AMADEUS ARTS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ANNA!

Today We all at Amadeus Arts with all our love and respect would like to congratulate Anna Petrov - our Director of Music - with her Birthday!

Dear Anna, you are one of kind! Great pianist, great musician, great teacher, great director, great mother of two(!), and of course you are great friend to all of us!

Your dedication, creativity and professionalism makes Amadeus Arts a great school to work - teach and learn!

Anna - you are inspiration to all of us!

Happy Birthday and best Wishes to you!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - the story continues…

A brief and pleasant interlude in Munich, which included the premiere at the 1781 Munich Carnival of Idomeneo, Re di Creta (Idomeneo, King of Crete, K. 367) – one of his greatest opera serias – was brought to a close by an urgent summons from the Salzburg Archibishop for Wolfgang to join his party in Vienna. He was treated by the Archbishop as a possession, shown off to the aristocracy of Vienna but made to eat and live with the domestic servants. Mozart’s anger over his employer’s arrogant attitude led to a row and subsequently to Mozart being literally kicked out of the Archibishop’s residence, pursued by a string of expletives from his secretary, Count Arco. Braving his father’s anger, Wolfgang refused to attempt a reconciliation knowing that the time for such things was past. He had high hopes for an independent career in Vienna.

Leopold’s anger turned to paroxysm of rage when Wolfgang moved into lodgings in Vienna with the Weber family with whom he had had such curious relations in Mannheim a few years previously. Herr Weber had died, leaving the family relatively poor. Wolfgang now fell for the third sister, Constanze. Young and still gullible, he was put under pressure by Constanze’s mother and agreed to sign a marriage contract of intent, nearly driving Leopold to distraction, but by now his son’s mind was fixed. Amidst the chaos of his personal life, Mozart enjoyed the successful premiere of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (K. 384), and in all probability met Haydn for the first time in the late autumn of 1781, when the older man was visiting Vienna. From the beginning the admiration between the two composers was mutual. Mozart was only 26 while Haydn was nearly 50, but both learned a good deal from each other, Mozart in the realm of structure and expressive dignity, Haydn in colorization and richer melody.

The year 1782 began with a series of subscription concerts for which Mozart often prepared new piano concertos or symphonies, and which were regularly attended by the Austrian nobility, but the hoped-for Court appointments failed to materialize. When he and Constanze finally married late that summer (against the wishes of his father and sister), the newly-married couple looked forward to a precarious existence, sustained in part by private music lessons, for which Mozart was singularly ill-suited. The first child arrived the following summer, and in 1783 Mozart and his wife visited Leopold in Salzburg. But the relationship between father and son could never be the same, even though Leopold returned the visit in 1785. This was to be their last meeting, and was fortunately a happy one: Leopold met Mozart’s friend Haydn and was told by the older composer that Wolfgang had “the most consummate knowledge of the art of composition”. The father’s return to Salzburg was accompanied by ill-health, and he was dead within two years.

Another major development in Mozart’s life began when he joined the Freemasons, a powerful secret society. This was no passing fancy on Mozart’s part, as was demonstrated by the constant undertone of Masonic thought which can be traced in so many of the works composed in his remaining years. A more artistically important event occurred in 1785 when Mozart became acquainted with the newly-appointed Imperial Court Poet, the Jewish Italian Lorenzo da Ponte. He invited da Ponte to compose a libretto, and together they created Le nozze di Figaro (K. 492) based on Beaumarchais’ anti-establishment satire. Produced in Vienna on the first day of May 1786, after surviving vicious Court intrigues against it, the opera became the hit of the season. A subsequent production in Prague (to which Mozart was invited) was an even greater success, and Mozart wrote to a friend:

“Here they talk about nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro. No opera is drawing like Figaro. Nothing, nothing but Figaro. Certainly a great honour for me!”

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Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837)

At Amadeus Arts we would like to remember of one of the greatest poets of all time - Alexander Pushkin, - the Russian 19th century author who often has been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.

“Love passed, the muse appeared, the weather
of mind got clarity newfound;
now free, I once more weave together
emotion, thought, and magic sound.”
(from Eugene Onegin, 1823)

Born into the Russian nobility in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo.

Pushkin had some Slavophile sympathies, which were combined with a deep admiration for Classical Liberalism. While under the strict surveillance of the Tsar’s political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris Godunov. Later, during the reign of Nicholas I, Pushkin held moderately conservative views.^[9] His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832.

Pushkin’s poems and novels were and are always found as inspirations to great musical pieces.

The Munich Carnival of 1775 prompted a commission for a new opera; the result was La finta giardiniera (K. 196), which made a deep impression on the German composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, a wild and dissipated man but a great judge of musical talent, who commented: “Unless Mozart should prove to be a mere overgrown product of the forcing-house, he will be the greatest composer that ever lived”.

Now approaching the end of his teenage years, Mozart was committed to composing in the fashionable style of the time, the “gallant” style, which emphasized brilliance and display and which would keep him enthralled for at least the next two years. He was also kicking at the boundaries of life in Salzburg, a city which, for all its pride in its cultural accomplishments, was deeply parochial. For Mozart, who had already seen the most sophisticated cities in Europe, this must have been doubly hard to bear, especially when his father’s employer at the Cathedral, Archbishop Colloredo, was utterly out of sympathy with his aims and outlook on life.

In September 1777 Mozart left for Paris with his mother, leaving Leopold and Nannerl in Salzburg: the tour was to be financed solely by fees earned while traveling. The pair had reached Mannheim when an event occurred that decisively shaped his future: Wolfgang fell in love with Aloysia, the second daughter of the impecunious prompter and copyist, Fridolin Weber. As the girl, who was a talented singer, returned his affections, Mozart hatched a hare-brained scheme to take her to Italy and make her a prima donna. He wrote to his father to inform him but Leopold saw only catastrophe ahead; after a series of bullying and wheedling letters, he eventually persuaded Wolfgang out of the idea.

Mozart and his mother finally arrived in Paris in March 1778, but she was ill on arrival; her condition worsened and in early July she died in Mozart’s arms. The distraught son remained sensitive to his father’s feelings throughout this terrible experience, asking a mutual friend to prepare Leopold for bad news before writing to him himself. In a letter to a friend, Mozart wrote:

“She was constantly delirious, and today at twenty-one minutes past five o’clock the death agony began and she lost all sensation and consciousness. I pressed her hand and spoke to her, but she did not see me, did not hear me and all feeling was gone”.

He left Paris soon after, traveling back via Munich, now the home of the Weber family, but Aloysia had married and affected to retain no feelings for him. By January 1779 he was back in Salzburg where he took up the position of Konzertmeister to the Court and Cathedral. His life had irreversibly altered.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concentrate, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classicalcomposers.

Baptized Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus, Mozart was the seventh-born child of a musically gifted and personally ambitious father, Leopold, the son of an Augsburg bookbinder. By dint of his determined character, Leopold eventually attained the positions of Court composer and vice-Kapellmeister to the Salzburg establishment of Count Thurn und Taxis, Canon of Salzburg. Leopold was an able composer, and his “Toy Symphony” is still regularly performed, but the accomplishment most admired during his lifetime was a treatise on violin playing published in 1756, the year of Wolfgang’s birth.

Both Wolfgang and his elder sister, Maria Anna (nicknamed Nannerl), were child prodigies. Wolfgang was given lessons by his father from the age of four, and within a year he was not only playing duets with his sister, but composing little minuets in imitation of the pieces his father set him. His progress continued to be prodigious and by early 1762 Leopold believed the two children were ready to be introduced to the world. All three Mozarts were presented at the Court of the Elector of Munich and later in the same year their burgeoning reputations led to an appearance at the Emperor’s Viennese Court at Schönbrunn Palace, where little Wolfgang’s talent and artless behavior (which included jumping into the Empress’s lap and kissing her) made him the object of everyone’s indulgence.

Over the next few years the Mozart family followed a pattern of increasingly ambitious tours to various cities throughout Europe, including Paris, London, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Munich, as well as giving concerts to the aristocracy of Salzburg and Vienna. Another pattern which emerged from the tours, however, was not so propitious: the regular illnesses suffered by all the family, but by the two children in particular. It has since been speculated that these illnesses had a generally weakening effect on the boy’s constitution, leaving him vulnerable in later life, although Nannerl outlived Wolfgang by 28 years.

In 1768, and by imperial command, Wolfgang composed a full-length opera, La finta semplice (The Simple Pretense, K. 51) to words by Coltellini, and also saw a private production of his short operatic work Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50). He was now aged 12. An extended tour of Italy (1769-71) by father and son met with unprecedented success: Wolfgang was given a private audience with the Pope in Rome and was awarded the Order of the Golden Spur. In Bologna he was admitted to the ranks of compositore by the Accademica Filarmonica – a position normally denied to anyone under 20. At this stage Wolfgang was still very much a child, writing to his sister from Milan:

“Lest you should think I am unwell I am sending you these few lines. I kiss Mamma’s hand. My greetings to all our good friends. I have seen four rascals hanged here in the Piazza del Duomo. They hang them just as they do in Lyon. Wolfgang”.

Less than a year after their return to Salzburg (where Wolfgang was again seriously ill) the Mozarts were back in Milan where the opera Lucia Silla (K. 135) was completed. Austria beckoned once more, and a Viennese visit in the late spring of 1773 brought Mozart into contact with the work of Franz Joseph Hadn, specifically his String Quartets Op. 20, the so-called “Sun” Quartets, from which Mozart later claimed to have learned vital lessons in form and development.

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