Why do people find Mozart difficult?

Question

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, don't tell me 'to bring out the mooood' because it's absurd. Mozart put enough instructions and was conservative enough that it's easy to perform his pieces well and expressive and blah, blah, blah. Not out of arrogance, but i actually sightread one of his sonatas. Not perfectly, but it was good enough that my piano teacher sat and enjoyed listening to me.

Would you mind not going farther than the question and not overanalyzing my character, please? :))) PLEASE, just try to answer my question and don't make judgements. I don't mean anything and I am not trying to fuss with anybody. I am just curious to know why people find it hard. :)))) it wouldn't be fair to judge anybody in cyberspace in accordance with a couple questions and paragraphs. :)))))

DID I NOT SAY EXPLICITLY "NO COMMENTS ON MY CHARACTER"???? People have trouble following instructions. If you can't answer the question, don't write nonsense just to prove you're here.


Btw, the problem could be deriving from my misunderstanding; HOWEVER, writing comments without ANY judgement is simply nonsense.

Answer 1

Taking the panorama as a whole that both Musicyh and Glinzek have put forward, you have as much practical detail as you could wish for to form an overview of the elements that make up the spectrum of difficulty in Mozart. Something implicit in what they have both said in different ways might be of more help to you if actually put in the foreground, in a spotlight of its own.

Difficulty, and our capability to assess it, is intimately and directly related to the breadth and depth of our own technical skills and understanding of the moment at which we seek to make that assessment. To state the bleedin' obvious, the day we first clap eyes on our instrument of choice, our technical understaning is nil, and therefore absolutely everything is difficult. As we make progress, both as regards technique and musical understanding, we acquire a hinterland of things we have conquered and made our own -- these we use to make our judgements of that moment on -- and we have a pretty good idea -- by making analogous assumptions based on what we do know -- of what lies immediately ahead of where we are. However, what we know absoloutely nothing about yet, further ahead, is as nought to us at that point. It doesn't exist (for us): ignorance does indeed produce a state of (temporary) bliss. For as long as we continue to make further progress, the frontier between these two territories -- what we know and what we do not yet know -- marches along in perfect step with us.

Right, so now we come across a giant in the art form, in this case Mozart (but Bach is an equally fine example) where at first sight the physical demand appears well within the territory of what we know, yet all around us, friends, colleagues and other soothsayers who have at least one thing, far greater experience, in common -- they are somewhere else, further ahead on the learning trajectory, compared with where we are with our current frontier -- keep sucking their teeth, muttering darkly about terrible difficulties, difficulties which we can see hide nor hair of! Confusion looms large...

That's precisely where I found myself as a second year Conservatory student -- at the time I was labouring under comparable notions of 'what's all the beef about this Mozart guy' -- having been set the double concerto K365 to perform partnered by the pianist I was studying with, rather than another student. (A very cunning move on his part!) Part learned, the first rehearsal. Within minutes I was overwhelmed by a sense of real fear. While my playing was perfectly efficient, and certainly competent, every minutely sculpted phrase of his he passed across to me from the other piano I could only answer with ones I knew how to make at that time, and these were beginning to sound more trite, more one-dimensional and banal in comparison with every passing minute, with a good thirty of those still to go...

Until then, I had been *completely* ignorant of to what degree of precision and refinement and detail Mozart's phrases can and *need* to be sculpted, and poised on a knife-edge, for them to speak the way they can be made to speak in the right hands. The moment this was happening all around me, I heard at once *that* it was happening, but was completely clueless as to how to reciprocate. That rehearsal reset my boundary of what was 'difficult' in a way that was completely unforgettable. I had been given a glimpse of a new technical landscape ahead, of which I had been comprehensively ignorant until then. And my personal bar of what 'difficult' amounted to had abruptly been raised sky high, with me feeling very small, all of a sudden, in comparison.

Call it a form of Mozart 'ephiphany', but we all have them, and yours will come too, sooner or later. (It's also related directly to personal age and maturity, which time sorts out for us, like it or lump it.) Mozart is feared and admired, in equal measure, by musicians for those reasons of their individual epiphanies -- it's not just a pianist thing, by any means! -- and once that boundary has been crossed, there's no going back. The good news is that the Mozartian space is one of the most fascinating yet intractable landscapes you could ever wish to inhabit, yet it remains infuriatingly elusive to ever grasp fully, right to the bitter end of our days. It just keeps us thoroughly on our toes, I guess... :-)

Answer 2

Whoa, easy there......

The answer of Musicyh covers all the bases that I would cover, and easily rates best answer.

Unlike the Romantic and Impressionist composers, where the sheer volume of sound can cover up some inaccuracies in articulation and a host of other foibles, Mozart's transparancy is daunting. The texture is so sparse by comparison that it demands absolute perfection in articulation, phrasing, and nuance. Dynamics are much more subtle, a singing tone is of utmost importance, and difficult to achieve because of the sparing use one must make of the pedal -- I could go on and on.

I am never satsified with the way I play Mozart or Haydn -- I always feel as if I'm too harsh or too gauche with it. Polishing those pieces to performance level is very frustrating for me.

Answer 3

Well there's a famous saying which goes that Mozart is too easy for amateurs but too difficult for professionals. Doesn't seem like it makes sense huh? But I do find it kinda true. Because in Mozart the musical texture is so light and transparent that any slips on the performer's part can be enough to destroy the whole thing. Mozart's music has this simplicity of character to it that many professional musicians find it hard to just portray it as it is without over-emoting it. For amateurs, Mozart will just look and sound like a simple piece with a bright, cheery mood - so just play it as it's written and you can't go wrong right? But as amateurs start crossing the threshold into professionalism, they'll find that simply following the score is not good enough. It would warrant at most a decent performance, not a good one. So they start adding stuff to it in an attempt to bring out the character more strongly, but more often than not we overdo it and it sounds just pedantic.

Mozart's pieces require excellent sensitivity towards the music, because his music is often so 'operatic' (even in keyboard works) that it's hard to bring out every different 'character' in the music effectively without making it sound over-the-top. Not sure if you know what I'm getting at, but have you ever played his piano sonatas with the image of an orchestra/singer in your mind? If you've tried it, you'll find that all his works have an operatic/orchestral streak in it - be it a duet between violin and cello, a duet between a soprano and tenor, a conversation between the strings and woodwinds, the melancholic sound of an oboe or viola, etc. It's all really clearly implied in the way he writes his melodies and accompaniments. I think different instrumental/vocal colours is the most apt description. This is perhaps what makes it so hard to nail - the fine line between blandness and exaggeration.

A good reading of Mozart is not the same as a good performance. Sight-reading Mozart sonatas are simple if you just aim to get the notes and dynamics right. But if you want to go an extra step and really bring the music to life, it's not easy at all. Many of my conservatory friends struggle with Mozart because of the lightness and fluidity of touch required. Mozart needs to sparkle and tinkle like pearls bouncing on the ground. And we need to really articulate very well because if not it'll just sound like mumbling (esp since his dynamics are not that extreme to start with). The clarity and sensitivity is of utmost importance for Mozart. It makes or breaks the performance. It's what differentiates an amateur performance from a professional one. People underestimate the skills required to play Mozart well.

I used to think Mozart was easy and boring. I found out how wrong I was after I started doing diploma, and my teacher told me that from then onwards, I'll find myself putting in long practice hours just to get a single section to sound right to my ears. And that's what happened. I got so frustrated practising sometimes that I just chucked it for the day and decided to go on to other pieces. No matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to be able to make it sound right. My teacher had to help me loads with it, even though I find it easier to play Mozart well than say Beethoven (just how my personality is like). You can try learning a Mozart sonata on your own and making it sound good. I promise you that unless you don't care about his operatic/orchestral style, you're going to find it hard to master without help. He wasn't called a master for no reason you know :).

Answer 4

Because Mozart is a famous musican who have a lot of pieces music in his life. The people like his pieces music very much so we always admire himj

Answer 5

after reading one of those answers (you know which one) I finally woke up .... the answer is actually very simple some people are lucky and have the knack to play Mozart without working at it ... it's just an inborn or inbred feel for the music

Answer 6

Well, 6 feet under he is difficult to find :-)

Answer 7

theres no words... people who are closed minded dont think much.