Mozart's Grace by Burnham Scott

Author:Burnham, Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400845118
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Moving Inward

Let us return yet again to the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467, now putting together some passages we have considered separately (example 1.10). The orchestra introduces the movement with twenty-two bars of rapt music, held within an envelope of gently pulsing con sordino strings. Halfway through, this music of placid and effortless beauty takes a turn into some other realm before coming back to the business of thematic convention and closure. After a six-bar melody that moves with the ease of convention from tonic harmony to dominant harmony and back, the bass line underpins the now swooping violins with a steady chromatic ascent on the downbeats of bars 8–11. The pitches of this ascending bass (A, B-flat, B-natural, C) indicate a common approach to the dominant, with intent to cadence. But when the bass arrives on C, it persists there for the next six bars, while the harmony does not resolve the A-flat of bar 10 to an expected G or even A-natural, but holds to it over the bar line, thus seeming to enter a state of enchantment within the minor mode. The unfolding melodic period now falls away, and a different logic takes over. During the ensuing six bars, the upper voice descends on minor-mode scale degrees from D-flat to F, each step down the sum of opposed but unequal leaps. This descent is counterpoised by the more stepwise and sinuous ascent of an inner voice, sonorously scored in octaves for bassoon and second violins and marked by the dissonant suspensions on each downbeat that we noticed earlier.39 The pedal point in the bass holds the passage in a suspended state of apartness, the upper-voice descent keeps it directed, the general rise of dissonance gives it an increasingly otherworldly sound—and then the bass finally moves off its C and steps down to A, just as the upper voice gets to F, arriving together at bar 17 on the first downbeat in quite some time that is consonant. This first-inversion tonic sonority has a limpid, daylight clarity not unlike the easing of a fever, and the music soon arrives at its appointed periodic cadence.

When the piano soloist then takes up the theme in bar 23 (example 2.24), we hear a much more normative and undisturbed 6 + 6 period (after a one-bar introductory vamp). But this would-be normality cannot mask what we heard first: the original presentation of the theme, with its center expanded and its periodic gravity suspended, with its revelation of a strange, new world emanating from within the phrase.40 This world disturbs Mozart’s beautiful surface with an even more transfixing beauty, a captivating and terrible beauty.

Mozart’s music often stages passages that arise as inspired interpolations in the middle of a phrase and that seem to signal the emergence of a higher—or deeper—consciousness, passages that have been felt to brush the listener with what Rudolph Otto called “primal numinous awe.”41 Such passages may well have moved E.T.A. Hoffmann to exclaim: “Mozart leads us deep into the realm of the spirits.

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