Gertsamtkunstwerk

Good telly

I might just give my TV an extra piece of chocolate tonight. It's been a good boy today. Four and a half hours of jolly good stuff. And if I hadn't sold my soul to Rupert Murdoch, I would only have had one of those hours.  It's probably a good thing that I am off work sick, because how could I possibly fit four-and-a-half jolly good TV hours into a schoolday? I'm going to have to ask that nice French doctor for another month off, I think...

First off was Spanish Night with the Berlin Philharmonic from Waldbuhne. I've seen it before - The Performance Channel seems to have programmes on a three month rotation - but it's good fun, and repeated next week.

Bath and dinner were followed by Howard Goodall's Big Bangs about the invention of the stave , an event surely as important as, and preceding, the invention of double-entry book keeping (and the semi-colon). Or as Goodall posited, the printing press and, I would add, the steam engine.

Hot on the heels of this of this was The Genius of Mozart on BBC2. A bit patchy in places - interesting concept, having Leopold and Nannerl talking direct to camera, and at one stage I was confused thinking it was real archive footage of young Wolfgang walking in the woods with his father...However, it was fun to press the red button and get some extra narrative, plus a useful aide memoire to what was played as background music.  I actually burst into tears at Ave Verum Corpus, which is, frankly, a bit sappy of me, but then I realised that I haven't taken my happy pills and vitamins today.

This was followed on BBC4 by Mozart Uncovered, which was really interesting. Charles Hazlewood spent half an hour explaining the piano concerto, and then the next half an hour was a performance. I wasn't sure at first of the musical map - it seemed a bit Noddy, then I cottoned on, and it was interesting, especially in the performance to be able to anticpate the key changes, the introduction of a new theme, and elements such as the dialogue between the woodwind and the piano. This is how telly should be, and I've never before felt the benefit of the red button. The evening was rounded off by a short documentary on finding  - possibly - a forgotten Mozart manuscript in Huddersfield. Not a great programme but better than realitycelebritydietdecoratingrelocatingdating TV.

I'm going to have trouble taping all this next week when I'm away - and The Tales of Hoffman (which I've seen before, but it was 23 years ago and it marked the time I realised that opera wasn't just that boring stuff that the parents were into - my evil manipulative parents had also forced my sister and I to watch the star being interviewed on Parky on Christmas Day, the result being that we insisted on watching the live broadcast...!)

I then ran around the backroom like a headless chicken on acid trying to decide which of my much Mozart I should play, deciding that the only CD version I have of Ave Verum Corpus is actually blasphemous in that it is performed less-than-perfectly. And I now realise that the tape of Le Nozze di Figaro highlights is showing signs of overuse. I have a CD of the complete thing, and the vinyl is upstairs, but...

You know, the BBC so rocks!

Mozza rules!

I assert that Mozart is totally the best composer ever. Par excellence, beyond comparison - although, by some reckonings only the seventh most influential musician of the last millennium, some distance behind Robbie Williams - wasn't that just the most dire TV programme ever, I was staying at a friends' house, and we ranted and raved in incredulity and disdain at the final results.

How can one single out any Mozart composition as his greatest? I certainly don't intend to do so. However, the disc playing on the stereo right now must be up there. I am loath to highlight just one movement, because a piano concerto is made up of three movements. However, the second movement in this one is special. I don't think that this is a particularly top interpretation - I have a different version, with Murray Perahia playing, which I much prefer. But seeing as though my CD collection has been compiled in an entirely capricious way, I may as well as share that fact.

So, another of my all time favourites is Mozart's Piano Concert 21 in C major, K467, with a special emphasis on the beauty of the Andante.

Update: I was thinking of writing about what a great dance tune this would make but then I thought that it would look silly. But tonight (8 January) I have just seen a ballet on the telly using the music.

Figaro

Monday night being Opera Night your blogger was perched in front of the TV watching The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart's sublime opera. I say sublime, because I'm sure all the purists will sniff and say it's barely a proper opera, totally non-intellectual, blah blah blah.  The one that people recommend you go to as your first, the one I went to as my first. You could be fooled into thinking it was a light-hearted trivial story -  hah, because it was based on a Beaumarchais play so seditious it was banned in 18th Century France. In the end, it has some of the mosty heaven-soaringly beautiful music imaginable, which sadly reminds me that today has been my Mozart day.

I am now older than Mozart ever was. He died a few weeks short of his thirty sixth birthday. He was an Aquarius, like me.  Look at what he achieved, look at what I have achieved.  Humiliating.

Mind you, he never had a blog.

Random Thoughts on Random Song

Requiem Aeternam from Requiem (Mozart)

Inevitably reminiscent of the film 'Amadeus', and far from being Mozart's greatest work, nevertheless, to me, symbolic of Mozart. How one piece of music, only 5 minutes long, can combine passages of ominous, bass- and tlmpani-dominated dark, with the sweet optimism of sopranos and high strings, without a jarring or even an obvious join.

The film portrays Mozart feverishly trying to finish the mysterious commission which turns out to be his own Requiem. The veracity of this remains debatable: nevertheless, it remains a powerful allegory to the extraordinarily paradoxical life of the greatest creative genius of all time.

It is universally agreed that he was an insufferably awful person - although nowadays he would deserve recognition as the victim of a bullying father. I wonder what it would have been like to have known him, to what extent awe at his genius was outweighed by irritation at his manner.

I got into Mozart relatively late in life. As a child I was into Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Handel. Playing percussion in school orchestra got me into the Strauss family. At O-Level, the syllabus included the study of six works and the life and times of their composers. We didn't study Fauré and his Requiem because Mrs B. felt it was better to do five properly than six superficially. In order of preference my favourites were Montiverdi's Beatus Vir, Schumann's Kinderscenen, Arnold's Scottish Dances, Mozart's Clarinet Quintet in A K.581, and Handel's Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No 6.

To my eternal shame, all I remember from the history side was that Schumann and some friends, influenced by the poetry of Goethë and Schiller, formed a group called the Davidsbündler. They were iconoclastic against those who preceded them, whom they dubbed the Philistines for their adherence to form (over substance), and most importantly, Schumann's talent largely emanated from the fact that he had syphilis. We learnt that the rash was only the first stage. This was followed by a stiffening of the fingers and toes - which curtailed his career as a concert pianist - and the final stage is a madness, from which flows genius.

To conclude, I would never hesitate to name Mozart as my favourite composer. Beethoven, in a distant second place, is well clear of a field of a dozen or so, whom it would be invidious - and pointless - to rank.