"The incredible 'permanent' modernity of Mozart's masterpieces is probably due to the deep anxiety reflected in his music, an anxiety that has become the way of life in our consumer-oriented societies. Both the G-minor symphonies, and especially symphony 40, seem to reflect the deep sadness of Mozart's short life, and reach into our souls, connecting us to a suffering that is a part of everyone's life, especially when a television set has been turned on."

We found this paragraph here (a good read for the inquiring).

But is it true do members think? Does this music really reflect or express a "deep anxiety" and a "deep sadness"? Is not the Fortieth Symphony on the contrary joyful? After two hundred years is the great mass of listeners still unable to agree about such a fundamental fact?

It doesn't have to be joyful or sad, surely? If anything, it simply communicates Mozart's intelligence, and our reactions are likely to be derived from our own characters, just as much as from his.

The greatest composers for me are the ones who manage to share their humanity in an uncontrived and non-coercive way. Wagner wants to preach at me, and I don't like to be controlled. But Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninov, to name but three, just tell it how it is for them.

Mrs Pianola and I don't have a TV, so we avoid the suffering you quote, though between London Bridge and our own station we are frequently saddened to encounter K550 on the local Nokias.

Cheers, Pianola

What's that Toscanini quote about the Eroica? “To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is Allegro con brio.”

 .

 I'm not a bit surprised Tommo . I was rather expecting such a comment.  However I guess your remark about bar lines answers the question i.e taking your example I would have expected ,because of the barline,the 10th note to be accented as the start of a new phrase. Thanks very much. I better remove reply 6 before I confound any one else.

Actually, Ted, I think you asked a really good question.  I cannot decide how I like the shape of the initial violin phrases.

At one level, I like the feeling of breathing in for the first 10 notes and then out for the next 10.  Sort of emphasising the q and a structure.

At anothe level I like the idea that you come away from the first crotchet of both question and answer, so they have the same shape.  But if you do this I would like the oomph on the answer to be less than the oomph on the question, so that you get an over all feeling of POM, Pom over the two phrases together.  Then the same shape for phrases 3 and 4 but with greater intensity.

Maybe it is such a great work partly because its phrasing structure works at so many levels (possibly simultaneously)

I wonder how this all fits with the development?

Tommo

The thing about that opening is that Mozart is playing one of his metric tricks. He does this a lot (the opening of the K466 D minor piano concerto is very similar, for instance). There is a whole bar of introductory chugging in the violas, see? The melody doesn't upbeat to bar 1, it upbeats to bar 2. So, you can read the implied emphasis at the beginning of bar 3 as a metric syncopation, since in a sequence of four-bar units one would expect a greater emphasis on bar 1, then 5 etc., not 3 then 7 etc. Try imagining the piece beginning without that first bar, i.e. with no preamble at all before the violins' two quaver upbeats... in that case, you'd be tempted to feel the emphasis on the first downbeat (what is actually bar 2, then 4 etc.) ...very different indeed, and far less interesting, rhythmically!
All that leads to some very subtle and ambiguous metric playfulness in the development.

I find it is able to be both things simultaneously (and the combination of such emotions is not unusual elsewhere in life). Joy can be accompanied by apprehension of its finitude (no-one ever captured this better than Schubert), sadness can bring joy through catharsis. And more widely, if sufficiently intense, both extremes can meet one another.