Sunday 10 January 2010

Music and Worship: Mozart, born 1756

27 January 2006 saw the 250th anniversary of the birth of the composer Mozart. He is known generally today as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (remember the play Amadeus?), but was baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Gottlieb Mozart.

Mozart’s music is famous for its classical elegance and spontaneity. The aim was usually to please rather than to disturb the audience, although below the surface simplicity there is great profundity and originality. Mozart, who began composing when he was about 5 years old, was probably the most gifted musician ever.

Mozart is known above all for his operas, in which he showed a special genius for characterisation through music. He also wrote piano concertos, sonatas, symphonies, chamber music and church music – well over 600 works, despite his living only to the age of 35!
Almost everyone has heard parts of his serenade Eine kleine Nachtsmusik (as used for the signature tune of Radio 4’s Brain of Britain), and his piano piece ‘Alla Turca’. If you’ve ever learned the piano, violin, clarinet or other ‘classical’ instrument, you’ll almost certainly have played one or two of Mozart’s pieces.

We don’t hear much of Mozart’s music in church in Chandler’s Ford. In fact, over the past few years I can recall our using only two pieces that bear his name – a hymn tune for the words ‘Take my life and let it be’, and the anthem ‘Ave verum corpus’.

The hymn tune for ‘Take my life’, entitled ‘Nottingham’, was not written for the words we sing to it, which date from the mid-nineteenth century (by Frances Ridley Havergal). It was apparently adapted from a Mass attributed to Mozart – in other words, it may not be by him at all.

‘Ave verum corpus’, although short, is one of Mozart’s very finest pieces. It was composed only a few months before his death in 1791. Mozart, who was a Roman Catholic, set its Latin words as a eucharistic devotion. In English translation they begin ‘Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary.’

Most of Mozart’s other church music is unsuitable for use in parish churches, on grounds of length or difficulty in performance. Also the style of music has struck some people, including many in the Roman Catholic church, as too ‘secular’, for Mozart’s music is heavily indebted to opera and other non-church styles. Nevertheless Sir John Tavener, one of today’s leading composers of church music, has spoken enthusiastically of a spirituality in Mozart’s music that for him is unrivalled. Listen, and see what you are able to hear. There are literally hundreds of recordings of Mozart’s music, and it is regularly broadcast on Classic FM and Radio 3.

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