Maderna‘s Mozart

The music of Mozart (Salzburg 1756-Vienna 1791) covers the arc whic runs from the death of Bach to the threshold of the Nineteenth Century. Using his experience, the "Viennese" of the time (Beethoven and Schubert) started off, as did many great German romantics and many composers of the Twentieth Century, to draw up new artistic and humane ways, but at the end of their search and often rich with admirable realizations they all returned to Mozart and his dizzy compositions, an obvious sign that the composer from Salzburg represents the peak of music outside the time of his own short life. The motet Exultate-Jubilate K.16, a composition still tied to the religious style of the early Eighteenth Century, already shows the signs of the great transformations of the 80s and opens the way for the masterpieces of the last Viennese period, to the music which Mozart wrote for himself and of which the symphony no.38 K.504 and the concerto for piano no.24 K.491 are the testaments. The interpretation of Mozart by Maderna is not philological in the sense of Hogwood or Harnoncourt, because he does not insert it in the current search of the antique according to the original rules of composition, but is a revelation in the sense that he brings to the music the sign of an integration between two opposite worlds, between reason and sentiment, something that appears in everything he directs. Infact one notes that the passing of time and the changing of style seem only an accidental fact and nothing is lacking in either the most simple or most complex structures because the integration is given by the director and by his culture as a modern man. In his lesson of 12-note music at the Conservatory of Milan, Maderna often recalled the last symphonies by Mozart as a confirmation of his extraordinary modernity and his special artistic and didactic value.