Mozart's Jupiter Symphony

I'm not going to answer this until I wake up and actually listen to the damned thing again.

By the way it might be nice to say which recording you listen to.

does anyone say anything mean about it in that book of yours?

(they called wagner "advanced cat music"!!)

jess that's ok because lots of people on ilm have horrible taste ha. sadly the book doesn't talk about it because mozart is pre-beethoven.

oh and I am listening to the: cheapo excelsior version b/w no. 40 (haha), from the 'slovak philharmonic orchestra' cond. by 'libor pesek'. I never used to think so but now the high woodwinds seem placed a little funny.

by contrast bartok's quartet no. 3 that I'm listening to right now is a lot more fun because it makes less sense - it's repetitive but not in such a nanananana way.

Are you saying that applies to Mozart, Josh? Listening again to no.41 again this morning, as promised, reinforced my view that Mozart's genius was in being able to take traditional forms, such as sonata form, and stretch it to near breaking point. It's almost as if it never occurred to him to abandon the rules (it was Beethoven who finally broke the mould in this respect, I think), but he was damn well going to do something worthwhile with them.

So in the first and second movements, the recapitulation contains substantial further development of the subjects, he cannot stop playing around with the music until virtually the final chord.

Back in my student days (when I acquired my recording of #41) I was never keen on slow movements, but I've gradually warmed to them over time, and the second movement here is beautiful as well as clever. Harmonically, it's pretty strange: near-dischords in the development section.

More genius in the menuetto - the trio section is pretty much just a string of cadences! I tend to agree however with the negative comments above about the finale - he's really showing off by this point, with up to five themes going on simultaneously. More fun to take apart than to listen to, I suspect.

Yeah, but Gould's ideas about music were often a bit loony. This argument doesn't make much sense. Being a good improviser is an asset for a composer - in fact, many of Mozart's pieces originated as transcribed improvisations (e.g., Ten Variations in G Major on Gluck's "Unser dummer Pöbel meint", which according to the traditional story was transcribed from an improvisation that Mozart performed in Gluck's presence).

And how often do variations by any of these guys really explore anything? They usually seem pretty formulaic, the era's equivalent of ripoff remix albums. Even when they are original, their flow is so disjointed I find them hard to endure. Could it be that the variation form only makes sense when it's truly improvised live, as both Mozart and Beethoven did to wild acclaim?

Supposedly compositional transformation is supposed to carry these things for you. Ha ha.