In yesterday's post we saw Mozart focusing his Futurescope forty years forward, into the sound-world of Schubert. As it turns out, this gizmo had a range substantially greater still.
If you're a nostalgist and/or a New Yorker old enough to remember Joe Franklin's long-running talk-show on WOR-TV, you might recall the show's theme song, "Twelfth Street Rag." (The first 40 seconds of this clip of the song are all you need to hear for present purposes, but feel free to follow this ear-worm further down memory lane.) As will be more than obvious, the gist of the song is a descending three-note figure repeated (and repeated) in syncopation over a four-square beat. I don't know where Mozart heard this number, but it clearly made a dent in him.
The finale of his last string quartet, K. 590, is a brilliant mix of joie de vivre and contrapuntal complexity. This wasn't the Mozart piece that moved Beethoven to exclaim "Why can't I write music like that?", but it might as well have been. (The piece that drew these words from Beethoven was a wind quintet being played in the street outside his window.) I encourage you to hear, enjoy, and marvel at the whole K. 590 finale (which begins at 19:03 in this clip), but would call your attention here to the catchy little tune that ends the movement's first section (at 20:55 in the clip). If it makes you laugh out loud, you’re forgiven: the syncopated, dizzying repetitions of its descending three-note figure whisk us ahead a hundred years-plus to an age when "Twelfth Street Rag" and its ilk roamed the earth. (The bluesy alternation of major and minor chords beneath the repetitions of the figure is prescience squared.) Mozart himself knew he’d happened on a remarkable, and remarkably winning, thing in this tune–as shown by the fact that he works its three-note figure non-stop for almost the entire central “development” section of the movement (which goes from 21:07 to 21:50). This look-ahead to jazz had no precedent in Mozart (or anywhere else), and was not to be repeated by him. (Not that it had much time to be: K 590 was written only a year and half before his tragically untimely death at thirty-five in 1791.)
But jazz did receive a return visit 30 years later–from Beethoven. His last piano sonata, the Opus 111 (1821-22), has only two movements rather than the customary three or four, but it’s safe to say that no one has ever felt shortchanged by the work. The second movement, in particular, is, to adopt a phrase sometimes applied to Schubert, of a “heavenly length:” a theme and variations, marked Adagio molto ("very slow"), that lasts at least fifteen minutes, and often a good deal more, in performance. (It starts at 9:22 in this clip.) While the movement’s glacial tempo never changes, things seem to speed up from variation to variation in the first few of them, as Beethoven packs the same capacious beats with progressively more (hence progressively faster) notes.
It's in the third variation that things get prophetic. When I first heard it (beginning at 15:56 in the clip), I could hardly believe my ears: who knew there were honky-tonks in 1820’s Vienna? Not that Beethoven ever re-visited them; it’s as though, having happened on an entirely new world we call jazz, he left the exploration of it, as Mozart had, to a later age. Of course, Beethoven himself didn't hear the writing in this variation as “jazzy”–just powerfully syncopated. Can we forget our experience of jazz, and hear Beethoven’s variation in all 19th-century innocence of music's future? Not easily, but that doesn’t mean that, as a mind-stretching exercise of our historical imagination, it isn’t worth a try.