<<  -- 4 --  Alistair Hinton    THE SAME OR NOT THE SAME?

The true 'sameness' in a creative musical (sorry, Ferruccio!) persona, far from being a form of mere surface gloss, is that which informs -- or rather underlies -- all its outpourings, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the composer's life. Do not Don Juan, Salome, Capriccio and Vier Letzte Lieder clearly emerge from the same distinctive creative wellspring, for all their obvious differences? If that is indeed true, it must be due to a kind of constancy in Richard Strauss's persona that permits all manner of development in and between such works without actually turning against itself at any point; this may be surprising, given the vastly and irrevocably changed world in which the composer, in his eighties, came to find himself after the close of World War II. Perhaps Metamorphosen might be regarded as a sort of monument to this very kind of change. And is it not curious that Strauss and Schönberg -- despite what some might see as the unbridgeable differences between their creative journeyings -- each came to celebrate Mozart as they approached the ends of their respective lives? -- Strauss in some of his actual music and Schönberg in his beration of someone claiming him to be an auto-didact with the words 'I am a pupil of Mozart!'.

That we have come full circle back to Mozart here is perhaps not so surprising, in that it somehow reflects the kind of 'sameness' -- in the constancy sense -- with which Mr Standford's thoughts 'provoke' us (and perhaps, in the light of the 'constancy' referred to in the last paragraph, it could be suggested that Mr Standford has indirectly shed new light on the reason that Mozart married someone called Constanza...). Mozart's death occurred more than two centuries ago, long before there was even the communicative means to enable his work to achieve the well-nigh universal global admiration it has come to attract since, yet during those two centuries so many composers of different persuasions have sought to cite him as some kind of god-like creative persona -- from his near-contemporaries Haydn and Beethoven through Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Schönberg, Stravinsky, Britten -- even Elliott Carter, in a relatively recent interview, claimed that, as a composer, he didn't really feel particularly influenced by anyone -- except probably Mozart!

So, with this in mind, perhaps it is not so much that 'all Mozart sounds the same' but that 'all music sounds the same'! Now there's a provocative thought!