Review Summary: "The earliest music that sounds wholly Mozartean to our ears"
The German literary movement “Sturm und Drang”, “Storm and Stress” in English, grew out of a desire to break free from the ultra-rational, ultra-objective, and ultra-empirical ideals of the Enlightenment and French Neoclassicism. The principles of the era held that objectivity and reason can adequately explain the awesomeness and the entirety of life itself, and as part and parcel of this ideology, Enlightenment rhetoric privileged reason and its philosophical mathematics over human individuality, expression, and emotion.
Coinciding with the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism was the musical style known as “Galant”, fashionable in Europe from the 1720s to the mid 1770s. The “Galant” period featured a kind of musical regression. Musicians began to harness the simplicity of the tonal system: harmonies were simplified, songlike melodies were given preferential treatment over short bursts of motivic material, and polyphony was ignored entirely. The dramatics of the late Baroque era, with its dark harmonies and byzantine thematic material, took a backseat to reasoned form and proportion.
For whatever reason, it seems as if it was sporadic, it became crystal clear to a particular culture at a particular time, late 1760s German speakers, that reason in it of herself is inadequate to both define and explain the universe. A desire grew amongst the populace to triumph a more genuine human experience, and artists, misanthropes that they are, naturally took to exploring humanity’s darker sides. Protagonists in “Sturm und Drang” novels are often driven by base motives, even violence, rather than lofty ideals. Goethe's Werther, after all, plagued by narcissism, killed himself to avoid his emotional torment. Although there was less of a “Sturm und Drang” movement in the musical world than in the literary one, certain “Storm and Stress” features bled from one artistic discipline to another, and this was especially true in the cosmopolitan and multicultural Vienna.
Enter Vienna 1773, the year during which seventeen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the “Wunderkint from Salzburg”, composed his symphony No. 25 in G minor. Although it is questionable whether Mozart composed No. 25 as a self-conscious adherent to the German literary movement, the “Little” G Minor Symphony, so called because of its stature in comparison to Mozart’s later G Minor Symphony No. 40, features hallmarks of the musical “Sturm und Drang.”
The first movement, made famous by the 1989 flick “Amadeus”, and especially its opening motif, four bars of syncopated G minor dominant-tonic action followed by an 8th note ascending tonic triad that quickly descends in a 16th note lighting-esque diatonic run, features such “Strum und Drang” hallmarks as: agitated syncopation, wide intervallic leaps, and strings utilizing the tremolo technique. Phillip Huscher, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, sees No. 25, and especially its opening motif as “the earliest music that sounds wholly Mozartean to our ears…something utterly individual, music that leaps from the page and lodges in our memories.” Many music historians indeed see No. 25 (and No. 29) as the first examples of Mozart’s genius. There is certainly something irresistible about No. 25’s first theme. It flies out of the gate, without frill or nicety, emphatically expressing its distress; so much so that the audience feels a need to see to the end of the story.
Theme two, although set in the rich key of Bb Major, also utilizes syncopation and the so-called “Mannheim Rockets.” The theme sounds as though Mozart set out to mirror invert the mood of theme one. It seems this way from design; motivic material from theme one is refashioned into major sonorities. The development, although short, features excursions based on previously sounded thematic material in distant harmonic keys. Moreover, new transition material is added and we explore the harmonies of D and A Major. And in the recapitulation, the sonata principal is fulfilled when theme two sounds in the tonic. That the tonic is a minor sonority adds further distress. The mood of the movement, it seems, will never resolve.
The second movement, set in Eb Major and in sonata form, emphasizes texture and soundscape over thematic development. Theme one is a plodding and fragmented melody that exists in a dialogue between the horns, strings, and winds. This is not, however, a conversation taking place in polite company. Each instrumental group, instead of gracefully passing the melody between themselves, interrupts before the other is finished. The flow of theme one conveys a sense of anxiety through its contrapunctus. Theme two tides in serenity. The strings bounce to a sturdy down beat in the horns before each group enters another dialogue composed of similar motivic material from theme one. This time they respectfully allow each other to finish. The respective themes are repeated and then the movement gracefully peters out in the horns.
Movement three, set in a standard Minuetto and Trio in G minor/G Major, stands out for its emphasis on dark harmonies, contrast between monophony and homophony, and for an abrupt modulation from G Minor to its parallel Major without preparation. The mood of the Minuetto is neither anxious like movement one, nor pleasant like movement two, but serious and bold.
Enjoyable as the second and third movements are, they are of lesser importance to the symphony, as is custom, than in comparison with the exquisite fourth. Parts of this movement, to my ears, foreshadow music of the big-band jazz era. The melody enters in the strings, a single line of dotted rhythm in g-minor. After the cadence that ends the passage, theme one is repeated as is, but with an utterly modern sounding syncopated bounce in the horns. What’s more, this rhythm mimics the syncopation from the first theme of movement one, satisfying our ears natural yearning for repetition. Just as modern sounding is a passage that again features the same single dotted note rhythm line, but also utilizes the “ta-ta-tum” rhythm you might hear sounded in the standup bass or drums on literally any jazz record recorded over the past sixty years. What I mean to say is that these two passages swing. They rival Beethoven’s famous “boogie-woogie” variation from his 32nd piano sonata for the “jazziest” sounding classical passage of the 18th and 19th centuries. And yet this symphony predates the Beethoven by some fifty years. Incredible. With all its buoyancy, and even though the symphony ends with an emphatic G minor, the last movement feels as though it resolves the anxiety left over from movement one.
Music in the “Galant” style often comes off as rather impersonal and anonymous. To illustrate, there is a parallel, I think, between the Neoclassical-Galant style, aptly named, and the statuary of Classical 5th century Athens. Athenian sculptors aimed to replicate divine perfection in human form. Thus, there is something alien about them, their faces especially. Inherently individual and imperfect as our bodies are, without representations of what make our bodies and faces the way they are, the beings represented in Athenian statuary seem unrecognizable, even frightening. Some of the same can be said of “Galant” style music barren of a musically unreasoned injection. We remember the best “classical music”, to use the term broadly, for its ability to speak to something instinctual in us. This is why No. 25 endures in popularity. Somehow, we recognize the personality imbued within it, and as a matter of fact, with more than two centuries having passed, we understand that a sense of individuality and personality is what separates composers, this composer and this composition especially, from the rest of the “Galant” pack.
