Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac
The Mozart example doesn't really work that well. Mozart wrote his first symphony in a month at the age of eight and his last three (39,40, 41) in the space of a few weeks. Despite being "rushed", they've been "fairly enduring". On the other hand there are plenty symphonies which have taken years or decades to write and which do not even begin to approach the quality of K.16. The same is true for writing books - decades spent writing is no guarantee of quality.
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This thread has entered some sort of space-time
dis-continuum in which people address the imaginary posts they wish to disagree with rather than the posts to which they've actually replied.
Your response is predicated on the idea that I, a classical musician with three years of musicology who has played and studied Mozart and has read about his life endlessly, both for my degree in composition and minor in piano and as a fan, was arguing that Mozart needed to be paid because he was a
slow composer. You couldn't have been more off-base.
In fact, I was using Mozart as an example of why
compositional speed is often irrelevant when one is discussing the effect of not being paid on the legacy of the artist's work. The time it took to write that one individual book or piece of music is far from the only factor. Let's have a look at the actual post to which you responded:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
The lifetime aspect can have to do with working up to that book, writing the books that make that one great book possible, or simply having the extra time that one doesn't factor in if one only marks the dates of initiation and completion.
[T]he series of books [written by Jane Austen] is effectively a single book, if you consider that the time she spent writing them all is cumulative.
Consider the number of symphonies, quartets, concertos, choral pieces and operas by Mozart. Now consider the effect that not being paid might have had on his output (Mozart the strudel packer). Would you really be willing to sacrifice any of his music to the idea he would have been just as good if he'd had a day job? Which masses and symphonies would you want to do without?
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Thus, the point has never been that Mozart was a slow composer. The point is that he's quick and
still needed to be paid to create the body of work he did. Never mind the fact his Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, the Adagio and Fugue, the Mass in C Minor and works like the Jupiter required more time than many of the other pieces. (He's also the guy who produced the most kickass orchestration of Handel's Messiah en route to studying the style -- no one's ever done it as well.) The point is that, had he not been paid, he'd have had to turn away from writing to a great extent and many of those pieces would not have been written. It's also clear, if you read about Mozart, that he was originally the creature of patrons and required deadlines very often to complete his work. The feverish pace to which you allude was simply the composer finally getting around to writing down the music which was already completed in his head, an extraordinary ability he possessed as documented not only by the famous "Carriage Letter," the veracity of which some have doubted, but also the feat of his copying down the entirety of Allegri's complex Misereri from memory after hearing it once at age fourteen.
The question I asked, and which you have not answered, is the same: If you knew he would have had less than half the time to compose and that, therefore, a great number of his pieces would not have been written, which Mozart would you decide we should do without, and how could you know that even the pieces you do prefer could have been written without the momentum and flow of the rest?
And contrary to what a few people have suggested, I can attest as a trained composer and as a person who studied composers that, yes, composing a piece is a form of practice, just as composers often begin with exercises in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration (even toward the end of his life, Bach used to copy out other composers' scores to learn what they were doing). Mozart is a great example to the extent he and Beethoven met in life and agreed together it was important for them to return to working out counterpoint, which had fallen to disfavor from the time of Bach's son, C.P.E., to that of the early Classical Period. You can hear Mozart trying on the deeper disciplines of counterpoint in the C Minor Mass, the Quartets and the Adagio and Fugue -- all efforts that would inform the greatness of his last work, the Jupiter and the Requiem, just as his operas informed their dramatic power. Without the technical problems he worked out in those pieces (such as how to incorporate baroque counterpoint into the classical style without imitation or disregard, and how to make it work formally and dramatically in later classical forms), we wouldn't have the later work.