Robert Levin deconstructs Mozart

This event was listed as a standard piano recital, but Robert Levin suggested to his Philadelphia Chamber Music Society hosts that he might want to "say a few words" about the music. The upshot was much more of a lecture/demonstration than a performance, but the erudite and enthusiastic Levin (he is a professor at Harvard) turned this event into a fascinating and rewarding evening, especially for Mozart lovers.

The underlining theme of the program was the influence of the Baroque— specifically the music of Bach and Handel— on Mozart. The generation of composers immediately preceding Mozart, which included his father, was steeped in the Baroque, and yet our modern ears hear Mozart as the embodiment of the Classical style. Levin's powerful (if counterintuitive) point is that the fugue was the cauldron that formed the mature composer whom we love today.

Wearing down the quill

Mozart scholars, including Levin himself, can get a sense of the effort and time that the composer spent on his work by studying the inks used, and the effect of the wearing down of the quill on the manuscripts. As it turns out, fugues— which Mozart's beloved wife Constanza loved and encouraged him to write— gave him an unusually hard time. Many of Mozart's unfinished pieces take this form.

Levin contends that before Mozart tackled fugue composition in a serious way, everything came easily to the young genius. For the first time, as Levin put it, he had to work like a real composer, pushing his imagination and struggling to create real works of art. From this process, Mozart's true voice emerged.

Seldom heard works

The program's entire first half consisted of music that, Levin speculated aloud, very few members of the audience had ever heard before. I did know the Prelude and Fugue in C (by stumbling through it myself on the piano), but the fragment Adagio variée and an incomplete Suite "in the style of Handel" were indeed new to these ears. Both of the inconclusive works were treated to Levin's own completions and embellishments.

Usually, seldom heard music is obscure for good reason, and this truism was not belied by these three surprisingly dull and even clumsy works. Levin provided some fun, however, as he re-worked the little Adagio, stripping it of Mozart's ornate decorations in a repeat playing. In any case it was all instructive and edifying, clearly demonstrating the composer experimenting with ideas that would reach fruition in later works.

That would include the two effusive and much better known Sonatas— K. 533 in F, and K.576 in D— that formed the second half of the program. Ah, here is the ethereal Mozart we know, but suddenly newly enlivened by brilliant contrapuntal writing. Of course, it was always there, submerged with seamless elegance within the broad scope of the music.

Spontaneous alterations

The attentive reader may notice by now that I've said nothing about Levin's playing. Actually, that was quite remarkable in a number ways, extraordinarily fresh and vivacious, and brightly colored.

Levin is renowned for his spontaneous altering of melodic lines, a practice widely endorsed by Classical scholars but rarely brought off with such confidence and clarity. This style made more sense due to Levin's insistence on playing all repeats ("The repeat sign," he told us, "is an order, not a suggestion"), rendering these sonatas with a symphonic scope.

I must also report that Levin's playing lacked an essential warmth, precluded by what seemed like a nervous energy, with outer movements taken just a shade too fast, and slower music dynamically constricted. His encore, a wonderful gigue that was later orchestrated by Tchaikovsky, was way too fast to dance to.

None of this detracted much from an evening filled with profound insights about one of music's greatest geniuses.