Mozart Fans Only

Personally I could have done without the two "modded" "virtuoso" moments. Just sing it straight and don't add anything. But it was a refreshing change from the garbage we've been hearing in recent years. A singer, singing--imagine that. Good idea!

Renee Fleming... just did the national anthem at the SB the way it should be done, maybe for the first time ever there. Maybe there is hope....

Very well put Tostadosunidos.

I love the quintet, D. 956 (but among those who've heard it, who doesn't?)

It's what I imagine the first moments in heaven would be like.
Absolutely otherworldy.

Kmcarthy, Schuberts op 99 and 100 trios are true wonderworks of music, no other works I'm aware of ride the very peaks of human emotion for that long while maintaining
such complete harmonic and melodic integrity.

I once heard Arthur Rubenstein say Schubert's op 161 Pn Quintet was the most lovely piece ever written and he wanted it played at his funeral.

One of my great moments was when I visited the Vienna Central Cemetery and discovered Schubert was buried right next to Brahms. Almost wanted to die right on the spot to see if I could hear their conversation. (no joke)

I certainly do not mean to belittle Beethoven, you'd have to be an even bigger fool than me to do that!
A way of putting is, on a scale of 1-10;
Bach is a 27 ,
Schubert and Mozart a 9.5
Beethoven a 9 .

Consider,
Bach died at 65
Beethoven at 56
Mozart at 35
Schubert at 31, and only Beethoven was perhaps as sick as he during his last years.
IMHO , if Franz had lived as long as even Mozart ,well you get it.
50 years ago European critical opinion had Schubert as a relatively minor composer, in the last 2 decades it has shifted greatly, largely to where I stand .
Most of the criticism you hear about his chamber music strikes me as like saying I wouldn't have gone out with the young Elizabeth Taylor because she was too pretty.

you might be interested in some of the later Mozart masterpieces, the String Quintets. He wrote six of them. k593 and K614 are widely thought of as supreme. The artist is the Grumiaux Trio with two guests filling out the roster. Its a phillips LP collection recorded in the 70's. My favorite is K515 in C.

I love Schubert's chamber music but find it a bit overly dramatic at times. I'd never consider it superior to Beethoven's, but I'm speaking of a narrow range of their output which I happen to be familiar with.

I came upon this thread as I finished listening to my LPs of Schubert's Piano Trios (Beaux Arts Trio, Philips). Endlessly spellbinding and gorgeous music.

Whoops, obviously Bach did not stand on Haydn's shoulders.
I meant to say Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert did.

I'll agree with Schubert's assessment of Schubert's music.

Schubert was even better than Beethoven , only Bach bettered him, only Mozart equaled him.
All three stood on the shoulders of Haydn.

Agree 100% with Frogman on the Gran Partita - a must for Mozart chamber music. He also wrote much other fine wind music, especially for the wind octet, and also arranged a few of his operas for that ensemble. If I could form any chamber ensemble I wanted, it would be a wind octet.

Das glaub ich auch .

Schubert, well said. In view of all of this, perhaps the name Wolfgang Gottleib is an appropriate name for my dog after all.

Dogs have big hearts, Schubert has the most "heart" of all the great composers. Also like dogs, Schubert had not a phoney bone in his body or in his music.

God loves us and knowing dogs are "mans best friend",
he had to let them in on his greatest earthly gift to us, serious music, and of course Schubert came to mind.

Schubert, wow, amazing. What is it with dogs and Schubert?

Brownsfan, I once had a Bassethound, rather passive as is their wont, who would awake from a dead sleep and come 'a running whenever I would play Scubert chamber music, he would actually get teary over the op99 and 100 trios!

I had named him Schubert as a pup, so help me God.

Frogman, I have a Shetland Sheepdog named Wolfie after you guessed it, Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart himself. Short of stature and a rather large nose. The dog that is. Now this dog loves music, especially Schubert's chamber music, as evidenced by his propensity to sing along with the violins. Only on rare occasions will he sing along with anything other than Schuberts late quartets. Even if he doesn't sing along, he usually wanders into the music room when he hears the music start. Ironically, my wife wanted to name him Schubert. I just had to name him Wolfgang.

No discussion of Mozart's chamber works would be complete without mention of his Serenade No. 10 for winds in B flat major ("Gran Partita"), K. 361. Amazing music that as Salieri is purported to have said is "like listening to the voice of God". Of special note is his use of a pair of basset horns; a seldom heard instrument, member of the clarinet family, which is essentially an alto clarinet in the key of F. A beautiful sonority that perfectly fills in the harmonic "gap" between the clarinets and the bassoons. The Charles Mackerras/Orchestra Of St. Luke's recording on Telarc is very fine on all counts. Highly recommended!

BTW, on the subject of insanity and the power of Mozart's music: I swear that only Mozart can get my pet parrot to sing along.

Learsfool, LOL. Now, if someone can explain the operation of zero dimensional quantum dots, I will be quite impressed.

I am actually very surprised that others on this board even know who Rott is. Certainly not someone the average classical music lover would ever have heard of. Kudos to Brownsfan!

Tostado, Rott was a fellow student under Bruckner with Mahler. I understand Mahler held him in very high esteem and was greived by his unfortunate illness.

Learsfool, at the Central Cemetary in Vienna, Schubert is buried next to Brahms, with Hugo Wolf just a few graves down. Wolf is still popular in the German lands.When I went to pay homage to Schubert, Japanese tourists had his entire grave covered in hundred of roses, one was actually lying next to the grave crying like a baby !

Re, Schubert, kinna hard to be cheery when you are dying from Syphillis and you know it. No composer,not even almighty Bach, ever wrote sweeter melodies.
I personally heard Rubenstein say his op161 Quintet was the greatest piece ever written.

Hans Rott? How can we forget someone we've never even heard of?

I'm pretty sure Brahms has tried to kill me once or twice, too. He wrote very nice chamber music, though!

Learsfool, Let's not forget Hans Rott, who eventually was institutionalized, having run through a train waving a pistol and shouting that Brahms was trying to kill him. I'm pretty sure that qualifies.

The composer who actually went insane was Hugo Wolf, though one could make a case for Schumann as well.

You are correct. More major than I thought. An acid flash from the '60s. Major or minor, please take that with a grain of salt as far as happiness. Minor = imho, sadness/disquiet/troubled/glass half empty. Yep, small pox scars doesn't help. If he made $$ and spent it unwisely, we still have a money issue, no? He fared better than most, but was impecunious most of his life...poor? No, but always needy for the $$.

'Mozart led a pretty rough life, and only wrote one piece in a minor key.'

Can you clarify about this minor key claim, Mozart wrote in a minor key much of the time, so this claim is puzzling to me. Whether he wrote in major or minor had little, if anything at all, to do with his personal life.
Although Mozart was broke most of the time, he typically had money coming in due to the self promotion of his concerts, his private commissions and his posts to the courts. He was employed nearly all of his life. Mozart was just notoriously bad at saving money but compared to his contemporaries, he did pretty well financially. What Mozart did suffer from was an insecurity of self image due to his having been scarred by small pox from an early age.

George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra is a good interpreter of Mozart. Just picked up Symphonies 35, 40 and 41 on CD. The recordings are from the late 50's/ 60's. Well recorded.

Excellent! Thank you Chayro!

They did have Zanax back then. I think they called it Absinthe.

You know why? Ludwig Van. Shubert felt so inferior to Beethoven. He asked, and was, to be
buried next to him. Talk about low self esteem. Shit, if they only had Zanax back then, Franz would have been seeing the glass half full.

The real sob story is Schubert - not our beloved A'gon Schubert, but the real one. "Every night when I go to bed I hope I may not wake... I live without pleasure or friends." He considered his composition "useless". I wonder if he was an audiophile as well?

Insainity? Mozart? you got that wrong
Einstein? Insane? you got that wrong, as well. Eccentric is not insanity. Keep at it, you'll get some copy right. Start with colors and shapes.... :)

Mozart led a pretty rough life, and only wrote one piece in a minor key. There's a half glass full kind of guy. They also found one of his early draft for a sonata. Turns out, start to finish, there was not one error, edit, Nothing!! That ain't just coming from him.

tpreaves,

the difference between insanity and genious,is that genious has its' limitations.

Einstein

The Florestan Trio, Piano Trio recordings on Hyperion are delightful.
There are two separate Mozart packages from the 'Andante' label that I would not want to have to live without. One of them is a set of live radio broadcasts from the Salzburg Festival consisting of string quartets and the clarinet quintet.
The bands are The Juilliard, The Smetana, The Barylli, The Emerson, The Tokyo and The Cleveland. The other set contains live recordings of the Vienna Philharmonic which features M. Polinni playing piano concertos, D. Oistrakh as conductor of concertante and the Jupiter and Lucia Popp conducting the Requiem in D minor.
If you like the violin concertos, my recommendation would be Anne Sophie Mutter and The London Philharmonic on DG.

Been watching too many movies if you think Mozart was insane.

I would second the recommendation for that disc - some friends of mine are on it, though, I should add as a disclaimer.

You do know that Einstein was border-line insane, don't you? For that matter, so was Mozart !!!!!

I'll second this disc, it combines a really good recording, beautiful music and excellent playing. And thanks, Kal, for the recommendation, I've been hoping they would have some more releases.

And they have another that is quite different but equally as good: http://www.sa-cd.net/showtitle/7591