Prof: So--good morning.
 
I bring you news from
Nashville--very interesting,
Nashville.
 
I had such an interesting
weekend.
Friday night,
went to this spectacular
concert of Mozart,
doing the Mozart Requiem in
this one hundred thirty-five
million-dollar concert hall that
they have put--
built for music in the city of
Nashville.
 
The next afternoon,
Saturday afternoon,
I walked across the street.
 
I could have gone two blocks to
watch a hockey game--
they have a hockey team in
Nashville--
or three blocks in the other
direction to watch the Titans
play in the football stadium,
but I went just one block to
the Country Music Hall of Fame.
 
So I spent three hours in the
Country Music Hall of Fame and--
absolutely fascinating--but it
got even better,
because Sunday morning,
there I was at the airport
about to fly out of Nashville.
 
And I'm sitting there and you
know how you're queuing up to
get--go out your gate to get on
your airplane and CNN is playing
on the television there.
 
It was wonderful.
 
What did I hear?
 
>
 
Ah, Mozart!
 
Mozart right here in the
airport in Nashville.
And then it went on from that.
 
There was another commercial
and they used <<plays
piano >>
 
and so on.
 
So what a strange,
wonderful world,
what a strange,
wonderful country to have such
diversity ethnically,
politically and musically.
And at the same time to have a
sense that this little person
who was only about five feet
three inches tall--
probably weighed about one
hundred ten pounds--
sitting in a room in Vienna,
Austria,
more than two hundred years ago
could create this beauty that we
still engage today,
whether consciously or
subconsciously,
when we're sitting in an
airport in Nashville,
Tennessee.
Right?
 
Astonishing what the brain
sometimes experiences.
Well, today we're going to talk
about Mozart.
Now the music that you just
heard--<<music
playing>>
 
Okay.
 
Let's just stop it there,
and we're going to come back to
this in just a second.
 
It's music of the Classical
period.
It's music of Mozart.
 
It happens to be what's called
his "Little G Minor
Symphony,"
and contrast that to the music
that you heard in section last
week by Bach,
>
 
and so on where he gets a
concerto going,
>
 
and it sort of chugs along in
that same fashion,
chugs along,
in fact, for about nine minutes
and twenty seconds all with the
music having the same general
tenor,
the same general mood,
the same general feeling to it.
 
That's Baroque music.
 
Once you get an ethos
established in Baroque music,
it will carry through from
beginning to end of a particular
movement or a particular piece.
 
It doesn't change,
generally speaking.
When we get to the Classical
period,
however, and here we're talking
roughly seventeen fifty up to
around eighteen twenty or so,
things get a little bit
different.
 
We get change within a
particular movement.
Change might be from regular to
irregular rhythm,
for example,
or from very loud to very
quiet.
 
And this push for change only
accelerates as we go in to the
romantic period where you get
these wild swings of emotion,
these wild swings of musical
mood, a kind of bipolar music in
the nineteenth century.
 
Well, this begins in the
Classical period so let's go
back and hear the beginning of
this Symphony No.
25 in G Minor of Mozart.
 
And notice here we begin minor
key,
lots of syncopation,
agitation, and within about
forty seconds Mozart has morphed
into a completely different
mood,
a major key, oboe solo.
The music is very lyrical.
 
The meter now is--or the
rhythms are all lined up to come
on the beat rather than off the
beat.
Watch how we have this
transformation of mood within a
rather short period of time.
 
>
 
Okay, completely different sort
of music here.
Now that sound that you just
heard there is the opening music
for the film
"Amadeus."
How many have seen the movie or
film "Amadeus"?
If you haven't, go see it.
 
It's just not to be believed,
it is so good.
And it doesn't age either,
because it's all done in period
costume so you don't know that
anything has really changed.
It's a wonderful movie.
 
It's based on two premises:
One, what does mediocrity do in
the face of absolute genius?
 
And two, isn't it ironic,
isn't it somehow unfair,
that this God-given talent,
this great creature,
comes to earth in the form of
this sort of childish lout,
i.e., Mozart?
 
And we'll explore that just a
little bit.
And how does someone like Peter
Shaffer,
who created the play and--on
which was built the film
"Amadeus"--
how did they create a character
like this?
 
Well, they use memoirs of the
time, letters of the time,
primary source documents of the
time.
You may remember in
"Amadeus,"--
and I put a picture of this in
the textbook because I think
it's actually very important in
trying to get inside of Mozart's
head--
that Mozart often composed on a
billiard table.
 
That's what we see in
"Amadeus."
Is this true?
 
Yes, it is actually true.
 
If you look at the probate list
of Mozart--
they went through his apartment
after he died and they
inventoried all the furniture
and said where everything was--
in his bedroom he had a
billiards table--
not a pool table,
but a billiards table.
There's an important difference
here because billiards,
of course, involves angles.
 
And there is a report from one
of Mozart's friends,
a tenor, Michael Kelly,
who said in his memoirs,
"He was fond of billiards
and had an excellent billiard
table in his home.
 
Many and many a game I played
with him but always came off
second best."
 
And Mozart had other interests
too.
His--one of his other interests
was arithmetic,
and if you look at the Mozart
autographs and particularly the
Mozart sketches you will see
that he fills the margins
oftentimes with numbers,
doing various basic
calculations and sometimes some
fundamental algebraic
formulations.
 
Why this fascination with
numbers and shapes and patterns?
He would go into a restaurant
and he would be seen folding his
napkin this way,
this way, this way.
When he writes letters he
oftentimes writes the word
backwards.
 
He loves anagrams and I could
give you lots of specific
instances of that.
 
Another aspect of this is
Mozart the mimic.
Mozart had an incredible
capacity to imitate other
individuals--their facial
gestures, their dialects.
We can't--we don't have time to
go in to it, those dialects.
And he was fluent.
 
He learned languages
lickety-split--
fluent Italian,
fluent French,
fluent English,
of course in addition to his
native German,
and he had a great musical
memory.
 
He could retain all of this
sound.
A famous story:
He goes into the Sistine Chapel
in Rome.
 
We saw pictures of that two
weeks ago.
He hears one piece that
couldn't be performed anywhere
else, had never been published,
only supposed to be performed
in the Papal Chapel.
 
He goes in once,
hears it, walks back to his
hotel, and writes the whole
thing down.
Well, what is all of this?
 
Well, it's the capacity,
I suppose--what is the brain
doing up there?
 
We've got this organ,
probably the least understood,
and we have these various parts
of the brain.
Sound processing--for music,
sound processing for language--
is happening mostly in the
temporal lobe,
but engaging various kinds of
near-term and long-term memory
in the frontal lobe,
and probably in the hippocampus
as well.
 
If you have absolute pitch,
sometimes you short-circuit,
apparently, this whole process
because that's being recognized
in the brainstem and so on.
 
So there's lots going on here,
and I've given you this sheet
in which a Yale neuroscientist,
David Ross--a couple of years
ago--he was the basis of an
article in the Yale Alumni
magazine:
"Is Your Brain In
Tune?"
 
and it talks about things such
as the incidence of absolute
pitch in this world;
roughly one person in every ten
thousand has it.
 
So these are the kinds of
things that interest about
Mozart.
 
Oddly, we can--we know more
about Mozart than we know about
Picasso.
 
Picasso lived--a great artist,
a great genius here--in the
twentieth century,
died about 1973,1970-something.
But we can get inside of
Mozart's head more intensely and
we know more about him than we
can about Picasso because Mozart
left us a ton of letters.
 
I just grabbed something that
was on my bookshelf in my office
here,
here--volume two of a
five-volume set of letters by
Mozart,
so he was always writing
letters to,
principally,
his father, and it's on the
basis of this kind of thing that
we get a sense of who Mozart
was.
 
The portrayal of Mozart in
"Amadeus,"
as I say, is just absolutely
wrong.
It couldn't be more wrong.
 
The movie is brilliant,
the premise is brilliant,
but the portrayal of Mozart
couldn't be more off the track.
Here is just one letter from
those in the collected letters
of Mozart that always interests
me.
He's writing to his father,
1787, about the time of the
death of one of his good
friends.
The friend was named Count von
Hatzfeld and this is what Mozart
says about death.
 
"Death is the true goal of
our lives and I have made myself
so well acquainted with it
during the past two years that I
see it as the true and best
friend of mankind.
Indeed, the idea of it no
longer holds any terror for me
but rather much that is tranquil
and comforting,
and I thank God that he has
granted me the good fortune to
obtain the opportunity of
regarding death as the key to
our true happiness.
 
I never retire at night without
considering that,
as young as I am,
perhaps I may be no more on the
morrow,
yet not one of those who knows
me could say that I am morose or
melancholy,
and for this I thank my creator
daily and wish heartily the same
happiness may be given to my
fellow man.
I clearly explained my way of
looking at the matter on the
occasion of the death of my very
dear best friend,
Count von Hatzfeld.
 
He was just thirty-one like
myself.
I do not grieve for him but
from the bottom of my heart for
myself and for all who knew him
as well as I."
Now ironically,
at age thirty-one how many more
years did Mozart himself have to
live?
Yeah, four.
 
He did not make it to
thirty-six.
He wrote this > --if you go on our
music library over there and you
could extend your hands like
this and you would not be able
to encompass all of the music by
Mozart that's been edited,
and he did all of that by the
time he was thirty-six.
 
So Mozart's an interesting
character.
He may have had no formal
education, didn't spend a minute
in school.
 
Why not?
 
 
 
Well, they didn't have
mandatory education in that
period.
 
He was recognized very early on
to be a musical genius and his
father nourished him at home,
took him all around the world
to showcase these talents,
and he was sort of educated as
a person in the world and his
father did teach him many,
many things as he went through
life.
Okay.
 
So what kind of music did
Mozart write?
What's special about Mozart's
music?
Well, let me try to encapsulate
this in a simple way by saying
let's focus on four things that
are peculiar about Mozart's
music or individual about
Mozart's music.
The first: I would say,
this infallible sense of
balance and proportion.
 
Yes, we are in the Classical
period in the history of music
and that's why we call it the
Classical period,
because everything does seem to
be in balance.
There's not an excessive degree
of ornamentation the way you
find in--sometimes in Baroque
art for example.
Everything is balanced.
 
And it is still the norm today.
 
I was dumbfounded looking at
that new concert hall in
Nashville.
 
What did they do?
 
They--it's a knockoff of the
U.S. Treasury building or the
Federal Reserve building in
Washington, D.C.,
you know, the basic pediment up
there, the columns and all of
this.
 
That's architecture,
everything in perfect balance.
Well, in Classical music we
begin to get this for the first
time here in the Classical
period.
Remember when we were studying
measures and bars and phrases
and I would have you count
measures,
and invariably we would find
that things are two plus two,
four plus four,
eight plus eight and that kind
of thing, very symmetrical.
 
Well, this comes in to music
here for the first time in a big
way in the Classical period.
 
So let's just refresh our
memory here.
Here is the aria "Voi che
sapete" by Mozart which we
had Lauren Libaw sing for us--
but just the beginning of it to
get a sense in our ears once
again what's an antecedent in
consequent phrase.
 
>
 
Antecedent, >
consequent, >
antecedent, >
three, opens it up and inserts,
>
now the consequence,
>.
Okay.
 
We'll just stop it right there,
but everything in four plus
four and you can go right
through that entire aria and
it's organized that way.
 
All right.
 
So that's point one:
balance, shaping,
perfect proportion.
 
Point two: The capacity to make
something very beautiful out of
the simplest of materials.
 
It's sort of oxymoron here with
Mozart.
The--sometimes the simpler it
is, the more beautiful it is.
Here is the piece they were
playing in the airport in
Nashville.
 
It's out of a piano concerto of
Mozart.
It's the one in C major that's
listed on your sheet there .
It's called the "Elvira
Madigan"
concerto because a few years
ago they used it as background
music for a movie that--
a film that was based on a
novel.
 
Thomas Hardy--is that right?
 
"Elvira Madigan"?
 
I think that's correct.
 
In any event, here is the music.
 
>
 
And so on.
 
I'm going to just stop there
for a second and let's look at
this.
 
>
 
What's that?
 
Somebody yell it out nice and
loud.
>
 
Daniel?
 
Daniel says major triad,
absolutely right.
So he is just ornamenting it a
little bit.
>
 
Now what's this?
 
>
 
Just a scale.
 
He's up on the fifth,
>
five, four, three,
two, one.
He makes it a little more
interesting by doing this,
>
 
a little chromaticism inserted
there, so the stuff we talked
about at the beginning of the
class.
Triad, goes up,
comes down the scale,
goes in--the triad coming down
the scale, a chromatic
inflection, >
the next phrase,
>
gets back to the opening idea,
but how does he do that?
>
 
This is an interesting chord
and we should focus on it just
for a minute.
 
It's called a dominant seventh
chord.
Here's our basic C major triad,
C, E, G, >
and it's made up of two thirds.
 
If we put one more third up
there, >
that would get us up to a
seventh chord.
Why is it called a seventh
chord, again?
Because it spans seven letter
names, C, D, E,
F, G, A, B.
 
So a total of seven letter
names up there.
But it's simply a triad with
another third thrown up there on
top.
 
So we get that idea.
 
>
 
Back to the tonic,
>
continue, >
diminished chord,
>
and throws a little trill
on--at the end and that's it,
but it's very,
very simple material but it's
so beautiful and so lasting that
you can hear it once again in
the airport in Nashville.
 
All right.
 
Point three:
what I would say are wild
swings of mood with Mozart.
 
It begins to come in,
as mentioned,
in the Classical period,
this change of mood within a
single composition.
 
But with Mozart it's
particularly intense,
because he likes to swing
really quickly between major and
minor keys and he likes to go
between diatonic and chromatic
really quickly.
 
And he likes to play off
different dynamic levels,
loud and soft.
 
And that's the essence of
drama, right,
contrast, conflict.
 
That's where we get drama.
 
So let's listen to a bit of the
"Confutatis"
out of the Requiem Mass.
 
We talked a bit about this a
little bit before but it
wouldn't hurt to hear it again
so we're going to start here
down low in >
demon land in minor,
agitation, and then we'll shift
up in to the higher heavenly
realm.
>
 
 
 
Now we're going to go to the
Confutatis out of the Dies Irae
of the Requiem Mass,
>
completely new environment,
>
and then back to the original.
 
>
 
So that's point three:
strong contrast.
And sometimes rather abrupt
contrast .
And here is the fourth and
final point: Inexhaustible
melodic supply,
fecundity of imagination when
it comes to melody.
 
This is an interesting thing.
 
It's something I'm studying in
my own work at the moment,
looking at a lot of Mozart's
sketches.
And Mozart sometimes would have
to sketch something.
He'd sometimes get in a little
bit of trouble and have to write
something.
 
For the most part,
he had it all in his head--he
was just writing it down--but
sometimes he did have to sketch
things.
 
When he gets in trouble and has
to sketch it's contrapuntal
issues, never melody.
 
Now you look at Beethoven's
sketches in the Beethoven sketch
books and Beethoven will wrestle
with trying to craft or get this
melody exactly the way he wants
it over and over again,
erasure after erasure.
 
When you look at the Beethoven
section of the textbook there,
there's a facsimile of--out of
the second movement of the
Beethoven Fifth Symphony.
 
Notice all the erasures there
and the constant corrections.
It took him about twenty years
before he was happy with
>.
He worked on that thing for a
long, long time before he got it
exact.
 
That would never happen with
Mozart.
This just flowed perfectly.
 
Now we're going to play an
example here.
I've never used this in any
kind of public forum before.
I'd be interested to see how it
comes across.
It's an example of Mozart
writing church music for a
soprano solo.
 
Actually, the soprano that had
to sing it was his wife so she
was pretty good.
 
So let's just listen to a chunk
out of a mass,
the <<"Et in
carnatus"
of the >>
 
C Minor Mass by Mozart,
and see this sense of melody
that just is perfect and can
just kind of go on--
perfectly shaped,
perfectly proportioned,
but you don't have a sense that
he's struggling with this.
It just seems so easy.
 
>
 
 
 
>
 
Okay. We'll just pause it there.
 
We're just breaking in the
middle of it.
This guy could go on forever
with this kind of thing and
sometimes it got him in trouble.
 
What I mean by that is that
there are two famous anecdotes
coming from Mozart's life,
one at the time of the
production of The Abduction
from the Seraglio.
The emperor is there and the
emperor says,
"All well and good,
my dear friend Mozart,
but far too many notes,"
and Mozart's repose--
response was,
"Not one nor--
no more or less than absolutely
necessary,
Your Majesty."
 
Then, at the end of the
performance,
first Viennese performance of
Don Giovanni,
the emperor,
same emperor,
Joseph II,
said, "Too much meat for
the teeth of my Viennese,
dear Mozart,"
to which the repost this time
was,
"Well, let them chew on it
a while.
They'll get used to it."
 
And they did and--get used to
it but unfortunately by that
time Mozart was dead.
 
So he didn't live to see the
success of his particular
vision.
 
So with Mozart there is this
sense of music that is divinely
shaped,
divinely proportioned,
a sort of endless variety,
not one note too many,
not one note too few.
 
And indeed in his day Mozart
was referred to as "the
divine Mozart."
 
We still call him "the
divine Mozart."
It's interesting what labels
get put on particular composers,
Bach for example--I'm not sure
we call Bach divine.
We call him the stalwart Bach,
the industrious Bach for
example, Beethoven the powerful,
Bach the powerful composer,
the striving composer.
 
I can sort of relate to Bach in
a way with his twenty children
or with Beethoven and the chaos.
 
You look at a Beethoven score
and it's this train wreck,
that he's scribbled here,
always trying to correct this
and wrote this out and then he--
his dinner falls over top of
the manuscript so he's got to
sweep that away.
It's just his whole life kind
of chaotic there,
but with Mozart it's all sort
of crystal clear and crisp,
perfectly organized almost from
the get-go in these autographed
scores,
and that's what we mean sort of
by the divine nature of the
music.
It's sort of heavenly sent
music.
It's an interesting phenomenon,
this idea of art and religion
and why we have these kinds of
things.
I often think myself--I'm not a
particularly religious person
but I'm one of these people who
take art and turn it into
religion in a kind--
odd kind of way.
And I think it is possible to
see visions of the divine,
working with art.
 
And occasionally I do get this,
and in an odd way this--isn't
this what art is supposed to all
be about?
Why do we have art?
 
What does it do for us?
 
It gives us a sense of
something better,
a vision of something better
than the stupid,
mundane and the vernacular crap
that we have to deal with on a
quotidian basis out here.
 
There could be something better;
there's something bigger and
better out there than we are.
 
That, in essence,
is what art is all about and
sometimes you can see it and--I
think you can see it,
or you just seem to be getting
nearer to it.
One of the experiences in my
life: Standing at the west end
of the Cathedral of Chartres on
a bright,
sunny day when the back of the
church is still cold and dark
but all these beautiful blue
lights streaming through the
stained glass.
 
In music it often happens,
well, sometimes and maybe with
Gustav Mahler but particularly
with Mozart,
and I think it has to do with
the sense of balance and
proportion,
crystalline clarity that's
operating there.
 
So that's what you get with
Mozart,
crystalline clarity,
balance and performance--
and balance and proportion,
and sometimes with Mozart you
get >
 
a vision of hell as well when
he switches off into the minor,
so it's a kind of total cosmos.
 
And I was struck recently when
I came across a passage of
Johannes Kepler.
 
Now don't get me wrong here.
 
>
 
I don't sit around reading the
astrophysicist Johannes Kepler.
I was reading something else
and this happened to crop up;
this quote from Kepler came up
in it.
How many of you in your physics
courses--do they mention Kepler
at all?
 
Then--all right.
 
So you know--you guys know
Kepler a lot better than I do.
Let's not put on airs here.
 
But this is what Kepler said,
and it seemed like a really
good passage to me.
 
All right.
 
He's talking about music here
and humanity.
"Man, the ape of his
creator,
has discovered the art of music
so that he might play the
everlastingness of all created
time in some short part of an
hour by means of an artistic
concord of many voices and
instruments,
that he might to some extent
taste the satisfaction of God
the workman through music."
Interesting idea.
 
Now in the same vein,
however, what does music--what
does art do for us?
 
I was struck there in the
Country Music Hall of Fame on
Saturday in which the--
you know, you go into these
things,
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
and you push a button and then
the--
one of these artists will come
and talk to you or--
the recorded thing there,
or sometimes they'll play
music.
 
Well, they had African American
country singer Charlie Pride
there and he had something to
say.
I didn't get it down verbatim
but this is the gist of it.
I went back and wrote it down.
 
This is what Charlie Pride had
to say.
"Music is a bridge to my
distant memories.
When I hear a piece,
it reminds me of a time or an
event of my childhood or of my
youth.
Music carries me back there.
 
It is a line that links me in
to the deep reservoir of my
memory."
 
So that, I think, is also true.
 
That's another thing that music
does for us.
It--and I bet you've
experienced this too,
sort of Proustian in a way.
 
You hear something that reminds
you when you first heard that
piece or what you were doing or
perhaps a person or an
environment.
 
So those are the two advantages
of music.
There are others.
 
You can dance to it,
can relax to it,
etc., etc., but this idea of
tapping into who you are,
the whole who you are as a
person, through getting you back
in touch with your inner
memories,
and also perhaps giving you
hope that there is something out
there better than what we deal
with on a daily basis.
These are two important aspects
of music,
and it's interesting that one
would come from the
astrophysicist Kepler and the
other from the country music
singer Charlie Pride,
but that's one of the wonders
of the diversity of music,
I suppose.
Okay.
 
Well, we don't guarantee you
here any kind of divine
experience as part of signing up
for Music 112.
A divine transcendental
experience is not an entitlement
here.
 
We don't guarantee it.
 
But you may have yours at some
point in your life,
and I suspect it will come in
some way in association with
art,
whether the visual arts,
architecture,
music, whatever.
And it may come in music--with
the music--of Mozart,
but how can you sort of load
the dice here?
How can you get things in your
favor?
How could you put yourself--you
know, success in life is
positioning yourself--you say
it's lucky.
Well, you put yourself there to
be lucky.
How can you get in the position
to have this experience?
Well, take a look at the sheet.
 
I was sitting there last night
typing this up.
It seemed to me that we used to
put these lists on the board but
then the lists got so long I
decided just to put them on a
sheet for today.
 
So here's the list,
"Craig's Essential
Mozart,"
if you will:
piano concertos;
Mozart sort of invented the
piano concerto.
 
We're going to watch a concerto
shortly in music--in section.
I'm going to just recommend
this to you.
I see we have our performers
here.
We're going to go on now.
 
We'll end up here a little bit
with some--talking about opera
here.
 
You can read through this.
 
Mozart wrote three great
operas, Marriage of
Figaro,
Don Giovanni,
The Magic Flute,
and we're now going to segue
over to a discussion of opera.
 
What's opera?
 
Musically heightened drama.
 
Music is there behind the drama
and it reinforces it.
It does the same thing in film.
 
Ever think about horror films?
 
What's the scariest horror film
you've ever seen?
A. J.
 
Student:
"Chucky."
Prof: "Chucky"?
 
>
 
Okay.
 
There's one I don't know about,
but "Shining,"
something like that?
 
I don't know.
 
Think of something.
 
I don't get scared when
watching a movie until what
happens?
 
I see some really scary visual?
 
Come on.
 
What scares you in a movie?
 
Supposing they took the sound
track out of these horror films.
You wouldn't be frightened at
all.
It's--I think we have a much
more visceral response to sound
than we do to visual images and
that's what's going on globally
in opera,
and opera, as you know,
is made up of an introductory
overture and then these numbers
such as recitatives where the
composer tells you what's going
on.
 
You remember the Bugs Bunny--or
I guess it's Warner Brothers
cartoon: "Be very quiet.
 
I am hunting wabbit,"
>
that kind of thing,
>
so that's a recitative,
what's going on.
Then somebody will come out and
sing about how they felt about
what just happened.
 
That's what's goes on in an
aria.
And arias will tend to repeat
words, and on and on it goes to
give a sense of emotion,
and there are choruses involved
in it from time to time too.
 
As we mentioned,
Mozart wrote three wonderful
operas, two of them by the
librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.
Read in your textbook,
there's a box on Lorenzo da
Ponte,
absolutely fascinating life,
far more fascinating than
fiction could ever make it,
but we're going to talk now
about Don Giovanni.
What music is this?
 
Lynda, could we have the next
piece of music?
>
 
What's that?
 
Nice and loud.
 
Somebody's got it out there.
 
Student: Overture to
Don Giovanni.
Prof: Overture to Don
Giovanni.
You had it as the basis of your
Listening Exercise twenty-five
on sonata-allegro form.
 
But it's a different side of
Mozart.
This is the demonic Mozart.
 
It's the story of a rake,
a misogynist,
a woman-hater who tries to
seduce every woman who comes in
to view simply for the sadistic
pleasure of doing so.
So that's the basis of this.
 
It's an interesting time in the
history of intellectual
processes and political
processes too.
Here we have a story that
involves male,
female >
--don't be distracted,
because this one of our cast
members, the dog,
and he's bringing Richard up
along with him.
 
No--don't go.
 
So we have this conflict
between male and female
interests.
 
We also have the social being
played out here because we have
the high-class nobleman,
who goes around disguised and
seducing women,
as the villain and the noble
people here are actually the
peasants and servants who are
doing his bidding.
 
So that's the kind of tension
that exists here in Don
Giovanni and note the year
up there on the board,
17--What--I guess it's on your
sheet for Don Giovanni
right down there at the bottom,
1788, the year before the
French Revolution.
 
Okay.
 
We have a guest with us today
and we're going to introduce
him, Professor Richard Lalli.
 
How many of you know who
Richard Lalli is?
Okay.
 
Oh, good, a famous guy already.
 
Richard is a professor of music
here at Yale.
And what really annoys me is
that a year or so ago he won the
single most important prize at
Yale University.
And what is it?
 
The prize for the best teacher
at Yale.
How many undergraduate
instructors do we have here at
Yale?
 
Four, five, six hundred?
 
Numero uno over there,
but more--equally interesting,
he is also what?
 
Hm?
 
An incoming master of Jonathan
Edwards College starting next
semester?
 
Starting in January.
 
And he happens to be a darn
good singer, as you will see
here in just a minute.
 
So we're going to start out
here with a little of this,
and Richard and his friend are
going to help us out here.
Hi, there.
 
>
 
And did--okay.
 
So--What we've got here is an
aria first for Leporello,
who is the servant of Don
Giovanni.
He's a kind of low on the
academic totem pole.
He's kind of like a TA in life
here.
So we've called on
>
Jacob.
 
So this is Leporello,
and as you will notice,
Mozart crafts the music to fit
Leporello.
It's not highfalutin music.
 
It has a rather narrow range.
 
It doesn't go way--it has a lot
of patter recitative in it,
and at the very beginning
Mozart kind of blocks out this
pacing idea.
 
Leporello is down underneath a
balcony.
Don Giovanni is up above trying
to seduce Donna Anna and he is
impatient and he hates this
position in life in which he has
been put.
 
>
 
>
 
Bravo.
 
>
 
And thanks to Santana also who
learned this part in one day,
basically.
 
Right? Yeah. All right.
 
So things have not gone well
this time.
Unexpectedly,
Donna Anna has been able to
rebuff Don Giovanni and she now
wants to unmask him--
and she would then find out
that he's really the leading
nobleman of the town--
wants to unmask him.
She chases him--after him,
out of the--he runs away.
She's screaming.
 
She calls for her father who is
the aging Commendatore and the
Commendatore--excuse me.
 
The Commendatore confronts Don
Giovanni, tries to challenge him
to a duel and they engage in
such a duel.
So let's--we'll have Don
Giovanni come up and let me grab
the Commendatore's music.
 
Great. Here we go. Thanks.
 
So I have--Here comes the
Commendatore.
Here comes the minor music and
we're going to have a
confrontation between the
Commendatore,
the old commander,
and the youthful,
spry, vocally skillful Don
Giovanni.
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I would have Don Giovanni
something like this and have
>.
 
Okay.
 
Excuse me.
 
The Commendatore was just
stabbed like this.
Don Giovanni is over top of him.
 
Mozart wrote this exquisite
little trio here.
It goes by very quickly.
 
Nobody ever notices it but it's
some of the most beautiful music
that he ever wrote.
 
We ended up on a diminished
chord and then the penetrative
diminished chord again at the
top of that line where he gets
stabbed.
 
Okay, and then we have this
little trio.
Leporello--He's just cowering.
 
He just wants to get out of
here.
This is the worst thing he's
ever seen.
Don Giovanni is a bit surprised
but says, "You had it
coming to you,"
and the Commendatore is about
to buy the farm here.
 
He's on his way out.
 
So it's just this little
about--I don't know--ten,
twelve measures or so of
exquisitely beautiful music and
we'll do it nice and slowly for
you.
>
 
>
 
Well, that's that scene.
 
>
 
>
 
Don Giovanni goes on to another
seduction in which he attempts
to engage in amorous compromise
with >
he makes his advance and she is
initially intrigued.
Will she succumb to his
advances?
Let's find out.
 
 
 
>
 
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>
 
That's it for today.
 
Next week we're doing
Goetterdaemmerung! 
 
 
