Why Glenn Gould was WRONG about Mozart!

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-06

[00:00:00]Despite its gently swooning melodies, its meticulously balanced cadences, despite its stable and architecturally unexceptionable form, I'm going to submit it as a good example of why I think Mozart, especially in his later years, was not a very good composer.

[00:00:16]Today, I'm going to have a big kind of argument with G about Mozart because I just think he gets Mozart completely wrong. And [laughter] I think it would be quite fun to have a little back and forth with with Gould about Mozart. So, that's what we're going to do here. Here we go. So, we're going to go in just plunge straight in. I got my iPad here.

[00:00:34]I'm watching Gold and we'll just see what he has to say. The original show was called On How Mozart Became a Bad Composer or Return of the Wizard. I'm not even sure why it has that second title, but one of you will tell me, no doubt, but How Mozart became a bad composer is the thesis of the discussion. I love the fact that in mainstream TV in those days, you'd have a show with this kind of topic. Uh, I kind of miss that sort of thing. It's a shame that TV nowadays doesn't. Okay, so let's have a look at what Gold has to say. First of all, he's playing the piano and and he's playing uh he's playing the Mozart C minor concerto in particular.

[00:01:13]Uh but weirdly, he's not playing the uh opening of the concetto is playing the what we would call second subject group uh which consists of quite a lot of sequential writing.

[00:01:29]Uh, G's an amazing pianist. I can't pretend that I love the way he's playing Mozart. [music] There's something ever so slightly mechanistic about it. I almost think that's deliberate, but we'll get on to that in a minute.

[00:01:43]There's a curious discrepancy when I'm watching Gold play.

[00:01:47]>> King from Mert.

[00:01:49]>> He's actually about to start talking, but there's a curious discrepancy when you're watching Gold play, which is, and this is before we listen to what he has to say. He seems to be enjoying it more.

[00:01:58]You can tell because he's doing his usual humming and sort of waving his head around and and kind of into it, which I think belies the fact that he's going to make a whole argument against the music. And that's just me noticing a kind of musical discrepancy between his own intuitive musical response to it and his sort of cerebral response. He's convinced himself he doesn't like Mozan.

[00:02:19]even though when he's playing it he realizes he kind of does like it [laughter] even though he he sort of does on some other level he's decided he doesn't and then he goes in with his argument >> that example came from Mozart's piano conerto in C minor one of the last works he produced in that form one of only two in a minor key and perhaps for both those program noteworthy reasons a work that's had a rather better press than it deserves I think despite its gently swooning melodies ease its meticulously balanced cadences despite its stable and architecturally unacceptionable form.

[00:02:54]I'm going to submit it as a good example of why I think Mozart, especially in his later years, was not a very good composer.

[00:03:02]>> Okay. So, there's something to take issue with. I mean, there's a contrivance here. He's played us a curious passage from the C minor concerto in that he's sort of given us a filler section, magnificent filler, which I'm going to try to explain why I think it is magnificent. But what he's neglected to say, he's mentioned these two minor key concertos, but goodness me, they're extraordinary. And he's missed out the [laughter] fact that C minor concto begins [music] with this amazing brooding.

[00:03:30]You know, you don't even know that you're in C minor. Is it [music] a flat major? Because we go to a flat first and then we do this very [music] characteristic Mozartian rhythm and then the woodwind comes in.

[00:03:45]uh this fantastic augmented sick.

[00:03:48][music] I mean, could you begin a ketta better than that? Uh it's fantastic. Uh [music] Neapolitan [singing and music] >> [music] >> Okay. So, it's fantastic, but he's neglected to play that bit, which I think is significant also because the opening of the concettto gives you the primary material, which everything subsequently is in some sense developing in this beautiful and imaginative way. But he doesn't say any of that. So I think he's already sort of removing the information we kind of need to establish that this is a masterpiece without very much debate. But there we go. That's what he's doing. Okay, let's press on and hear the next thing.

[00:04:47]>> Exceptionable form. I'm going to submit it as a good example of why I think Mozart, especially in his later years, was not a very good composer.

[00:04:55]>> Right. So he just made the case that Mozart in his late years he seems to think that Mozart when his teenager or in his very early 20s or something was good but then became lazy. I think obviously we won't have time to hear everything he says but he he seems to equate that with the fact that Mozart's a brilliant improviser and therefore his facility got in the way. It's that old chestnut where people go well if if the composer has too much facility. People often say it's about Mendelson. too much facility means that there's something easy and they don't bother and there's a laziness that creeps in or a smuggness or that kind of argument. I don't think it's true in the case of Mendelson or Mozart. I think both of them are composers capable of really fantastic work and really putting in the effort as well. [laughter] But the thing about improvisation anyway is that there tends to be this attitude.

[00:05:41]You even see it with the way that people discuss jazz, you know, as if it's some sort of minor genre because it's improvisatory. But the truth is all great composers come out of an improvising tradition. In a recent video about Vagnner's Tristan and his older, we we discussed how Vagnner was trained in partimento and and could sort of work stuff out of the keyboard. And we know that Bark was an amazing improviser. I mean, no one accuses Bark of being a lazy composer. Beethoven was an amazing improviser. Very few people say that he was a lazy composer. So, I just don't think it makes any sense. That's just to immediately dismiss the bulk of Goul's thesis, which is it's to do with improvisation. Well, I don't see that's true. Okay. On he goes with his main statement here.

[00:06:25]>> But the italics are squarely on that word composer because Mozart was unquestionably a very great musician, and I'm not being koi when I try to foster that distinction. By the evidence of his contemporaries, he was a superlative performer and an improviser of note. by the evidence of our own eyes and ears. A resourceful craftsman in the theater and in all the familiar musical forms of his day, an exhilaratingly dependable artist who could knock out a diverto the way an accounts executive dispatches an inter office memo. But in a way, that's his problem. Too many of his works sound like inter office memos.

[00:07:00]>> Okay. Well, I mean, they're pertinent.

[00:07:01]>> That is just not true. Name me a piece of notes that sounds like an inter office memo. [laughter] That's amazing. I mean, for example, let me give you exhibit A. He says that Mozar could knock out a Dvatimento like an into office memo. Well, most of you will remember the great scene in Amdus when Saliaryi walks into the I'm not saying Amdus is true, but in some ways it reveals something. The bit where Salaryi walks into a ballroom, everyone's kind of I think standing around talking or drinking or whatever.

[00:07:32]There's a wind ensemble playing Mozart's grandparita, his great serenade for 13 wind instruments or for 12 wind instruments and bass and they're playing the great adajio from that piece. So there's a wind devotto. What could be less like an office memo than salary says that it's like a I think he describes it as a a squeeze box or something >> like a rusty squeeze box. [music] the the [singing] rhythm [music] this thing and then the famous um obo. I'm [music] not playing it exactly right because I'm kind of improvising over and then the clarinet comes in. [music] So you get these effortlessly or they sound effortless. Effortlessly beautiful crossing over of instrumental parts in this dialogue. Perhaps the essence of Mozart's genius by the way is that kind of oporatic thing he has as a natural opera composer where every instrument sounds like a character and they're all talking to each other. So when you listen to his music, you're drawn into this conversation. It's amazingly communicative. And it's odd, isn't it, that some people don't really get Mozart Ghoul's one of them because for them music isn't like that. For him, it's much more sort of brainy. Uh, with Mozart, I think the although Mozart is brainy, I think the way he communicates is much more like speech, like some kind of human interaction, but we'll get into more of that in a minute. I've put the iPad on the floor, so I'm going to pick it up.

[00:09:05]>> And in that example, I think Mozart was dictating just such a memo. He held that series of rather undistinctive and virtually indistinguishable E flat major themes together with listless scale runs [music] and predictable chord changes.

[00:09:27][music] >> Guess what came after that? like an executive holding forth upon the ramifications of a subject that no one in the front office was much concerned with. Anyway, yeah. Well, uh, Harry, uh, as I see it, JB's got this thing about replacing the water cooler. Look, pilot [laughter] and forget it. [gasps] >> Okay. So, he's so brilliant [laughter] because he manages to play Mozart quite badly there so that it sounds sounds boring and then he says that it's like an inter office memo where people are just talking boringly to each other.

[00:10:03]It's sort of a brilliant thing that he's doing, but it's all nonsense. [laughter] And the reason why it's nonsense, let's have a look at it to the bit [laughter] the bit that he's taken exception to.

[00:10:14]And first of all, I should say the piano initially after all that wonderful C minor orchestral material that we we looked at at the start.

[00:10:25]So, it's this wonderful melancholic thing with the right hand playing these like a soprano really. Uh [music] and then sort of almost a throbbing [music] and then the orchestra comes in. So fantastically dynamic interaction between the orchestra and the piano. I think Mozart gets it right where very few composers get it right where the relationship between the orchestra and the piano does not have to be this massive sort of brzian conflict.

[00:11:04]I'm not meaning to have a go at Brahms.

[00:11:06]Beethoven does it too where you've got a massive orchestra and the pianist is trying trying to sort of overpower the orchestra in some way and they're kind of locked in a dynamic conflict. Doesn't have to be like that and for Mozart it never is. It's this interactive exchange between them. Very often the piano representing in some way an intimate form of expression as opposed to the more kind of grandly rhetorical character of the orchestra. So the passage that he picks out there which is this.

[00:11:39]Okay. So Loki when I was a teenager one of my favorite composers was a wonderful French living in those days a living French composer called Olivia Mession and most of you will know who he who he was a sort of mystical extraordinary French composer obsessed with bird song and setting mystical or or religious things in in a really kind of fervent and exciting way. fantastic composer.

[00:12:03]For me, Mozart was his most important composer. And I was always struck by this because he said the key thing with Mozart, something Gul doesn't mention, but for me, the thing with [snorts] Mozart is rhythm. And this passage in a sense is all about rhythm. You've got, for example, the first phrase, which has these what I would call trachic rhythms.

[00:12:24]In other words, long, short, long, short. [music] where you're aware of this one two three one of the third B as this marvelous expressive turn and also the shift to the diminished chord and back to the dominant seventh seems a simple thing it isn't simple it's it's magnificent [laughter] well maybe it is because in Mozart the essence of it is something incredibly sophisticated with the appearance of simplicity so you've got this thing that seems simple and then we have a piona [music] by which I mean 1 2 3. Do you see the emphasis on that E flat which comes in on the second beat of that fourth bar?

[00:13:07]But it's really a slow three. 1 2 3. And then the next phrase up the circle of fifth. So we started in B flat major.

[00:13:15]Now we're in E flat.

[00:13:20]And you notice how he begins the scale there on a lower part of the scale. So it hits an F just a tone above the E flat in the previous scale. That went to the E flat. This one [music] goes to the F. So, you're aware of a long range movement from the E flat to the F. And let's see what he does with the third phrase [music] and then he hits the F on the first beat. So, he disrupts that hemiola rhythm. These are subtle things, but they make the whole thing flow in a wonderfully expressive way. And then he moves from a trachic rhythm to anamic rhythm. So you go uh short, long, short, long, a harmonic rhythm suddenly bar by bar and now beat by beat. So it's as if the the harmonic rhythm is increasing speed. It's a typical Mozart thing. It's like an acceleration into [music] the uh this wonderful final accent and then the cadence point. I mean, the whole thing rhythmically is so subtle and sophisticated and magnificent. He he never mentions it. I don't think he really thinks about that. For him, these [clears throat] are just sequences. But do you see how things that seem like cliches once they're fitted into a larger sense of why it's communicating so well? You start to realize, oh well, anyway, what's wrong with sequences?

[00:14:45]What's wrong with a circle of fifth?

[00:14:46]These are all communicative ways of showing that you're moving towards something, that you're moving towards E flat major from a relatively remote point. You're moving towards E flat major. One last thing to say about this amazing passage that G doesn't like, but but I think is amazing is that the orchestra, he doesn't mention the orchestra, but the orchestra behind it is doing this first violins. It's fantastic with this emphasis on the third beat. So, so you get the [music] do you see that interaction between the first violins and the pianos in terms of the emphasis on the E flat?

[00:15:31]So that it again brings in a new kind of rhythmic emphatic element also very expressive because of the way he keeps emphasizing that third beat. So the orchestra 2 is involved in this beautiful interaction of rhythmic elements.

[00:15:44]>> Water cooler. Let's just file it and forget it. But before we do that, let's hear some more of this famous Mozart concerto. Oh yeah.

[00:15:52]>> This time played by my colleague, the distinguished British pedagogue, Sir Humphrey Price Davies, who's >> Okay. So we got to the point where Gould brings in this other person who Sir Humphrey Price Davis who is in fact himself playing a kind of pompous English person almost like you know like me sort of [laughter] this kind of English fool really who's holding forth about Mozart as part of the tradition again it's it's sort of charming because Ghoul is iconoclastic so he's really having a crack at Mozart because in a way he's making a very important question which is are these so-called great artists great because society tells us so or tradition tells us so or are they great because they really merit it and that's a good question to ask and it should be asked and ask it of Mozart see if the answer is yes I don't think it is the case that Mozart isn't a great composer but but Gould seems to see G's kind of convinced himself has he convinced himself he's keen for the purposes of the program to set up this whole debate which is kind of fun right let's see what Humphrey Price Davis has to Right. So he has himself playing [music] [music] not very well. I have to say the the sec the main second subject theme [music] but [music] lots of paddle which gold doesn't normally employ.

[00:17:25]>> [music] >> Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind.

[00:17:32]Thank you. How well I remember Sir Joshua saying during my last year at the academy, retain the C minor, start it up as you would the ninth or Gantius all the great pronouncements and it will be a blessing in your later years.

[00:17:50]So [laughter] he's got he's got this alter ego character saying these ridiculous things, pompous things about tradition and and great works being stored up. So you know, we know what Gold is doing here. He's having a crack at that whole classical music thing of extolling the virtues of things without really explaining them. They're they're simply great works. I think all that is to be questioned and to be interrogated.

[00:18:17]For some reason, despite all his experience and talent and facility, Mozart was content to set down in that piece, that purported late masterpiece, an appalling collection of cliches.

[00:18:30]Let's try to find out why. It's very difficult to define that word cliche and not get trapped by it. But I guess one definition would be a phrase or an idea which through repeated use has lost its point of view.

[00:18:43]>> So yeah, Gold raises this issue about cliche and he's right. It's an essential word particularly with an artist like Mozart but it's also essential when you're looking at imagine we were doing a discussion about the Beatles who I do want to look at at some point all sorts of cliches of the musical culture around them are being used but used in an inspired way. So my point would be creativity it doesn't hue cliche because music is full of cliches. It has to be it can't communicate without them. You know, if someone says write a tune in E flat, you're going to um in in in the in in the 18th century, you're going to come up with a formula and and it's going to have a cadence. You know, that's what tunes do. They still do have cadence. It's not quite the same, but a melody has to have a cadence, which is a form of punctuation. So, of course, cliches are there and they're present in everyone's music. It's just it's not just Mozan, it's Bach, it's Hiden, it's it's Beethoven. Cliché are the material of music. You know, as soon as Beethoven writes the Moonlight Sonata, which we've talked about a lot recently, he's got [clears throat] a second inversion triad. I mean, what could be more cliched to take a second inversion triad and just repeat it as an arpeggiated figure? But actually, the way he does it, the solarity of the instrument and the tempo and the journey that he takes that material on creates a masterpiece, creates a poem, creates something magical. The character of music is that something magical happens. There might be a kind of drosslike surface that's made up of these things, but an artist of caliber will make something happen that somehow you didn't quite predict you could never have imagined yourself.

[00:20:23]That's what Mozart does. So, it's all very well G saying it's it's just the material of cliche. Of of course it is.

[00:20:29]And Mozart of all composers knows that and makes use of the tropes of the classical style. But he spins gold out of the dross that nobody else can do much with. I mean Hayden has a good guy and I love Hayden but I mean I can't think of any other of Mozart's contemporaries Saliary or or Stammits or Detect you know there are many composers and they're all capable people rather like Gould says all fine craftsman all able to do things of interest for sure but Mozart does spin some gold out of the aspects of style that nobody else can really get to expressive gold or a kind of thing that takes you transports you when you listen to it.

[00:21:12]>> So, he's now going to have a go at the material.

[00:21:16]Um, >> 90% of the area after that, for 31 of 35 bars to be exact, Mozart ruthlessly exploited the sequence, his favorite time consumer, >> right? He's going to have a proper old go at Mozart's use of sequence. Ignoring the fact that one of his favorite composers, Bark, uses sequences a great deal. [laughter] Doesn't seem to bother Ghoul that Bach does it. For example, [laughter] look at this passage from Brandenburgg 5.

[00:21:48][music] So, the keyboard's doing that and it literally goes on and on doing this. And over the top of it, uh, we've got a a flute and a violin in this amazing, I have to say, cannon. Uh, uh, but just sort of turning thirds round, round round and round. Now, look, I'm not saying Bark isn't wonderful. Of course, he is. And actually, this is one of my favorite passages because it is literally just this sense that he will take a sequence further than anyone else does. And it's like a picture of eternity with everything just turning and turning. It could go on forever.

[00:22:32]It's amazing. But from a certain point of view, if I was being like ghoul, I could say it's just boring. It's just feels mechanical. Do you see how one musical object can seem perhaps to one observer to be boring and to another it can be revoly? And maybe this is just a matter of perspective. Except that perspective is really key. If when you look at the composer's work, everything else around it, if that's boring, too, you can then draw that conclusion, I suppose. But if the entire piece is fizzing with all some sort of genius and then it's got this curiously what seems like a mechanical element in it, isn't it worth asking the question, is it mechanical? Am I perceiving it correctly? Or is there something interesting going on here? So now let's go into this sequence that Gulo hacked off about.

[00:23:22]Right. [music] So here's >> the harmonic substance of the area immediately after that that subject. And for 10 bars he did absolutely nothing except cover up in the most delinquent way with scales and arpeggios precisely those rather inane chords. [music] >> Is it inane?

[00:23:43][music] >> That's all there was to that. And then having done that he >> I mean it's so crazy cuz he can say exactly the same about hundreds of passages. Bark the passage he's talking about uh so the orchestra is doing this [music] yeah we've got uh he doesn't mention this lovely interaction sort of canonic interaction with the bassoon doing this canonic interaction between flute and clarinet or is it flute and obo? Uh reason why I don't know immediately is because Mozart doesn't indicate what the instruments are fluting over and then over the top of it isn't covering over anything. It's adding to this beautiful uh ensemble of glittering material.

[00:24:33]Uh well is that it's so beautifully written because you've got these these rhythmic elements inside the keyboard figuration that are just fizzing with energy. Um and and they're not repeated. The second one he could have gone but he goes [music] so he's got this fantastic sense of variation. Next bit I mean beautiful. You've got the rising scale [music and singing] embedded inside it is the is a kind of cannon. [music] Do you see that? a cannon in the right hand but but in the form of offbeat things is I mean again rhythmically it's the second semiquaver is the first voice second semiquaver and then the third semiquaver is the answer second semiquaver third semiquaver I mean rhythmically astonishing left [music] hand doing this rising Okay, it would seem mechanistic except that this is the very passage where he's also adding these other elements in the woodwind. So, it's it's delicious. It's not it's not padding. I'm not going to go into all the sequential passages that Gould criticizes, but I think I've made the case that these aren't mechanistic things. They're not filler. Mozart's creating a beautiful surface of interactive elements with the most refined rhythmic elements within them.

[00:26:07]most refined rhythmic invention and that is part of the reason why it has this beautiful sort of sizzling quality a kind of energy and that's why Mozart is so important you know because he's still relevant to us and he still communicates it's not that he's a great musician this is the thing Gul says it's because he's a great he was a great musician so it's okay he was a great musician wasn't a great composer who cares if he was a great musician I mean loads of great musicians in history who've then sort of passed away and we don't remember them.

[00:26:37]But that's not what it is with Merza.

[00:26:40]It's very much an enduring kind of music to me. Something that's as alive and meaningful now in 2024 as it was in in the 1780s when he wrote it. And that's the definition of great art, I think.

[00:26:52]And that's why music matters because it's it's literature. It's it's kind of got an enduring importance. Thank you for listening to the video and we'll try and do a bit more Mozart just to flesh out some of these points in a future video.