The famous Bach interpreter Glenn Gould (who is considered as among the most famous and celebrated pianists of the 20th century), famously commented negatively on Mozart.

In 1968, Gould presented a segment of the weekly public television series Public Broadcast Library. His topic was “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer.” (source: OpenCulture)

Glenn monologued a 40min critical masterclass, accompanied by a piano—filled by piano snippets dissecting Mozart to the core, and Glenn’s sparkling satrical humor. Here’s an organized transcript of it with the original show link of YouTube.

Part 1: K.491 Flooded with Cliché

That example came from Mozart’s piano concerto in c minor (FYI, K.491) . One of the last works he produced in that form—one of only two in a minor key. And perhaps for both those program noteworthy reasons—a work that’s had a rather better press than it deserves I think. Despite its gently swooning melodies, its meticulously balanced cadences—despite its stable and architecturally unexceptionable form, I’m going to submit it as a good example of why I think Mozart especially in his later years was not a very good composer.

But the italics are squarely on that word composer, because Mozart was unquestionably a very great musician. And I’m not being coy when I try to foster that distinction. By the evidence of his contemporaries he was a superlative performer, and an improviser of note; by the evidence of our own eyes and ears, a resourceful craftsman in the theater; and in all the familiar musical forms of his day [Mozart is] an exhilaratingly dependable artist who could knock out a divertimento the way an account accounts executive dispatches an inter office memo. But in a way that’s his problem: too many of his works sound like inter office memos. They’re pertinent, they’re often blessed with an engaging sense of humor, they sometimes provide a concise resume of the main points their author wants to make.

But like inter office memos they can jump from point to point or on the other hand dwell at unconscionable length upon a particular point, which details the executive’s pet peeve—a point not necessarily germine to the corporate interest. And in that example [K.491] I think Mozart was dictating just such a memo. He held that series of rather undisctinctive and virtually indistinguishable E-flat major themes together with listless scales on this [short Music], and predictable chord changes [short Music] And guess what came after that. Like an executive holding forth of a ramification of a subject that no one in the front office was much concerned with: “Anyway, yeah well uh Harry uh as I see it JB’s got this thing about replacing the water cooler let’s just file it and forget it…” But before we do that let’s hear some more of his famous Mozart concerto. This time played by my colleague the distinguished British pedagogue Sir Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2) whose artistry needless to say I greatly admire, but whose views I couldn’t agree with less,

[Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2), playing Mozart and commenting]

Some people claim they find in the late works a maturity of outlook which they deny to the early concertos

[Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2) speaking] thirty years [Mozart] waited to produce that piece… he’d stored up his impressions and experience of life. you must do the same…

They claim that this maturity helped Mozart come to terms with the techniques he’d used in his previous 490 works,

[Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2)] Sir Joshua was right of course it’s not an easy work to come to terms with. who can say why Mozart settles down for such a spell in E Flat Major eh? Who can say? But he does and what a grand thing it is not to modulate. to remain secure…

But to me it seems like a haven for some wistful and likable themes so have been far better off within the stricter regime of the concertos or symphonies that he composed a few years earlier?

Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2) the achievements one can’t ignore work like that, can’t turn one’s back on such a…

[Glenn turned off the television playing Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2)'s comments]

It seems to me that by the time Mozart wrote that concerto he’d already passed his peak as a composer. That the symphonies and sonatas he composed a decade earlier are structurally more coherent, texturally more consistent than the work of his later years. There’s nothing wrong with that example. At at least one can’t prove a case against it academically. But neither is it nearly as taught and compelling and concise as it could be. For some reason despite all his experience and talent and facility, Mozart was content to set down in that piece that purported late masterpiece, an appalling collection of cliches.

Let’s try to find out why. It’s very difficult to define that word cliche and not get trapped by it. but I guess one definition would be a phrase or an idea which through repeated use has lost its point of view. Many of the sequential progressions which Mozart worked to death in that concerto would have seen one generation earlier discriminating comments on the precarious evolution of classical tonality. But from heard in a late work like that Mozart c minor concerto they seem unenterprising somehow and disdainful of the real problems posed by the concerto form. The sequence is only one kind of Mozart cliche but along with um the walking base [music] the running treble [music] and the curtsying cadence [music]. They all help to make Mozart perhaps the easiest to imitate of the great composers.

And of all these cliches the sequence is the easiest by far to treat of statistically. The sequence is not really a very difficult item to define. It’s a musical thought or an idea which is repeated at infinitum in various registers of the keyboard. And without any of the human and humane changes that a composer would normally bring to bear on it. Here’s one sequence that Mozart uses in that concerto [music].

So I’m going to override all subjective value judgments and reduce one minute’s worth of that piece that Mozart’s theme of that concerto to statistics. By doing that I can prove I think that for almost 90% of the bars which followed the first of those e flat major themes [music] 90% of the area after that for 31 of 35 bars to be exact, Mozart ruthlessly exploited the sequence his favorite time consumer: [Music of the base chord progression]. That was the harmonic substance of the area immediately after that subject. and for 10 bars he did absolutely nothing except cover up in the most delinquent way with scales and arpeggios precisely those rather inane chords.

[Music: example of the chord progression shown in the piece]

That’s all there was to that. And then having done that he introduces another sort of sequence to us just as arbitrary as the one we’ve just heard the falling fifth sequence but um every bit is boring [music]. Then it’s back to our falling fifths routine again [music].

Every progression is simply dropping by a fifth. The fifth from the bar preceding it [music]. There are no exceptions, no elaborations, no fanciful breakings of the patterns. Only the same relentless quest for an equable unflappable, and I’m afraid inevitably undistinguished harmony: [music].

Well then Mozart does break the pattern for just a moment but only to offer us another kind of sequence. Slightly more animated this time, but every bit is arbitrary [music]. Then it’s back to the falling fifths routine once again:

Glenn playing a snippet of K.491

And so it goes. And all that was nonsequential in those whole 35 bars of music could be summed up in this one pathetic fragment [music]. Nothing more. And this is by no means an isolated example. It’s typical, sadly, of that jaded world weary approach which beset Mozart in his later years. And one may very well ask what happened? Why were those prodigious gifts which made Mozart as a young man, the toast of Europe, reduced in the end to skillful self-parody?

Part 2: The Hedonistic Persuit of Improvisation—the Inventor vs. Curator tradeoff of Mozart

Well I think that in many respects his decline can be blamed on what should have been his greatest natural asset a fantastic facility for improvisation. All composers of Mozart’s day had that facility to some degree. They had to have it if they were to fulfill the unrealistic production quotas expected of 18th century Capel meisters. And a lot of them like Mozart were not easily persuaded of the value of an editor’s blue pencil [music].

As Victor Borger once remarked when he pretended to be catching Bach out at a similar game. I bet he has his mind on something else when he wrote that one [music].

It would be idiotic to pretend that all of Mozart’s works consist primarily of segments like that one from his C Major Fantasia for piano. But there are relatively few works especially from those later years which aren’t at some point disrupted by events of that kind—events which compromise the intensity of the work even as they add to its pretentions.

Because the thing about improvisation is that it has to come quickly, it can’t pose too many technical challenges. It’s pretty well limited to the sort of music making that results from split second reaction. And it must rely heavily on devices that have already secured a place in the mainstream of musical activity. And those cliches that Mozart found so useful had been the stocking trade of composers a generation before his time. The scales and arpeggios to which he resorted continuously were as irrelevant to the real musical cares of his day as the champagne chili shelling of Lawrence Welk is to ours. And as Mozart grew older, and abused this facility for improvising, his best ideas were necessarily aborted by those cliches. Because in fact a computer could produce them really with a minimum of programming. And so could a 5-year-old after a few weeks of theory lessons.

So one begins to wonder, whether in circumstances like that the composer is in fact, really necessary. And this strangely enough is a question that one can profitably asked today. Because much of the activity in the art world just now suggests that the isolated artist romantic figure that he is, is being attacked and may well succumb to the free wheeling attitude of the chance composers the random paint throwers, the mixed media enthusiasts, and such less aggressively nihilistic souls as the happening devotes who simply want to draw the audience into the making of a work of art.

Well I’m all for it. At least I’m all for that latter idea for if it could be soberly approached—I’d like to think that it could be done that the audience could in fact get into the making of a work of art as a participant. But there are more dangers menacing that idea than anyone has taken time to calculate as yet. And not least among those dangers is the hedonistic pursuit of improvisation as a way of life. And that’s why I think we can learn from Mozart why his reliance in his late works on a facility for improvisation provides a real object lesson for the 20th century. Because the 20th century is the age of the debatable motive. an age occupied with the problem of whether, and to what degree our thoughts derive from a conscious industry. A result from concealed desires. So most of us look for signs of premeditation in art. We need to be assured that what’s being said has to be said that even amidst the most elusive rhetoric. A calculating creative mind is however deviously at work.

Beethovens was just such a calculating mind, and usually deviously at work. Legend has it that he was every bit mozarts equal as an improviser, and yet many of the great moments in his scores are the least improvisator inclined. he had in fact the unique ability to simulate improvisation to pretend that he was improvising, without in fact ever deviating from a scrupulously plotted course:

[Glenn playing the 'scrupulously plotted course']

That sounds like the sort of music almost anyone might think that they could improvise. And doesn’t really seem to be getting anywhere at all. but Beethoven’s been holding a great climactic surprise in reserve and that deceptively tranquil episode ensures that when it arrives we’ll be cut off guard.

Glenn playing the Beethoven's 5th Symphony on piano embedded with the scrupulously plotted course

And that’s the real difference between those two composers. Beethoven can appear to be noodling dilettantishly about as he seemed to be in that example from the 5th Symphony. And in fact all the while be realizing some very subtle aspect of his design. But if Mozart seems to be going nowhere in a hurry, the chances are that’s exactly where he’s at. And that’s the point about what improvisation and the music that derives from it. For all its charm and brilliance and capacity to entertain, it doesn’t usually provide moments like that. Moments which sacrifice immediate appeal in order to support a long range projection. Moments in which the composer in effect, practices what you might call a psychology of denial. The inveterate improvisers like Mozart are as caught up in the glory of the moment as the social climer in the jet stream of Cafe Society. they just can’t take the long range view.

Perhaps it all comes down to this within every creative person, there’s an inventor at odds with a museum curator. And most to the extraordinary and moving things that happen in art are the result of a momentary gain by one at the expense of the other. In Mozart’s case the inventor was endowed with the most precocious gifts, and the curator who manufactured all those sequences and arpeggiated links and passages of scale padding zealously carried out his duties as well.

But what I object to is that mozart tries to cover up the conflict between them. Time and again the curator wins out over the inventor as he has every right to do. But i’ I’d like to find some evidence of protest, some frantic disruptive unsyntactical attempt on the part of the inventor to get free of the curator’s control. Or in the absence of that desperation move I’d like Mozart to feel guilty. And because of that guilt to sacrifice something of the charm and courtesy which mask the humanity of his work. And he should feel guilty because in his early works Mozart came very close to realizing the possibilities for experiment that would exist within even the most stylized form. His early sonatas concertos and Symphonies were extraordinarily flexible and inventive to a degree that he never quite equaled later on. Yet somehow the very people who look to these later works for a message I don’t think they contain, give a once over lightly to those incredible pieces that he produced in his earlier days.

[Humphrey Price-Davies (Glenn No.2) playing and speaking] Yes well you know Mozart’s achievement is all the more remarkable when you consider what very great odds he had to overcome. All those wispy little ditties of their steel galon as we like to call it. Taken their toll you know. The chap didn’t come through unscathed oh my know not…

Well even those of us who can’t quite concede that Mozart was the embodiment of all musical virtue, and we’re a much maligned and harassed minority group, have our own favorites from among his voluminous output. My Mozart preference is for the work of his teenage years and as far as the piano sonatas are concerned those which he wrote during and shortly after his visit to Paris, which took place during his 22 year. These are glorious pieces lean fastidious and possessed of that infallible tonal homing instinct with which the young Mozart was so generously endowed. and despite everything that I’ve been saying in these last few minutes, I love them.

Part 3: Bonus (Glenn playing his favourite Mozart)

I’m going to play the last of the sonatas which he wrote during that Paris trip. It bears number 333 in Mr. Köchel catalog (i.e. K.333) and it’s in the the key of B flat major.