One day 50 years ago George Cleve, then the San Jose Symphony’s conductor, along with oboist Bob Hubbard and French horn player Wendell Ryder were kicking back with a few beers at their favorite watering hole, Original Joe’s in San Jose, after a particularly scintillating concert performance of Mozart’s delightful opera, “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”
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“Gee, that was fun!” said Hubbard.
“Yeah,” said Ryder. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could play nothing but Mozart all the time?”
And voila! Just like that, the Midsummer Mozart Festival was born, with Cleve as its artistic director and performances in the South Bay, North Bay and Berkeley. Only 100 people showed up for the first one, but 300 showed up for the second, 800 for the third and 1,200 for each performance the following year. Clearly, the word had gotten around.
Half a century later, the festival has become summer’s highlight for Mozart buffs all over the Bay Area. This year it will be on July 14 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, on July 20 at the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma and on July 21 in the glorious ballroom of one of Julia Morgan’s masterpieces, the Berkeley City Club.
They’ll also play a free concert on July 15 at the Cazadero Performing Arts Camp in Sonoma County’s small community of Cazadero for the campers, counselors and whomever else happens to show up from the general public. For details, visit midsummermozart.org online.
This year being the festival’s 50th anniversary, they’re pulling out all the stops, featuring some of Mozart’s most beloved crowd-pleasers, including the overtures to Don Giovanni and La Clemenza di Tito and the “Piano Concerto No. 24,” featuring John Wilson, the pianist at the San Francisco Symphony and principal keyboardist of the Marin, San Diego and Oakland symphonies.
And they’re saving the best for last: Mozart’s final symphony, the greatest symphony ever written (and I’m prepared to defend that claim) — “the Jupiter Symphony.” Mozart never called it that, of course. It was given that name after Mozart’s death by an impresario named Johan Peter Salomon, who is otherwise known as the guy who convinced Franz Joseph Haydn to come to London.
The name fits, though. I swear, every time I hear the first four notes of the final movement a feeling of dread sweeps over me because I feel like I’m about to be struck dead by a thunderbolt for having the hubris to listen to the voice of God. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. I know exactly how Lot’s wife felt. And I keep going back for more.
Cleve died in 2015, and I had the pleasure of attending his final performance, which, coincidentally, was the “Jupiter.” He was already a very sick man, and he had to be carried to the podium. As soon as his hands came down for the first note he was once again the maestro of old, though, and it was magnificent. People in the audience and the orchestra were crying.
After his death there was a serious question about whether the festival would survive him. Without his star power, the underwriters ran for the hills. The musicians refused to let it die, though.
Under the leadership of First Violin/Concertmaster Robin Hansen, they kept it going even through the pandemic and found a brilliant young conductor to lead them, Paul Schrage, who was Cleve’s last student.
A few years ago I attended my college class reunion, and one of the young, up-and-coming faculty members they always use to impress us was a professor in the music and the psychology departments. The topic of his talk was “What made Mozart a genius?”
It was a peek at the ways Mozart’s mind worked that were different from the way the rest of us think. He was known for composing a gorgeous phrase and taking it apart, running it backward, turning it inside-out and upside-down and commenting on it musically in a way that presaged the coming of jazz more than a century later.
The professor said he was the same way with words: According to letters from Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, and some of his friends, he loved to move effortlessly from a Viennese accent to a Bavarian accent to a Hanoverian accent to a Berlin accent, etc.
“Now,” said the professor, “who does that remind you of?
Blank faces all around. He looked at us like we were idiots.
“Robin Williams, of course!” he said.
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.