protagonist’s passionate yearning. It’s perhaps significant, then, that this movement is composed in E major. It seems equally relevant, though, that the music fails to achieve an E major resolution, concluding with a low D in the cello. When asked about this, Britten said “I want the work to end with a question.” Throughout this final movement of Britten’s final instrumental work, the most recognizable allusion to Death in Venice is a recurring motif quoting a single line: “I love you.”
Some four decades earlier, at the age of 20, Britten set out to compose a series of portraits of his old school friends entitled Alla Quartetto Serioso: “Go play, boy, play”. Initially planned as a five-movement work for string quartet, Britten struggled with this piece, and only three movements were completed. Eventually, he paired two of these movements with a new march and created the Three Divertimenti. This is sunny music, filled with youthful energy and celebrating fond memories of childhood friendships.
This sunny atmosphere is matched in Mozart’s “Spring” Quartet. Composed in 1782, around the same time as the fugue from the Adagio and Fugue, this was the first in a series of six quartets that Mozart composed in honor of Haydn. The piece is a skillful example of traditional classical quartet form, but Mozart surprises us with some chromatic lines in the opening movement and by placing the minuet as the second movement (instead of in its traditional place as the third). The quartet concludes with a joyous fugue reminiscent of the finale of his “Jupiter” Symphony.
Copyright © 2019 Chris Myers. All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution or reproduction prohibited.