The famous 19th century conductor Hans Richter was once asked, “Who is the greatest composer of all time?” He said, “Well, there’s Bach, of course, and Brahms and Beethoven and … .”
“What about Mozart?” said the questioner.
“Oh!” said Richter. “I thought you meant apart from Mozart!”
He wasn’t alone in feeling this way. After hearing Mozart’s “23rd Piano Concerto,” Beethoven exclaimed, “Ah, we shall never be able to do anything like this!” He also said, “I count myself amongst the greatest admirers of Mozart and shall remain so until my last breath.”
Brahms called Mozart “the greatest composer the world has ever known,” adding, “If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity.”
Rossini said, “Beethoven I take twice a week, Haydn four times and Mozart every day!”
Schubert said, “His music has countless images of a brighter and better world.”
Tchaikovsky called Mozart “the musical Christ” and described his music as the “highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music.”
And Chopin’s last words before he died were instructions for his funeral: “Play Mozart in memory of me.”
Don’t take their word for it, though. All you have to do is listen to his music, even the stuff he wrote when he was a little kid, and you’ll be hooked in no time flat. That’s what happened to me. The only thing I can compare it to was the first time I heard the Beatles. And there’s no better event series to get turned on to Mozart at than the Bay Area’s Midsummer Mozart Festival, which at has been delighting area music lovers for more than 50 years.
Plenty of Mostly Mozart festivals are all over the country, but this is the only one that is all-Mozart, all the time. I mean, why mess with vanilla or pistachio when you can eat chocolate? All of the festival’s musicians are world-class, and for them it’s a labor of love. If listening to his music is as much fun as I say it is, imagine what a thrill it must be to play it.
This year, they’ll play the “Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major” (the same one that got Beethoven so jazzed); the “Symphony No. 35 in D Major,” aka the “Hafner,” and the “Serenade No. 10 in B Flat Major Gran Partita” for 12 winds and string bass.
Each of them is a masterpiece; but then again, everything Mozart wrote was a masterpiece. In fact, everything he wrote was perfect. You couldn’t add or subtract a single note without detracting from it. He was a genius, perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived. If you think I’m exaggerating, I repeat: Just listen to the music.
The festival will take place from Friday through Sunday, July 25-27, featuring piano soloist John Wilson, who gave such a masterful performance last year, and guest conductor Ryan Murray.
Murray is a past winner of the Vienna Philharmonic’s prestigious Ansbacher Fellowship for Young Conductors, an artistic director of Music in the Mountains and a former Cirque de Soleil acrobat (he and his wife got married in midair, sitting in a hoop that was hoisted overhead).
“He’s a lot of fun to play Mozart with,” Robin Hansen, the orchestra’s concertmaster, says of Murray. “He’s upbeat, full of energy, traditional and — this is very important — positive.”
July 26, the festival’s second day, will start at the Buena Vista Winery in Sonoma at 6:45 p.m., and July 27, the final day, will start at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga at 6:30 p.m.
At 7:30 p.m. July 25, though, I’ll be at the Berkeley City Club because the building was designed by Julia Morgan. It’s a perfect match: His music is drop-dead gorgeous, and so is her architecture. For tickets or more information online, visit midsummermozart.org.
Footnote: At one of my college reunions I attended a lecture by a professor who has been studying how Mozart’s mind worked. He said that just as Mozart loved to play with melodies, he also loved to play with language, switching in a flash from a Berlin accent to a Bavarian accent to a Viennese accent and so on.
“Remind you of anyone?” he asked us.
Blank looks were all around.
“Robin Williams, of course!” he said.
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.