Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart

Everyone is doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits. It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live.

That is all very well, and very elegantly put. But there is another side to Mozart, and that is that ordinary amateur musicians like you and me can play his music.

One of the great joys of my life has been to play Mozart string quartets. There are a bunch of them, usually published in two volumes as the Early Quartets and the Late Quartets.

To play a Mozart string quartet is to feel yourself participating, in a palpable way, in the very center of the western experience. First of all, you are playing a violin, the most perfect musical instrument ever conceived and executed. It demonstrates in its form and its sound both the male principle of tautness and tension and the female principle of lushness and pregnant beauty.
Then, of course, you are actually playing the music, this remarkable outpouring of a young genius. What music can compare with the power of the Quartet K.465 the “Dissonant,” the mystery of its opening measures, the bleakness of its second movement, the Andante Cantabile?

Next month, we are playing an early Mozart quartet at the concert of the string orchestra I play with, Hildman Strings. In addition to Mozart we’ll be playing Benda, C.P.E. Bach, and premiering a composition by composer Dell Wade.

You could play the violin, you know. You can start any time and any age, and in a couple of years find a sandbox orchestra in which to play, as I did. There are amateur orchestras all over the United States. One of them is waiting for you.