"Andrò ramingo e solo": Galant Schemata in the Great Quartet from Mozart's Idomeneo скачать в хорошем качестве

"Andrò ramingo e solo": Galant Schemata in the Great Quartet from Mozart's Idomeneo

Robert O. Gjerdingen has shown that Mozart, immersed from childhood in the galant musical language, throughout his life wrote music that brilliantly exploited galant schemata. His analyses of several of Mozart’s earliest compositions, as well as of later music such as the slow movement of the Symphony in G minor, K. 550 and the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, are full of valuable insights. This video, focusing on the wonderfully complex and dramatic quartet from Idomeneo, will demonstrate the usefulness of Gjerdingen’s analytical system is in confronting late eighteenth-century opera. A glance at the score reveals how intensively Mozart interacted with the conventional patterns described by Gjerdingen and others. Hardly a measure in the quartet does not involve at least one of these schemata. Mozart identified some schemata with certain characters. The Triadic Descent at the beginning of the prima parte and at the beginning and end of the seconda parte is clearly associated with Idamante. When Ilia enters for the first time, she is accompanied by two new schemata, the Meyer and the Indugio. When Idomeneo enters, we hear another new schema, the Passo Indietro. Some of these schemata don’t play important roles later in the quartet. The Morte, on the other hand, can be heard as dominating the quartet as a whole. (The Morte combines the old chromatic descending tetrachord--the "passus duriusculus"--in the bass with a rising chromatic line in the treble; see my article “The Morte: A Galant Voice-Leading Schema as Emblem of Lament and Compositional Building-Block,” Eighteenth-Century Music 12 (2015), 157–81). At the beginning, where we hear the Morte so clearly in the orchestral introduction and in Idamante’s first utterance, it characterizes the young hero’s emotional state. But as the quartet unfolds, it takes on a wider meaning: it begins to apply to all four characters. It accompanies Elettra’s first words, “Quando vendetta avrò?” In the seconda parte the Morte plays a role in a remarkable passage in which Idomeneo cries out repeatedly “Nettun spietato” as the music sinks ominously through a series of tonally remote minor keys. The most spectacular way in which the Morte dominates the quartet was pointed out many years ago by Daniel Heartz (“The Great Quartet in Mozart’s Idomeneo,” Music Forum 5 (1980), 233–56). Two amazing tonal digressions—the passage in D flat major near the end of the prima parte and the passage in C flat major near the end of the seconda parte, can be heard as a composing out of the two chromatic notes in the Morte bass in E flat. These tonal shifts are wild indeed, but in one respect the passages in D flat and C flat are actually very conventional. They both use the Overture, a beloved schema with which Mozart’s listeners were familiar. (As named by Dean Sutcliffe, the Overture involves an ascending scale or scale segment over a pedal point.) Their familiarity with the schema must have helped them accept the extraordinary tonal challenges with which Mozart confronted them. Mozart, working within a binary structure, used many of the same schemata in the prima parte and the seconda parte. But he also departed from the expected parallelism of binary form, most remarkably and dramatically toward the end of the seconda parte, where he introduced a large number of schemata that he had not previously used in the quartet. Starting at m. 134: the Monte Romanesca, the Long Comma, the Aprile, the Corelli Leapfrog, and finally, in the orchestral postlude, the Quiescenza. Two of these schemata, the Monte Romanesca and the Corelli Leapfrog, must have sounded old-fashioned to Mozart’s audience, and more appropriate to sacred music than to opera. Introducing them here at the climax of the quartet, Mozart momentarily brought his audience from the theater into the church: he used antiquated musical vocabulary to transform an operatic conflict into an elemental confrontation of human beings and powers beyond their control. The appearance of all of these new schemata coincides exactly with the return of the tonic E flat major after so much tonal and modal instability. The re-establishment of the tonic key and the major mode encouraged Mozart to take his exploration of schemata to a new level of variety and expressiveness. Measure 134 signals the end of an astonishing tonal adventure; but it constitutes just the beginning of a final, climactic display of schematic fireworks.