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Grand finale (I)

By Ariel Hirschfeld

It was just in this period, between July 25 and August 10, that Mozart, in the summer of 1788, composed his last symphony (No. 41), known as the Jupiter Symphony. This is something I have remembered since reading, in my youth, Alfred Einstein's book "Mozart," in which it is written: "To the summer of 1788 belong the three last symphonies Mozart wrote, in E-flat [No. 39], G minor [No. 40], and C Major [No. 41] - all composed within the unbelievably short space of about two months." Noting that the impulse behind their creation is unknown, Einstein continued, "It is possible that Mozart never conducted these three symphonies, and never heard them." And then he adds a comment that is quoted by everyone who writes about Mozart: "But this is perhaps symbolic of their position in the history of music and of human endeavor, representing no occasion, no immediate purpose, but an appeal to eternity."

Everyone who has ever listened to these three symphonies knows that they constitute the highest pinnacle of Western orchestral music; the most crystalline realization of the symphonic form; and above all, bottomless outpourings of emotion, which found a way to be made manifest in sound and transmitted without any buffer to the listener in three works that are utterly different from one another. And anyone who knows that they were written between the middle of June and August 10 of one summer can never forget that. And anyone who has been privileged to see the manuscripts will be even more bowled over: There are almost no erasures. No drafts, no hesitations, no searching. Even the last movement of the Jupiter, which imbues the most difficult and complex structure of voices that any Western musician ever conceived, is all created in a broad, confident flow. Everything is revealed and takes form simultaneously.

The conjecture that the three last symphonies were composed without any apparent reason is incorrect: Mozart hoped to conduct them that autumn in Vienna in a new concert series, and he also planned a visit to London (as Haydn would do a few years later) in order to present his work to the audience in its most supremely impressive form. (It was in London, after Mozart's death, that Symphony No. 41 was dubbed "Jupiter.")



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The romantic notion of seeing the greatest works as not having been composed by commission and as having "no immediate purpose, but an appeal to eternity" also seems archaic. Even pieces that were commissioned for specific functions can be masterpieces, and by the same token, works composed for no apparent reason, without being commissioned, emerged from a tacit commission engendered within a clear context of values and poetics. Still, Einstein's raptures over the symphonic triptych of the summer of 1788 embody a response that no one who has engaged the phenomenon known as Mozart can escape. It is not just the ever-growing mountain of astonishment at the perfection and the speed and the scale and the depths; it is also a joy that has no words, an overpowering joy that such a thing exists, and amid the joy, always, a deep gash of sorrow for the composer's hasty and bitter death, which prevails. Anthony Burgess wrote, in a remarkable way, something to the effect that the composer died at the halfway point on the path of his life. Burgess' sentence is an allusion to the beginning of Dante's "Comedy."

And indeed, the same summer during which Mozart added to his repertory those three symphonies (in a precise record, which he had been keeping for four years, setting down each piece's completion date, its orchestration and a four-bar quote from its opening) brought about the turning point in his life - the onset of the decline, of the poverty that thrust him into severe distress in the last two years of his life, from 1790 until his death. Mozart did not yet know, of course, that this was a decline from which he would not emerge. But the distress in the summer of 1788 was very serious for him. His infant daughter Theresia had died in the spring, and the Ottoman siege of Austria depleted the country's coffers and affected Viennese artistic life. No new commissions came in and there was no demand for the subscription concerts from which Mozart, one of the first independent artists, made a living. After a very impressive financial success lasting more than five years, the Mozart family had to scale down its standard of living, and their debts mounted month after month.

In the middle of June 1788, Mozart wrote a letter to his affluent friend Michael Puchberg (the two were members of the same Freemasons lodge), containing a detailed request for a long-term loan of 1,000-2,000 florins so he could settle his debts and remain solvent until the bad times passed. Puchberg agreed to 200 florins, which barely covered what the Mozarts owed for the rent on the apartment they had left. On June 27, Mozart sent another urgent and heartrending letter to Puchberg, noting that he understood Puchberg's temporary plight, but nevertheless imploring him to send "a fairly substantial sum for a somewhat longer period," so that he could preserve the "honor and the credit" still remaining to him in the world. Puchberg declined to provide the loan, and at the beginning of July Mozart turned instead to a usurious moneylender.

These were the very days in which he composed Symphony No. 40, through which terrifying grief courses; indeed most people who have written about Mozart have linked the symphony with the mourning, the overbearing distress and the feelings of despair attested to in Mozart's letters. But on June 26, Symphony No. 39, a work of surging joy and soaring passion, was completed; on August 10, Jupiter was finished.

It is not easy to talk about the Jupiter Symphony. In 1835, Schumann wrote that "there are some things in this world [about which] there is simply nothing to be said - for example, about Mozart's C-major symphony with the fugue [referring to the Jupiter], much of Shakespeare, and some of Beethoven" (translation from Internet article by Elizabeth Schwarm Glesner). Anyone who has listened to the symphony attentively knows that immediately after the last notes fade, at the end of the tremendous coda, words simply fail - concretely, there is a failure of language, and for no little time. It is simply impossible to speak. It leaves the place where there are no words gapingly present, revealing its vast, radiant dimensions. Yet it is precisely about this work, whose greatness so eludes exposition and conventional signs (including the irritating and inappropriate nickname "Jupiter") that we must speak, in order to cry out, even today, about its existence.

The second part of this column will appear in next week's issue.