Dance Rhythms in Mozart's Arias Author(s): Wye J. Allanbrook and Wendy Hilton Reviewed work(s): Source: Early Music, Vol. 20, No. 1, Performing Mozart's Music II (Feb., 1992), pp. 142-149 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3127676 . Accessed: 09/11/2011 17:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early Music. http://www.jstor.org which startsalla breveand prestissimoends up in 2/4 and organizationof time that is at the heartof Mozart'screa- only allegroassai. tive act. To realizeMozart's tempo indicationsas accuratelyas possible in all their subtlety therefore requiresboth a Jean-Pierre Marty, composer, conductor and pianist, is the knowledge of 18th-centurytempo conventions and a Director of the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. careful examination of every element of the musical He has been working on the question of Mozart's tempo structure. This is one of the performer'smost chal- indications since 1966, and has published The Tempo lenging and stimulatingtasks. Upon his or her success Indications of Mozart (Yale University Press, 1988). depends the listener's perception of that particular Wye J. Allanbrookand WendyHilton Dance rhythms in Mozart's arias .wv % I ?:.j:f:•?K1 . I.. "i: I. fit. 'ti' lJ '... 14t ': ?'Chi"' " " -, ;.' . , , . , ?, . 1Masked ballin the largeRedoutensaal, Vienna, c.1780, pen andwash (Vienna, Historisches Museum der Stadt) Mozart and the dance performersto use the social dance forms as a textbook WYE J. ALLANBROOK for the study of rhythmand characterin music'-these Musicwritten for the dance is a familiarpresence in the texts and others like them are part of our standardana- music of the high Baroque.The rhythmsof social dance lytical equipment,and seem no more out of the way to saturateFrench opera, for example,and the dancesuites us than those writers'instructions in thoroughbassand and partitasof the late 17thand early18th centuries. Mat- counterpoint. Hence we scarcely raise an eyebrow at theson'sexhaustive discussions of particulardances and analysesthat seek to set the more 'abstract'music of the their affects,Kirnberger's exhortation to composersand period in a dance framework:to identify a Bach fugue 142 EARLY MUSIC FEBRUARY 1992 subject as a bourr&e,for example, or a Handel aria as a am sure that we all have changeswe would hope, either sarabandeseems fully legitimate. overtly or covertly,to see come about from this bicen- But as the 18thcentury moves towardits end, our per- tennial second look at Mozart'smusic. My hope-one spective suffers an abrupt change: we are reluctant to that I have hardlykept covert-is that our notion of the speak of dance patterns as animating the music of 'absolute'Mozart may finallydisappear and the Mozart Mozart;what seemednobly expressivein Baroquemusic who used his music as a mirror to catch glints of the suddenly appearsmundane, and a needless contracting many-facetedworld aroundhim maytake its place. For I of his expressivehorizon. This reluctancedoes entail a think that this is not to demean but to celebratea man certaindisregard for the evidence.We know from Con- who had an intense love for the social pleasuresof his stanzeMozart, for example,via the memoirsof the tenor life, and whose music would have had farless animation Michael Kelly,that Mozart loved to dance, and that he if it had been cut off from them. More materially,if we often said that 'his talent lay in that art rather than in ourselves come to understand more about the living music'.' We know that Mozart wrote dance music all sources of this animation, our performancescan only through his life, most intenselytoward its end, when, in become more directed, more lively and more his capacityas Royal Imperial ChamberComposer, he illuminating. composed for the ballrooms of the Viennese many rich Turningto vocal music specifically,in the mid-18th sets of minuets, contredansesand Germandances. (The centurythe criticaltide was turningagainst the intrusion last two types, the dances of the hour, had eclipsed the in opera of the old-fashioned divertissementsthat con- stern hierarchyof the French court couple dances, and sisted of a succession of social dances with little or no were performedon social occasionsalong with the more connection to the plot. It was now good taste to require genteel minuet, which remained an important pres- more dramaticdances, which emphasizedthe virtuoso ence.) We know that a movement called 'minuet' con- dancerand bore an explicitlink to the plot. By the 1760s ventionally graced most symphonies and chamber dance was beginningto separatefrom opera as a serious works,and that the last movements of these same works art in its own right;witness the popularityof the pan- frequentlytook their quick comic grace from the con- tomime ballets of Noverre and Angiolini, with their tredansein its 2/4 version (althoughthis has not helped attemptsto be directlymimetic of the action (as if such a us to recognize that this habitual employment in 'seri- thing wereever fully possible without some mediationof ous' music of the popular dances then danced in the conventional gesture). In Mozart's operas, however, dance halls made the symphony into a kind of analogue social dance did not disappear;it went, so to speak, to the Baroquedance suite). Finally,if we look closelywe underground,to become part of the musical materialof see scatteredthroughout Mozart'sworks unmistakable the ariasand ensemblesof his matureoperas. And it was rhythmic references to dances old and dances newly not divorcedfrom expression,as were the social dances popular, to dances he enjoyed performing in daily life interspersedwith the action in the tragddielyrique. For and those old-fashionedones the sense for which he had the patternsof social dance were in themselves,as Mat- absorbed from his classical Kapellmeistertraining. So theson stressed,bearers of affect;written to accompany the evidence is that dance had as lively a presence in dancesperformed on social occasions,they mirroredthe Classicmusic as it had had in the Baroque;the old ways social and affectivehierarchy. had just changed with the times, and taken on new Although I will forbearmentioning every dance pat- manifestations.Nevertheless, something stills our fac- tern that found its way into Mozart'smusic, a quickview ulty for comparison here: I suspect it is the notion, of a spectrum of dances from slow to fast would start inherited from our 19th-centurypredecessors, of the with the austere triple pattern of the sarabande, all limpid purity of Mozart'smusic, the notion of a Mozart restraint and Spanish hauteur. In the middle would who, while childlike, neverthelesskept his eye on the stand the quicker, evenly accented triple of the com- otherwordlyand the absolute. plaisantminuet, which in its noble congenialitybecame I must immediatelyconfess that in this litany of our known as the 'Queen of all the Quicker triple I dances'. failings am setting up something of a straw man. measures were often bound together into compound Things are changingrapidly in Mozart analysis;writers duple, or 6/8, where a duple beat on a higher level con- are more coming and more to accept-indeed trolled the lower-level pulse of the lilting triple; the gigue embrace-a Mozart whose music was grounded in the in 6/4 (later 6/8), although a court dance, had strong then and in there, the ways of the world he inhabited.I rustic connotations, and habitually appeared in operas EARLY MUSIC FEBRUARY 1992 143 as the metre of peasantchoruses. The gigue had two sis- masters.The most comprehensiveaccounts are found in ters, slowerversions of 6/8: the so-calledpastorale, mod- books by four masters of different nationalities:Gott- erate-tempoedand legato,3and the siciliano,slower than fried Taubert, RechtschaffenerTanz-Meister (Leipzig, the pastorale,and typicallyin dotted rhythms;both had 1717);Pierre Rameau, Le maitre a danser (Paris, 1725); strong Arcadianassociations. The gavotte, a moderate- Kellom Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing (London, 1735); tempoed dance in duple metre, also had a history of and Gennaro Magri, Trattoroteorico-prattico di ballo association with the pastoralmode, and with its com- (Naples, 1779). panion, the amorous.4The rhythmicpattern of its usual While Taubertand Tomlinson seem to have made music is an inversion of the 'pedestrian'rhythmic pat- careersin their native countries, Rameauwas dancing tern of the march, in which a simple i1 2 3 4 1 becomes master at the Spanish court at the time his book was 3 4 1 1 2. It articulatesa complex rhythmic arch across published. Magri was a highly skilled theatricaldancer the bar-lineto establisha coy beatingrhythm that could who performedmostly in Naplesand Venice,but in both be said to mirrorthe pastoralmode in its most artificial 1759 and 1763/4 he was engaged at the Burgtheater in manifestations;the gavotte frequently comes with a Vienna. musette bass, as for example, in the gavottes of Bach's Given the long life and widespreadpopularity of the English Suites. These and other dance rhythms would minuet it is to be expected that it was not danced in have been familiarto Mozart'saudiences, as also would exactly the same way everywhereor at all times. But have been their affectiveconnotations. They formed a while the descriptionsand notated scores of the dance powerful vocabularyof expression, which Mozart fre- show certaindifferences, the threebasic essentialsof the quently employed to choreographcharacter in the arias minuet remain the same: one pas de menuetequals two and ensemblesof his mature Italianoperas.