Have you ever wondered why the Mozart symphony in this concert is called the ‘Jupiter’ symphony? Jupiter is the head god in the pantheon of Roman antiquity. Is this symphony Mozart’s top symphony, his most powerful? Perhaps it is. Certainly it gives the impression of magnificence, and unlike many symphonies of its time, keeps it up right to the end, where Mozart caps everything that has gone before, combining five themes at once in invertible counterpoint. Trumpets, horns and drums all contribute to the godlike effect.
But this doesn’t explain the title, which is not Mozart’s. He simply wrote on the autograph manuscript the word ‘sinfonia’, indicating accurately but prosaically what kind of a work this is.
The historical moment when a piece of music acquired its title can often be pinpointed. In the case of Mozart’s last symphony, this seems to have been in London, and the title may have been coined by Salomon, the violinist and entrepreneur who was Haydn’s London sponsor. The earliest published edition of the symphony to use the subtitle ‘Jupiter’ was a piano arrangement made and published in London in 1823 by the composer and publisher Muzio Clementi.
Concert promoters and publishers began to use titles like this as publicity gimmicks, marking a fundamental change in the business of music: the need to sell it to an audience. The aristocratic patrons of music, meeting in stately residences, were beginning to give way – by the 1780s if not earlier – to the commercial entrepreneur presenting concerts by subscription for a middle-class public. It may have been Haydn’s idea to include the stunning Turkish percussion in his Symphony No.100 (he knew it would be a hit with London audiences) but it was Salomon who publicised later performances as ‘the Grand Overture with the Militaire Movement’.
Such titles, then as now, put a handle on the piece of music for the casual, non-professional music-lover, from whom the ranks of concert-goers were increasingly drawn. It’s easier to say you enjoyed the ‘Jupiter’ symphony than to say you enjoyed the symphony in C major, since there are seven by Mozart in that key!
Would Mozart have expected it to become a classic?
The ‘Jupiter’ symphony was almost certainly written, not with posterity in mind, but for particular concerts in Vienna, concerts which probably didn’t even take place because they were under-subscribed. Mozart and his contemporaries wouldn’t have expected it to be still performed 200 years after his death, let alone elevated to cult status!
It was the Romantics who made Mozart a classic. Calling a symphony ‘Jupiter’ is like saying ‘it’s a classic’. We know what that means. It means ‘worthy of being held up as a model’, it means ‘generally recognised as super-fine’, perhaps it means exactly the same thing as ‘it’s a masterpiece’. Or does it? Often one suspects that some pieces are better-known simply by the accident of having acquired a name.
But are some works more worthy of attention, in a style notable for the high and even level of their production, than others? The Romantic movement, in fact, tended to single out for admiration those works which stood out from the norm: the disturbing, the unusual, the unexpected.
Doing what cannot be bettered
While place names (Paris, Linz, Prague) or people names (like Haffner) are neutral, titles like ‘Jupiter’ carry value associations. And those values are classical, but in what sense? It’s no accident that the English should pick on the name of a classical god for a symphony. Thinkers and writers were influenced by the movement we call Neo-classicism, which began in Europe in the mid-18th century, and received a fillip from the French Revolution, with its cult of Roman civic virtue. Neo-classicism was waxing strong yet again in England in the opening decades of the 19th century.
Two conflicting historical forces were at work in the Romantic period. On the one hand, the Enlightenment’s idea of progress continued with all the self-confidence typical of the 19th century. Music, many believed, was reaching its summit of achievement, and Mozart began to be assessed (selectively) in terms of how much he had anticipated the new music: Mozart the pre-romantic.
On the other hand, the 19th century developed a new reverence for the past as something to be written about and admired, with an understanding of its essential difference from the present. According to that view, Mozart was not a primitive precursor at all, but a master in his own style, as George Bernard Shaw noted on the centenary of Mozart’s death, in 1891:
Mozart came at the end of a development, not at the beginning of one...Many Mozart worshippers cannot bear to be told that their hero was not the founder of a dynasty. But in art the highest success is to be the last of your race, not the first; to do what cannot be bettered.
So for every Romantic who hailed Mozart as the inspired, frenzied pre-romantic, you can find one who praised him (and sometimes the very same music, too) as poised, serene, Grecian; ‘classical’ in fact!
Romanticising the Requiem
It may help to unscramble some of the confusion to consider the subject in relation to Mozart’s Requiem. This is the most romanticised of all Mozart’s works, and the one most difficult to disentangle from its legend, a legend that has been given a further twist, no more misleading than most of the earlier ones, by the play and film Amadeus.
Romanticism made the composer as a person an object of worship or fascination, where the great and admired masters of earlier centuries had been celebrated for their superior skill. This new interest in the life stories of musicians may have had something to so with the rise of a middle-class audience, educated by reading as well as listening. If the lurid details of the lives and deaths of ancient musicians like Carlo Gesualdo made them more interesting, the embroidered rumour of Salieri as the jealous poisoner of Mozart could do the same.
The origins of Mozart’s Requiem were intriguing enough without embellishment – the anonymous commission, the messenger in grey livery, Mozart’s well-documented feverish conviction that he was writing his own Requiem. Above all, the fact that the work remained unfinished at his death, and had to be completed so that his widow could claim the promised fee.
It seems that we are more bothered by the idea that the whole work may not be by Mozart than were his contemporaries. The idea of an incomplete masterpiece seems in any case to have its own fascination. Mozart’s Requiem has been compared to a great building that we know was not completed as its designer intended, but one which, if we changed it at all, would destroy a view dear and close to us.
That, at any rate, is how most people thought until recently. Now, in a bizarre combination of scholarship and the fad for authenticity at all costs, people have actually been known to perform only the parts we can be sure are Mozart’s, breaking off at the eighth bar of the Lacrimosa!
Actually, it is extremely fortunate that Constanze Mozart had the good sense to find a competent musician to complete the work. If it had remained a torso it would never have become so well-known, except to antiquarians. That, until recently, was the fate of Mozart’s equally impressive, but incomplete, Mass in C minor.
But the really disturbing thing to musicians about this work, the scandal, if you like, is that some of the passages, such as the Benedictus, which seem almost certainly to have been composed by Süssmayr, are up to the standard of the rest. And some things that strike us as inept are undoubtedly Mozart’s own intention – such as the trombone continuing the solo in the Tuba mirum so long that it seems to be showing off the player’s virtuosity rather than announcing the Last Judgement.
The fact is, we have been guilty here both of exalting Mozart and of reading history backwards. Part of the implication of saying that Mozart is a classic is that he shared the musical language of his time, a time when the standard was extraordinarily high, at least in Vienna. Mozart had studied with the best authorities, and Süssmayr had the same kind of training and grounding. He was perfectly competent to continue the Requiem in the manner in which Mozart had started, whether or not he had Mozart’s instructions and sketches to work with.
Then again, church music, to which the Requiem belongs, is a particular case. Sacred music was not the place for innovation; on the contrary, since the liturgy is concerned with handing on an age-old tradition. But because we know little Austrian church music other than that of Mozart and Haydn, we may be inclined to over-emphasise their originality. Mozart’s Requiem, for example, owes a good deal, consciously or unconsciously, to one by Michael Haydn, brother of Joseph and a colleague of Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart in Salzburg.
This was something Mozart did all through his life: take a model from another composer and seek to improve on it. We, the children of the Romantics, overrate originality as a virtue. But for the classical artist, imitation could be a virtue. Thus, Mozart in his Requiem, trying to write a mass for church use that his anonymous patron would recognise as the ‘right stuff’, created something which we, sometimes weepingly, greet as both a swan-song and a new voice, quickly to be stilled by death.
And are we wrong to do so? There is no need for a historical sense to feel the beauty and aptness of this music. That’s the main reason why it became a classic and has remained so. Joseph Haydn knew what he was talking about when he said that Mozart’s fame would be secure if he had written nothing but the Requiem.