J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

For all the harshness of his family circumstances, there is a sense in which he was now
in a distinctly privileged position, able to concentrate upon developing his art without
the necessity of currying popular or imperial favour.
This insulation between Beethoven and the world around him represents a
fundamental difference between his creative personality and Mozart’s. It is not just
that Mozart was economically dependent upon refractory patrons and fickle audiences;
the raw material of his music itself emerged from his relationship to these. We can see
in many different ways—his early ability to mimic standard operatic clichés on the
keyboard, 42 his masterly toying with audiences, 43 his care in tailoring arias for singers
so they fitted ‘as accurately as a well-made coat’, 44 his portrait of Rosa Cannabich in
K.309/284b 45 —how supremely receptive Mozart was to the musical and social
situations around him. It is possible to trace his musical development by listing the
musicians he came across: his father, J. C. Bach, Schobert, Padre Martini, Hasse,
Piccini, Le Gros, Joseph and Michael Haydn, van Swieten (and therefore Bach and
Handel), Schikaneder, Anton Stadler and many others. ‘As you know’ he pointed out
to his father ‘I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of
composition.’ 46
Beethoven was far less receptive to his immediate surroundings:
42 Daines Barrington’s account: ‘I said to the boy, that I should be glad to hear an extemporary Love
Song, such as his friend Manzoli might choose in an opera. The boy … looked back with much
archness, and immediately began five or six lines of a jargon recitative proper to introduce a love
song. He then played a symphony which might correspond with an air composed to the single word,
Affetto. It had a first and second part, which, together with the symphonies, was of the length that
opera songs generally last: if this extemporary composition was not amazingly capital, yet it was
really above mediocrity, and shewed most extraordinary readiness of invention. Finding that he was
in humour, and as it were inspired, I then desired him to compose a Song of Rage, such as might be
proper for the opera stage. The boy again looked back with much archness, and began five or six
lines of a jargon recitative proper to precede a Song of Anger. This lasted also about the same time
as the Song of Love; and in the middle of it, he had worked himself up to such a pitch, that he beat
his harpsichord like a person possessed, rising sometimes in his chair. The word he pitched upon for
this second extemporary composition was, Perfido.’ O. Deutsch, Mozart: a documentary biography,
tr. E. Blom, P. Branscombe, and J. Noble (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p.98.
43 Letter to his father, 3 July 1778, The letters of Mozart and his family, tr. and ed. Emily Anderson, 3
vols. (London: Macmillan, 1938), vol. II, pp.825-26; discussed on p.253-4 above.
44 Letter to his father, 28 Feb 1778, ibid., vol. II, pp.735-37.
45 Letter to his father, 6 Dec 1777, ibid., vol. II, p.602.
46 Letter to his father, 7 Feb 1778, ibid., vol. II, p.694.
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