The American academic and violist Edward Klorman, a professor at the Juilliard School in New York, has written a truly beautiful book about Mozart's chamber music, exploring the conversational exchanges the composer's writing seems to evoke and its lineage among Enlightenment ideals:
Mozart's Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (just out, from Cambridge University Press)
. It makes me realise how very far society seems to have fallen from such things, and how wonderful they are, and how we should start aspiring to them again, right now, this minute.
I've done an e-Q&A with Edward about his book. I hope you will love these ideas as much as I do.
JD: Your book Mozart’s Music of Friends examines the
interplay within chamber ensembles using the metaphor of social interplay. How
did you begin exploring this topic?
EK: During my studies at
Juilliard, I had some opportunities to study chamber music with violinist
Pamela Frank and pianist Robert Levin at various festivals. I remember vividly
some of the images they invoked in their coachings. Pam would describe a violin
singing a beautiful melody when the viola pokes in to interrupt or to tease.
And Bob would point out how one instrument “changes the subject” from a serious
fugue to something more light-hearted, or how another instrument introduces a
certain accidental that urges the others to modulate to a particular key.
This way of treating
each instrument like a character seems to be so intuitive to many performers,
but it’s somehow not something most musical scholars tend to write. Perhaps
this is because a player literally enacts just one of the instrumental parts,
whereas a music analyst adopts an omniscient, outside vantage point. This book
aims to bring the scholarly and performance perspectives together. By examining
the historical and theoretical underpinnings of performers’ experiences of this
repertoire, I’ve united two parts of my musical life.
JD: Could you explain
the title Mozart’s Music of Friends?
EK: This lovely phrase is
borrowed from a 1909 lecture by Richard Henry Walthew, a British composer and
chamber music aficionado. Chamber music is fundamentally a music not just for friends but of friends. Its natural habitat is the drawing room, where it was
played among friends in intimate settings, but even when it is played in large
halls, the music reflects its sociable ethos
through the way the
musical parts interact with one another. We become friends just be playing or
listening to it together.
This is a traditional
idea. A German preacher, who wrote an essay about string quartets in 1810,
observed: “Those who ever drank together became friends [but] the quartet table
will soon replace the pub table. A person cannot hate anyone with whom he has
ever made music in earnest. Those who throughout a winter have united on their
own initiative to play quartets will remain good friends for life.”
JD: It was Goethe who famously
described Beethoven’s quartets as resembling a conversation among four
sophisticated people. Was this his original idea?
EK: That Goethe quote is
an oft-cited expression of that idea, but the comparison dates back to the
1760s, around when string quartets first became popular. And it makes a certain
sense, since four instruments with similar timbres resemble the sound of four conversationalists.
Parisian quartet
publications dating from this period often used the title “quatuors dialogués”
— literally “dialogued quartets.” To compare chamber music to conversation was quite
a compliment, since the Enlightenment regarded conversation to a highly refined
art form. Whether a group of friends and familiars socializes through
conversation or chamber music (or perhaps both at the same time!), the interest
is on the witty exchanges and liveliness of the repartee.
 |
| A watercolour by Nicolaes Aartman showing this type of gathering |
JD: How would you compare
settings for chamber music performances in Mozart’s period vs. today?
EK: This is an interesting question, but
a complicated one. To begin with the words “performed” and “concert”: These
words are tricky in historical documents such as Mozart’s letters. The German
word “Akademie” sometimes describes a public, subscription concert in a
theater, but it can also refer to a private gathering in a salon in someone’s
home, possibly with some listeners (“audience”) but just as likely with no one
else present. In paintings and drawings from the period, you sometimes see what
looks like a soirée or party setting, with guests chatting (and half listening)
as the musicians play. The musicians were often arranged in a circle, playing
inward toward the other musicians rather than directing their performance
outward toward attentive listeners.
In a letter to his father, Mozart
describes a four-hour-long “Akademie” he played at an inn where he was staying.
The gathering lasted four hours, and Mozart played with a violinist he’d only
just met that morning – and who turned out to be a rather lousy sight-reader.
(“He was no good friend of the rests!” wrote Mozart.) The impression you get is
that the guests at the inn were basically just socializing, while music was being
played, rather than listening with full attention as a formal audience. As one of
my musicologist colleagues nicely put it, music could simulate artful conversation, but in salon settings it also served
to stimulate it.
JD: Tell us about the
companion website for Mozart’s Music of
Friends?
EK: The website (www.MozartsMusicOfFriends.com) is fun to explore either
together with the book or as a standalone resource. There’s a large trove of
paintings and drawings that give an idea what it might have felt like to attend
these musical salons. And there are videos that allow you to hear the musical
examples while watching explanatory animations. Appropriate for “the music of
friends,” those videos include musical performances by a number of my close
friends and colleagues, so it was a real treat to play together with them as
part of the project.
