Interview, Víkingur Ólafsson on Mozart and his Contemporaries

Featuring works by Cimarosa, Galuppi, CPE Bach and Haydn alongside music which Mozart composed in the last decade of his life, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson's latest recording on Deutsche Grammophon has been welcomed with a flurry of acclaim equal to that which greeted his previous albums of Glass, JS Bach and Debussy & Rameau: The Times observed that 'Ólafsson treats the music with equal distinction: articulation wonderfully fleet and clean; the phrasing flexible, always alive', whilst my colleague James described the project as 'another exceptional album from this phenomenally accomplished performer'.

In the run-up to his Proms debut, I spoke to Víkingur over Zoom about the personal and professional challenges which Mozart faced in the 1780s, how researching this project has led him to revise some of his own preconceptions about keyboard music of the Classical era, and one particular historical performance which he would 'give his right kidney' to have attended...

Why did you choose to focus on this particular decade of Mozart’s life for this project?

Simply because I think it shows us Mozart at his best – there’s a reason why 85 or 90% of what we hear in concert today by Mozart is from the 1780s. This last decade in Mozart’s life is one of the most incredible decades in music history for any composer, both on a personal and a musical level. In 1781 he discovered the music of JS Bach – by accident almost, in a library in Vienna – and his own music would never be the same. He was really delving deeply into Bach study during this period, and you hear that clearly on this album. And at the same time he was going through this astonishing transformation from being the prodigy of all prodigies to being a mature musician: by his mid-twenties he no longer has that free card of being the boy-wonder, and he’s facing a lot of difficulties with the musical establishment of his day. He wouldn’t bow down to the pressures of the aristocracy; he always played his own game, and in a certain sense he was a wild card as a person.

And you see that throughout this whole decade: he’s going in and out of fashion, and he’s almost like a character from one of his own operas. Then there’s the relationship with this overwhelming father figure, Leopold; he’s lost his mother in 1778 and he has Constanze and the children, but it’s a difficult decade nonetheless. He doesn’t get the opera commissions that he wants, but he has this will to live and to fight, so he starts his own concert-series and starts to write what are now known as the great piano concertos in order to sell tickets. In a sense you could say that he was history’s first indie musician: he was promoting his own concerts, designing the posters, selling tickets from his apartment in Vienna, drawing up contracts for the musicians in the orchestra… everything.

On top of this he was also teaching and doing a thousand other things as well as just ‘being Mozart’; after he died, Constanze would say that his cause of death was overwork, because he barely even slept. We often focus too much on the myth of Mozart, the myth of the prodigy and the myth of the genius – but as he writes in some of his letters, he often feels totally misunderstood and that people don’t give him credit for all the tireless work which he does. In one letter he says something like ‘Anyone who worked as hard as me would achieve the same results’: that’s not true, of course, because he also had the divine talent, but it says a lot. And you feel that in these works, which are so diverse and complex but also immensely pleasing: he manages to write music that (like today’s pop music) is something that you want to listen to over and over again, but at the same time it also has a darker side and this incredible complexity that can take enormously different interpretations from different performers.

In the booklet-note you mention Mozart’s fascination with subverting Classical traditions – could you give me an example or two from the album?

There are so many – I think that almost every measure of Mozart has a little bit of this. He takes the established traditions, patterns and musical vocabulary of the era and always manages to find a new perspective. You see it in the very first measure of Mozart on the album, the Rondo in F major: he’s got the most famous motif of the Classical era, the Alberti bass, and twists it by a semitone. And you see it in a different sense in the C minor sonata, where he’s really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the instruments of his day: the piece seems to ask for a bigger instrument than he probably would have had. I have a square piano – probably the oldest piano in Iceland – at home, and it’s a gorgeous instrument but when I play this piece it almost can’t take it!

Mozart was pushing not only the limits of sound, dynamics and register, but also what you expect from a Classical instrument in terms of expressive possibilities. And you feel that everywhere in this piece, right from the opening measures where you need great dynamic contrast – this really belongs to the Sturm und Drang of the Beethoven era. Beethoven’s Pathétique is absolutely impossible without Mozart’s C minor Sonata, and Beethoven draws from it directly in many places: even the famous theme of the second movement of the Pathétique originates from the third theme of the second movement of Mozart’s C minor, which is also in A flat major.

You also see it in my arrangement of the Adagio from the String Quintet in E flat: in terms of harmony, atmosphere and poetry, that movement really seems to go into a place that we simply don’t see in the Classical tradition, and in a sense it feels more like Beethoven or Schubert. Then there’s the Kleine Gigue (one of my favourite pieces on the album, and also the shortest), which stems from a pilgrimage that Mozart made to Leipzig during a horribly dark period in his own life when he sought comfort from visiting Bach’s town and going to the Thomaskirche to be near his grave. This little piece is incredible, because it’s so futuristic but also baroque – it starts with a twelve-tone row (well, a ten-tone row really), and it sounds like Stravinsky having a rendez-vous with Bach through the medium of Mozart! It certainly connects very different eras, at least to my twenty-first-century sensibilities.

And the Cimarosa pieces feel quite ahead of their time as well – one of them seems to look forward to Für Elise…

My two-year-old son knows Für Elise, and he said that too when I was playing it – so you agree with him, and I agree with both of you! I discovered Cimarosa fairly recently, through a friend: there are dozens of sonatas, maybe even hundreds, but very few are in print today. I don’t care much for about 98% of them, but a few are absolutely gorgeous. Cimarosa was one of the most famous composers of Mozart’s day: he was hugely in demand for opera in particular, and Mozart was so aware of the musical ecosystem of the period that I thought it would be interesting to bring these two sonatas to life.

Even though the Cimarosa sonatas on this album are incredible, I have to say that Galuppi’s works speak more to me overall – I had to do more digging for gold with Cimarosa. Galuppi’s F minor sonata and the C minor sonata have this kind of prophetic quality: they don’t seem like music of the Classical era to me. But perhaps that’s showing my own ignorance of the period, in that I thought it all sounded one way: this album has led me to conclude that the Classical era was wild, and there was incredible creativity from many more people than Mozart and Haydn.

I wanted to try and get rid of some my own preconceptions about Mozart by finding out more about the music of his day – I knew barely anything about these contemporaries until I started studying them for this album, and my idea was that I would come back to some of my favourite Mozart pieces and see if I could then approach them from a freer perspective. I sightread through literally everything I could find by Galuppi, CPE Bach, Cimarosa and Haydn, then simply chose the ones that speak to me the most directly: I feel these are some of the very greatest pieces that those composers wrote, and in that context they can stand next to Mozart. (Haydn of course is on a different level, a real genius).

CPE Bach is someone I feel more conflicted about, because although I don’t like so much of his music I do find it immensely interesting. But this one piece that I selected seems to me so brilliant, quirky, confident and humorous: it’s so fun and weird and unexpected, and you never know where it’s going to go! Mozart loved CPE Bach: there’s a beautiful quotation where he says that ‘Bach is the father and we are the children’, and everyone assumes he’s talking about JS but he’s actually referring to CPE!

The quality of CPE Bach's work is really variable, but the same can also be said about any composer, including Mozart: I don’t think that all Mozart’s keyboard music is equal, not at all. His greatest works have this incredible feeling of discovery, creativity and experimentation to them, but there’s also a bunch that were written for very practical purposes – a piano lesson here, a little commission there – and didn’t really matter so much. So aside from all of the historical intricacies and my aim of creating one composition from the twenty tracks, the most important thing to me was to present the very best music that was written in the 1780s. It’s my personal taste of course, and people will disagree, but I wanted to show what stood out to me.

Did Mozart have any direct contact with the two Italians?

I have to tread carefully here because I haven’t read absolutely everything, but to my knowledge he was never in touch with Cimarosa and Galuppi – though of course that doesn’t mean that he didn’t know their music. But the relationship with Haydn is a beautiful one: there’s one source that says that on occasion they would play the two viola-parts of the great Quintet in G minor together, and I would give my right kidney to have heard one of those performances! But it’s also very important to note that although Haydn and Mozart played certainly could play the violin as well as anyone around, they chose the viola… That’s something to keep in mind when you play the piano music, because late Mozart in particular has this counterpoint and inner life in all the parts. It’s never just melody and accompaniment: there are always many more layers, and the fact that he chose the viola should perhaps be a guiding light to remind us never to forget the quality of the inner voices.

What’s your attitude towards repeats in music of this period?

I actually omit most of the repeats on the album, because it’s 84 minutes and if I’d done more I would’ve gone to 100-plus! But more importantly, repeats don’t always make musical sense to me: if they add something to the narrative and strengthen the structure then fair enough, but for me they often weaken the structure and take us back in an unnecessary way. It made sense in the Classical era, because there were so few concerts: you were very lucky if you ever heard live music at all, so the repeat was just a second chance to experience something you might never hear again. But the repeat in the recording age is a very different thing – especially as you can just listen to the track again immediately afterwards through your chosen medium if you like!

The one repeat I do observe here is in the Sonata Facile, where I add ornamentation and make sure to keep the narrative moving forward. The important thing is to follow your own conviction and play from wherever you feel the drama has led you: you can impose little tricks and try to vary things, sure, but if you’re honest to the music and its trajectory then it will sound very different. It’s like life in a way: if you meet a person once and then run into them seven days later after various things have happened to you both, it’s not the same meeting or even the same person!