By 1780, Mozart was growing increasingly restive in his position as court composer to Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo in his native Salzburg. The archbishop’s insatiable demands, and his unforgivable failure to appreciate Mozart’s accomplishments in the realm of secular music, impelled the ambitious composer to search for greener pastures. In 1781 he severed his ties to the ecclesiastical court and moved to Vienna to pursue a highly successful career as a freelance composer, pianist, and teacher. One of his first appearances was a command performance at the imperial palace with his archrival Muzio Clementi. Although Mozart considered the Italian virtuoso a mere technician with “not a farthing’s worth of feeling,” tradition has it that Clementi emerged from the competition as Mozart’s peer. At least one eminent judge dissented, however. “Clementi’s way of playing is art alone,” Emperor Joseph II told the composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. “Mozart’s is art and taste.”

Having discovered that the Viennese were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of attending his subscription concerts, Mozart worked day and night to keep the programs stocked with a fresh supply of music. His boundless energy made a deep impression on his father when the latter visited Vienna in 1785. “It is impossible to describe the trouble and the commotion,” Leopold Mozart reported to his daughter in Salzburg. “Since my arrival your brother’s fortepiano has been taken at least a dozen times to the theater or to some other house.” During the last decade of his life, Mozart composed no fewer than 17 piano concertos, as well as a wide variety of solo keyboard music, ranging from large-scale sonatas to rondos, fantasias, fugues, and other stand-alone pieces. This diverse and masterly repertoire reflects Mozart's determination to expand the range of piano technique and expression, even as he breathed new life into forms and genres associated with his 18th-century predecessors.

Composed in May 1785, the agitated, passionate, and often tragic atmosphere of the Fantasia is traditionally associated with the key of C minor. (According to one 19th-century theorist, C minor evokes the “languishing, longing, sighing of the love-sick soul.”) The work begins and ends with a slithering chromatic theme that is repeated sequentially at different tonal levels. This ominous preamble gives way to a luminous aria in D major, followed by a torrid Allegro, a tender Andantino, and a second, even more brilliant Più allegro characterized by broken chords and intense chromaticism. While the sense of clearly mapped-out sections may owe something to the fantasias of C.P.E. Bach earlier in the century, the scope and depth of mood look to ahead to the future.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Shortly after arriving in Vienna, Mozart began attending concerts of “early music” at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the head of the Imperial Library and a pioneering musical antiquarian. “I go every Sunday at twelve o’clock to the Baron van Swieten, where nothing is played but George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach,” the composer reported to his father, adding that he was building a study collection of fugues by Bach and his sons. Mozart’s interest in the Baroque masters is reflected in works such as the Piano Suite in C major, K. 399, which revives the richly ornamented style and multimovement form of the 18th-century dance suite, as well in the arrangements of Messiah and other works by Handel that he made at van Swieten’s behest. The increasing prominence of counterpoint in Mozart’s music of this period can be heard in all three movements of the Sonata in F major, the 15th of 18 numbered piano sonatas that he composed between 1774 and 1789.

The finale of this exquisite Sonata was first published as a freestanding Rondo in 1786; two years later Mozart appended an expanded version to a freshly minted Allegro and Andante. (The latter two movements are dated January 3, 1788, in the “catalogue of all my works” that the composer started in 1784.) The resulting composite sonata is a characteristically Mozartean blend of playfulness and profundity. K. 533/494 begins innocently enough, with a perky little tune whose two-bar phrases are separated by a quizzical octave leap. But the second theme, with its cascading triplets and lickety-split turns, gives a foretaste of the bravura sophistication that lies ahead, including a contrapuntal reminiscence of the opening theme at the end. The Andante, in burnished B-flat major, is as sedate as the Allegro was energetic. The relaxed lyricism of the opening theme, harmonized in dulcet thirds and sixths, soon gives way to music of a more strenuous character, with intricate passagework, wayward chromatic harmonies, and arresting dissonances. In the finale, Mozart piles on layer after layer of complexity, cloaking the gaily skipping rondo theme in embellishments and alternating it with stormy episodes. In the end, the sparkle fades and the Sonata closes in unexpected baritonal repose.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Beethoven burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna in late 1792 and spent the remainder of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse. Upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overcome with emotion—or perhaps envy—that he couldn’t bring himself to touch his own instrument for days. In a city crawling with top-flight pianists, Beethoven was acknowledged to be in a class by himself. His unbridled energy at the keyboard, and his formidable powers as an improviser, are the stuff of legend. Like most of his contemporaries, the budding genius was weaned partly on a diet of J.S. Bach. When, at age eleven, Beethoven received his first favorable review, it was for a performance of the Well-Tempered Clavier in his native Bonn. Upon moving to Vienna, he took lessons in counterpoint from the eminent teacher Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. Decades later, those early compositional studies would bear fruit in the gnarled fugues of his late-period piano sonatas and string quartets. 

Throughout his life, Beethoven amused himself and supplemented his income by composing variations both on his own themes and on popular tunes, from patriotic tub-thumpers like “Rule Britannia” to operatic arias by W.A. Mozart and Antonio Salieri. In 1819 the publisher Anton Diabelli penned an unpretentious waltz and commissioned a Who’s Who of contemporary composers—including Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, and the 11-year-old Franz Liszt—to each write a variation. He would then publish them in a collected album for the relief of widows and orphans of the Napoleonic wars, an initiative that was part charitable and part creative marketing for his firm. In the first half of that year, Beethoven wrote not just one variation, but more than twenty. After setting the project aside for several years, he expanded his draft to thirty-three variations in 1823. Diabelli decided to publish Beethoven’s variations as a separate album.

Hans von Bülow dubbed the Diabelli Variations, “a microcosm of Beethoven’s art,” and Alfred Brendel has described them as “the greatest of all piano works.” Yet, this monumental work was built from a trivial waltz that Beethoven originally dismissed as a “cobbler’s patch.” Nonetheless, it triggered a creative brainstorm. The musicologist Lewis Lockwood speculates that Beethoven was one-upping himself, having written a set of thirty-two variations on an original theme as a young man. Another likely source of inspiration was Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations, which, like the Diabelli, run the gamut of moods between brilliance and introspection, lyrical simplicity and contrapuntal virtuosity.

With its simple C-major melody, regular phrase structure, and playful syncopations, Diabelli’s artless waltz readily lent itself to Beethoven’s brilliantly imaginative elaborations. From the first variation, a majestic march in 4/4 time, he mixes up triple and duple meters, alternately highlighting and obscuring the distinctive lilt of the underlying dance. The character of the individual variations is equally diverse, from gracefully flowing legato lines to crisp, percussive articulations, and each presents a different technical challenge to the performer. The daredevil acrobatics of Variation 19, for example, offer a vivid contrast with the somber, slow-moving, chorale-like harmonies of Variation 20 and the impish send-up of the aria “Notte e giorno faticar” (from Mozart’s Don Giovanni) in Variation 22. As the music becomes increasingly intricate and bravura in character, Beethoven belatedly introduces contrapuntal complexity in a rambunctious fugue (Variation 32), followed by a farewell nod to Diabelli’s waltz in the guise of a richly embellished minuet.

© Harry Haskell, 2024