Vous jouerez du Mozart en mémoire de moi

(or, Mozart By Total Immersion)

How is it that Chopin was my favorite composer, yet his final words on his deathbed -- "Play Mozart in my memory" -- never made sense to me?

Mozart? Why Mozart?

I used to think that Mozart was certainly a Wunderkind, and certainly he was on to something with his latest works, but had he only finished his Requiem and lived longer -- I thought -- maybe then would Mozart have written some great stuff. I held it against him that his music didn't seem "crazy" enough.

But my dear teacher, Yuko Hayashi, warned me during my teens, "Don't judge a piece based on how other people play it." This was a genuine fault of mine, and Mozart was the biggest casualty of it. I was poisoned by the profusion of sane Mozart playing.

On June 14th I had the privilege of performing Mozart's Piano Trio (K. 548) with my beloved colleagues, the Lavazza Chamber Ensemble.

I hadn't played any Mozart in years (save an occasional accompanying gig). I had never played a piece of Mozart chamber music. And for various reasons, I didn't begin practicing this piece -- I mean, I didn't even open the book -- until the Monday evening before the concert.

Mozart by total immersion.

No matter what piece I am preparing, I feel the struggle between preparedness and spontaneity. If every note is too secure, the result isn't music-making that lives and breathes. If the notes aren't secure enough, the music sounds spontaneous but reckless. Every composer forces the interpreter to find that balance; but with many composers the balance is quite easy to find. In a 20th-century étude, you'd better be sure and prepare all the notes. In a lyrical, Romantic slow movement, it might be better not to plan the exact rhythm or dynamics of every note.

But what do you do in Mozart? Every note has to be perfect; the tiniest smudge in Mozart is like a coffee stain on a white shirt. Yet if it's too controlled and calculated, it ceases to be Mozart at all.

I suddenly, but begrudingly, started to agree with a former teacher, who a quarter century ago maintained that Mozart was the most difficult composer to play. I would name a composer; she'd answer, "Mozart is still more difficult."

The problem with most Mozart playing in the 20th century: it wasn't just unemotional -- it was antiemotional. This was the greatest defect in "historically informed" musicians. To reason "Romantic = emotional" is in itself not too harmful. But as soon as you reverse it, "Emotional = Romantic," now you have a real problem. All of a sudden, musicians started stripping away the emotions like old paint. Bach became robotic, Mozart became robotic, everything pre-Beethoven became robotic.

I remember Stephen Drury saying in a masterclass, "Never forget that a Mozart concerto is virtuoso music." I would add to that that Mozart is dramatic, operatic music. The Historical types feared that it would be the Mahler type of drama. So they played it safe: throw out all the drama. And the Tchaikovsky type of virtuosity? Better throw out all the virtuosity as well.

To play Mozart without drama is to play Schubert without lyricism. (But then, some people do that, too.)

But how do you make Mozart always elegant and simultaneously always dramatic?

And how do you play Mozart virtuosically? Better play him very fast! The second biggest problem with today's Mozart playing -- and not a problem that with which we Lavazza folk did not wrestle.

So how did I overcome these obstacles and learn K. 548 in mere days? I tried out a new idea. I set a timer, and I practiced for 25-minute sessions. My breaks between sessions varied, but they were never less than 10 minutes and never more than an hour. And I did not listen to any recordings. (To this day, I still have not heard a recording of this work.)

To think that I had held it against Mozart that his music wasn't "crazy" enough. Despite its tonality of C major, K. 548 certainly gets crazy. Mozart tosses you sudden harmonic and melodic shifts all over the place. And yet the music always flows like oil. How Mozart achieved this dichotomy perhaps will never be known.

There's something interesting about C major. Several passages occur twice, first in the exposition and again, in a different key, in the recapitulation. When one of these occurrences was in C major, that was always the more difficult one to play. I have decided that C major is by far the most difficult key to play in on a keyboard instrument. Students learn C major first because it's musically the easiest. But note that Chopin started his students not with C major but with B major. There's no question that the more accidentals a key has, the easier its scale is to play. (Or like my father once said: "If you find the right key, you can play in any flat.")

A very interesting Indian woman came up to me at the post-concert reception. She herself was a pianist. She asked, "Are you a Mozart specialist?" I was floored by the question, but I couldn't help but feel that, at the very least, I must have achieved the musical effects that I was trying to achieve, for her to ask such a question. Then she floored me again by declaring, "Mozart is the most difficult composer, and C major is the most difficult key to play in!" Clearly this woman got it.