I'm going to make an educated guess and say yes. Here's the theme.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
Hello there, I'm Peter Schickele, and this is Schickele Mix, a program dedicated to the proposition that all musics are created equal. Or as Duke Ellington put it, if it sounds good, it is good. And how sweet it is to say that our bills are paid by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this tightly-run radio station, which, so far at least, lets me do my thing here, which thing is then distributed around by PRI, Public Radio International.
Well, we've got an interesting situation here on today's show. When I told the station manager that I was going to do something new for Schickele Mix, which is to devote an entire program to the first movement of Mozart's Prague Symphony... You know, I always play pieces or sections of longer pieces to illustrate a point or a genre, but I thought it would be a good idea to really get into a piece, one piece, and see what makes it work formally and everything.
Well, the station manager demurred.
Hit the ceiling is more like it. He said, we've got to give listeners what they want, and they don't want to listen to one Mozart piece for an hour, but I stood my ground. I still think it's a good idea. So do you know what he did? He drew up a list of pieces people want to hear. I'm making those little quote signs with my fingers there. And he had one of the staff announcers put together a one-hour show to run concurrently with mine. Presumably it's rolling right now in this studio across the hall.
And if it's decided that what I'm doing is getting too boring, then they're going to switch over to the other show. Just like that. Can you believe that? So I'm just warning you, so you'll know what's going on. You know, if you suddenly find yourself listening to Pachelbel's Canon or something, it's because... Oh, oh, and here's the kicker. I didn't tell you this. The station manager is out of town at a radio convention, and guess who he's put in charge of deciding if and when to switch over to the alternate show. You ready for this?
His 15-year-old son. That's what I said. I mean, I've met him, and he seems like a perfectly nice kid, if perhaps a bit over-relaxed. But, hey, the thing is, he's probably into heavy metal or grunge or cyber rock or whatever. It's a good bet he'll be getting bored before ten minutes are up.
It's hard to believe that the fate of today's show is in the hands of the rebellious teenager who's sitting in the studio across the hall with his finger on the red button, the launch button, as it were.
Hey, you know, I can switch us over to that alternate feed. Uh, let's see, it's this switch right here by the red light. Here's what you'd be listening to if Chip had already gotten bored.
[music excerpt: Pachelbel, "Canon in D"; Paillard Chamber Orchestra/Paillard]
Well, what'd I tell you? Pachelbel's Canon.
Well, I'm gonna hope that Chip has his virtual Game Boy in there with him and won't care what he's listening to. The show is being taped so the manager can hear it when he gets back, but I am going to proceed with my plan, which is to immerse ourselves, to wallow in one of my favorite pieces in the whole wide world, Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D major, nicknamed the Prague Symphony.
You know, the folks in Bohemia loved Mozart. And ever since the abduction from the Seraglio, Prague couldn't get enough of Wolfie. And when he went there at the end of 1786 for the local premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, he brought with him this newly composed symphony, which became a great favorite.
I'd like to say a few things before we get going. It has been pointed out that some commentators confuse Mozart's development as a composer with that of the symphony in general. When I point out new techniques, I don't mean to imply that Mozart necessarily invented them. Some of these changes were being brought about by Haydn and other contemporary symphonists as well.
The symphony developed from the Italian opera overture, which was usually fast, slow, fast, and in the days of Mozart's early symphonies, the 1760s, even those that were not originally written as opera overtures were generally played as a prelude to some kind of entertainment. Their job was to entertain and get people in a good mood. By the end of the century, symphonies were substantially longer, they were written for larger forces, and they had become self-contained vehicles for artistic expression.
They also got a lot harder to play, which put an end to one practice, that is, in the symphony orchestra. It still survives in Broadway orchestra pits.
In our theme song, if I may use the vernacular, we hear two flutes and no oboes. It's the middle movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 24, by the way. But in the first movement of that same symphony, we hear two oboes and no flutes.
Now that's because the pairs of flutes and oboes were played by the same two guys. They're called doublers. Nowadays, a lucky doubler in a Broadway show orchestra might have to bring a flute and an oboe and a clarinet and a saxophone and a bassoon to work every day. He may get a hernia, but he cries all the way to the bank, because he gets paid extra for every double.
Anyway, by the time the Prague Symphony was written, the woodwind parts had gotten hard enough to require specialization among the players. Mozart did have a lot to do with the much greater importance of the winds. It has been said that Mozart learned how to take full advantage of the string quartet from Haydn and that Haydn learned how to take full advantage of the orchestral winds from Mozart.
And finally, the later symphonies took on the full range of expression that you might find in an opera. Here's the slow introduction to the first movement of Mozart's 38th symphony. This is no longer the free drink you get with your meal at a dinner theater. This could be a scene from Don Giovanni, the
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
The opening of Mozart's Prague Symphony, played, as will be all our excerpts, by Charles Mackerras conducting, appropriately enough, the Prague Chamber Orchestra. Let me lay upon you now a little bit of the overture to Don Giovanni, which, by the way, was commissioned by Prague after the success there of the Marriage of Figaro. Most of the symphony introduction is in the key of D minor, as is the beginning of the overture to Don Giovanni.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Overture to "Don Giovanni" (K 527); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
Okay, now let's stop right there. I hate to turn that infernally sublime music off, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, but that last chord right there is a favorite voicing of the late Mozart. I don't mean Mozart wrote it after he was dead, you know what I mean.
Here's the same thing in the symphony. A dark, strong voicing. In this case, it's a full three-note chord, but all the strings are playing only one of the three notes, and on the bottom, they're all playing on one of their lowest, richest strings, with all the wind instruments above them playing the other two notes.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
You know, in a lot of early symphonies, if you left the winds out, you wouldn't miss a whole lot. Most of what's going on is going on in the strings, which are often complete thematically and harmonically speaking by themselves. Here, however, if you left out the winds, you wouldn't even have a chord, just a single note. That's a bold sound. Now here's a sweet one.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
That sound, the first and second violins playing an octave apart, became a staple of symphonic writing, but you won't find it in Bach. Cellos and basses have been playing in octaves ever since basses were invented, but the melody in octaves is a romantic sound. It may not seem to you, but it was a new sound at that point.
Mozart was especially good at creating distinctive and rich octave doublings. Sometimes he has two instruments playing the same melody two octaves apart instead of one, like the oboe and bassoon here.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Okay, now let's step back a moment here. A typical Baroque sound, and I'm talking now about doubling, what do the wind players do? A typical Baroque sound features the oboes playing along with the first violins at the exact same pitch.
[music excerpt: J. S. Bach, Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C (BWV 1066); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
It's a nice bright sound, a positive sound, but it's not a very sensuous sound. It's Apollonian, not Dionysian. Here's the very sensuous Wolfgang with a resigned but seductive falling figure, first in two octaves, then in three octaves And in both cases, the first violins are on the bottom of the texture, like poured honey.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Okay, that's the introduction. And I'm feeling lucky that I'm still on the air. You know, I can't resist switching over again to the parallel program in the other studio, just to see what you'd be hearing if I'd been 86'd.
[music excerpt: Vivaldi, "The Four Seasons," "Spring"; Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra/Rampal]
It figures.
Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Yeah, my guess would be that the name of that flutist is Jean-Pierre Rampal, and that my name is Peter Schickele, and that that of this show is Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
Today's program is called For Prague with Love, because that's how and for whom Mozart wrote his 38th symphony, the first movement of which we are getting on quite intimate terms with today. The main body of the movement is marked allegro, which is Italian for spirited, or in plain English, fast. It's in sonata form, which is basically a large three-part, or tripartite as we North Dakotans say, form.
It's a form having three sections, A, B, A, exposition, development, recapitulation, The A section, the exposition, is where the composer exposes himself. Just kidding, folks. Composers are, as everyone knows, pillars of the community. Okay, now the exposition itself has two main sections.
The first in the key of the tonic, which is the home base key, in this case D major, A major, and the second in the key of the dominant, which is the key based on the note five steps higher, in this case A major. Some restrictions may apply for pieces in minor keys. That key relationship is the basic thing. First half in the tonic, second half in the dominant. Beyond that, the things you read in the old textbook descriptions of sonata form may or may not be true. The first theme in the tonic section and the second theme in the dominant section are of a contrasting nature.
The first theme is supposed to be usually bold and masculine, whereas the second is soft, lyrical, and, you guessed it, feminine. Actually, the first and second themes are more likely to be theme groups, and there's often as much contrast in character within each group as between them. And it's not uncommon for material from the first half to appear in the second half. In fact, there are entire sonata form movements based on one theme.
But here's an exposition that follows the textbook pretty closely. It's the beginning of Mozart's Tenth Symphony, which the little wretch wrote when he was 14 years old, one year younger than the pimply kid slumped, I hope, in front of a video game in the studio across the hall. Here you've got your sprightly first theme, and your lyric second theme, and distinct material in each section.
Okay, Wolfie, you can't have the keys to the car, but you can play the beginning of your symphony.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 10 in G (K 74); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with the opening of Mozart's 10th Symphony. Let's compare that with the beginning of Mozart's 40th Symphony, written 18 years later when the composer was an old geezer. I mean, he was 28, and yet he was still composing. The most striking difference is that what I've called themes in the early symphony are really short little blocks of texture.
The exposition is more like a series of gestures than a group of themes. Whereas the opening of the G minor symphony, with that romantic sound of the violins in octaves, is a real song.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G minor (K 550); Vienna Philharmonic/Levine]
The opening of Mozart's 40th Symphony, James Levine and the Vienna Philharmonic. Now, that change from short blocks of texture to long melodies is definitely a historical evolutionary change, both in Mozart's symphonies and in those of other composers of the time. But at least in Mozart, it's not necessarily always a straight line.
The opening of his last symphony, the Jupiter, which comes right after the one we just heard, is more sophisticated than the earlier symphonies, but formally, it's closer in character to the opening of the 10th than it is to that of the G minor. Here's the exposition of the Prague Symphony, which, I guess, is somewhere in between.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
One of the things I love about the exposition of the first movement of Mozart's Prague Symphony is that you can never be sure what's melody and what's accompaniment. That is, accompaniments turn into melodies and vice versa. Right at the top, the first violins are going,
obviously an accompaniment for the lower strings, which have the melody.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
But all of a sudden, the first fiddles are going [sings the figure] while the lower strings have turned into second bananas.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Some people have noticed a similarity between that first violin theme and one in the overture to Mozart's The Magic Flute.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Overture to "Die Zauberflöte" (K 620); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
The similarity is certainly there, but it doesn't seem particularly significant to me. But let's use it as a nickname. We'll call that motif the Magic Flute theme. And the one in the lower strings, we'll
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
call that the Long Note theme. Okay, now in the next two bars, we've got a similar situation. Two short melodies or motifs. One grabs our attention in the first measure and the other in the second measure. The fanfare in the brasses moves in the first bar and is rather static rhythmically in the second, whereas the woodwinds are rather static in the first bar and move in the second. That
woodwind theme, lumpy, you know, octave skip reminds me of somewhere over rainbow. So let's call that the rainbow theme. Now that's the only time you hear the rainbow theme in the exposition. Just two measures. Can't be important, right?
Just you wait. Okay, next we have a rather square theme in the first violins.
We'll call that the square theme. And it's accompanied by the second violins and violas. But wait a minute! The accompaniment is based on the magic flute theme.
Well, here, Mozart says it better than I ever could. Next,
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Wolfgang takes the 16th notes, the fast notes, from the Magic Flute theme, and sort
of turns them upside down.
He fools around with that a bit, which leads to some cadential material to set up the second theme group in the dominant.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
I love Mozart's technique of having the woodwinds sort of double the strings, but not exactly. While the violins are going...
The first flute is going...
Instead of literally doubling the first violins, as in Bach, The flute is either punching or holding certain notes that the strings play, so it is both reinforcing the strings and also retaining its own identity. Listen to this section of the G minor Symphony. The melody in the strings is
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G minor (K 550); Vienna Philharmonic/Levine]
The high woodwinds are holding out
the first note that the violins play in each measure, but not the rest. First in unison, then in full chords. Listen for those high woodwinds.
Okay, now let's go back to the Prague Symphony. We're talking about that cadential, In the first, the strings play virtually the same thing three times, and the winds play literally the same thing three times. We can call that the you-heard-me section. Then there's a section where the basses go,
[sings the bass line]
which is exactly the same harmonic progression as is the 18th century version of
[sung: a doo-wop chord progression]
So we'll call that the doo-wop section. Then there's some hammering away on the note A in a way that leads us to expect, if we've been reading our textbooks, the second theme proper.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Well, we may expect the second theme, but we ain't gonna get it. What we get is a varied version of the opening of the exposition, with the long note theme, the magic flute theme, and the square theme being combined and tossed around in a way that the textbooks say isn't supposed to happen until the development section, after the exposition.
We go through some excitingly unexpected harmonies, and then, instead of keeping that texture and loud dynamic right up till the next theme, Mozart stops short two bars early, shifts down into soft, and introduces three wispy filigrees, the last of which turns out to be the pick-ups to the new theme.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
This is a new theme. And it is a lyric theme. And the first half of it is eight bars long. You expect the second half to be the same as the first half but with a different ending. But our sly friend presents the second half in the minor. So it's the same melody but in a darker form. And with the bassoons filling in the rhythmic cracks. Then he does something that I find delightful and touching. As I said, he has switched to the minor form of the scale, but otherwise he's repeating the first half of the theme exactly.
Then, five and a half bars in, with another couple of bars to go, the tune stops dead in its tracks. In the middle of the measure, it simply quits, leaving the cellos and basses plunking out a bass line and the high woodwinds holding chords as if they were accompanying a melody, but there's no melody. Or they are suddenly the melody, even though they don't seem to have much to do with the melody we thought we were going to hear completed.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Mozart pulls his thematic accompaniment trick again. The bassoons come in with a sort of rhythmically reversed version of the lyric theme, but hey, what do you know? It turns out also to be an accompaniment to a new lyric theme in the violins, leading to some more developmental type stuff.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Now the rest of the exposition has four segments.
We've got the doo-wop section, a very intense, loud rendition of the long note theme, the I-told-you-so section, and four bars of hopping around on the notes of the A major triad, or chord. Before, we heard the I-told-you-so section, followed by the doo-wop section. Now we have the doo-wop section, followed by the I-told-you-so section, separated by a new version of the long note theme.
Okay, look, look, I don't expect you to keep all these themes straight as I rattle them off. I'd be confused myself if I didn't have the score in front of me. All I'm trying to get across is that even when Mozart repeats material, he's repeating it in a different order or in a different version. And what that does is it enables him to combine familiarity and surprise, which is a very neat trick. Here's the end of the exposition.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
You know that place right after the doo-wop section, where the brasses and timpani blare out repeated A's, pushing the piece to an unexpected intensity? It always reminds me of this place.
[music excerpt: Beethoven, Symphony No. 5; The Hanover Band/Goodman]
Now, I don't know if Beethoven ever heard Mozart's Prague Symphony, but I do know for a fact that Mozart never heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, at least not with earthly ears.
My, what heavenly ears you have, Wolfgang. Or is it better to hear what that schlumpf Beethoven has swiped from me? Just fooling, folks. Mozart's Mozart, Beethoven's Beethoven. And I'm Peter Schickele, host of Schickele Mix from PRI, Public Radio International.
The subtitle of Mozart's 38th symphony could have been For Prague with Love, and it is the subtitle of Schickele Mix today. I'm devoting the whole show to one of my favorite pieces, in spite of the fact that the station manager's 15-year-old son sitting in a studio across the hall with instructions to, if he thinks it's getting boring, to flick a switch and send an alternate program out over the air. It could happen at any time, I guess. Completely without warning.
Well, actually, there would be a bit of warning. There's a red light on this console here that would flash for five or ten seconds, whatever it is, before the switchover. But, so far, so good. Hey, my feeling is, if all you wanted to hear was the Pachelbel Canon and Vivaldi's Four Seasons, you wouldn't be listening to Schickele Mix, right?
Let's see what you would be hearing now if son Chip had flicked his switch. Let me flick mine here.
[music excerpt: Pachelbel, "Canon in D"; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
Oh, another arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon. That's very enterprising.
Okay, now we've reached the development section of the Prague Symphony. The B of the ABA description of sonata form, exposition, development, and recapitulation. The development section usually, but not always, takes material from the exposition and subjects it to various kinds of fanciful treatment. Melodies are often fragmented, although in this case, most of the melodic material in the exposition is already in short fragments.
The fragments are often thrown around from player to player, section to section. There is often a liberal use of sequence. In the sequence, that's when you take a melodic phrase and repeat it, but starting on a different scale step.
[sung: an example of a sequence]
And the music usually goes through at least several keys before arriving back at the tonic. Now, all of those things happened, at least on a small scale, in the exposition. And that's why you have to beware of two things Greeks bearing gifts and textbooks bearing pat descriptions of musical forms in fact, by the time you get to Beethoven the line between exposition and development is thinner than that which separates lying and diplomacy but it is usually true that because of these characteristics the development section has a sort of a restless quality that is not resolved until the recapitulation I was just remembering, I once rehearsed a P. D. Q. Bach piece with an orchestra and I said, okay, let's go back to the development. A few seconds later, before we started playing, one of the horn players really cracked up and he just started laughing. I said, what's so funny? And he said, oh, nothing. And I said, hey, come on. Well, apparently one of the other horn players had quoted a famous line from one of the old radio comedies. Some character used to say, what a revolting development this has turned out to be.
Mozart's is anything but revolting. Let's see how it starts.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
Okay, so what is that?
[sings the theme]
That's the rainbow theme from early in the exposition, the one in the woodwinds.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
I told you so.
Seemingly trivial little two-bar tune heard but once in the exposition, but, as you will hear, it becomes a major player in the development, which also makes extensive use of the Magic Flute theme and the sort of upside-down sixteenths. [sings the figure] There's one place where Mozart pulls off a bit of a fast one. It's a sort of a false recapitulation in a way.
He quotes almost 13 measures of the exposition verbatim, or notbatim, which leads you to expect what followed it before to follow once more, and more, which it starts to do, but then goes off on its developmental way again. Finally, with a beautiful pair of descending sequences subsiding into the recapitulation.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
The development section of Mozart's Prague Symphony. You know, that serene series of descending phrases at the end there that leads to the recapitulation, like a hawk circling down and then finally landing in a tree, is a favorite device of Mozart's. He used that general idea more than a few times, and I always love it. When I was putting this show together, I realized that that passage must have been the inspiration for the similar passage at the end of the development in P. D. Q. Bach's Concerto for Two Pianos versus Orchestra. Of course, being P. D. Q. Bach, The sequence goes on too long, and when the orchestra finally arrives at the tonic, the pianists keep going, so the orchestra has to back up and go to the tonic again.
[music excerpt: P. D. Q. Bach, Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra (S. 2 are better than one); Jon Kimura Parker/Prof. Peter Schickele/The New York Pick-Up Ensemble/Mester]
The end of the development of the first movement, marked Schickelegro, of P. D. Q. Bach's Concerto for Two Pianos vs. Orchestra.
You know, when the first Telarc album of P. D. Q. Bach won a Grammy, one of the other nominees was the late comedian Sam Kinison. I wasn't at the awards ceremony, but I heard that he said afterwards, I can't believe I lost in the comedy category to somebody named Bach, which is a good line. Well, I guess he was good buddies with Howard Stern, and people would tell me every once in a while how the two of them would get on the air, or just Stern, and bemoan a culture that would give P. D. Q. Bach a Grammy.
So eventually I was invited to be interviewed on the show, which I accepted, having been told it would be in person. But then it was changed to a phoner, which made me more uncomfortable, but I agreed anyway. And, of course, he mopped the floor with me. At one point, he put on the P. D. Q. Bach album, I think it was the 1712 Overture cut, and went on about, this is funny? What's funny about this? Are you laughing, Robin? Funny? Is this funny? And then he laughed hysterically for about 20 seconds, which is a long time on radio.
I guess the best I could say is that I walked out of the ring.
He's right. If you're not interested in, or at least sympathetic to, classical music, and also if you're impatient, if gags have to play out in the space of a one-liner, it's not funny. And even if you are into it, it's often not hilarious funny, it's affectionate funny. That passage we just heard is certainly no Cocktails for Two by Spike Jones, but if you love the ends of Mozart's development sections as much as I do, you'll probably get a warm chuckle out of it.
Since he was so good at writing development sections, and since all but two or three of his symphonies are in major keys, and since the musical ideas involved are intellectual property and therefore part of his estate in a very real sense, I guess you'd have to say that Mozart was a major real estate developer. Or maybe you wouldn't. I can't believe that didn't get us off the air.
Let's see what you'd be hearing if it had tripped that switch across the hall. Well, I'm going to switch my switch here and listen to the alternate program.
[music excerpt: Mozart, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields/Marriner]
Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Well, you would still be listening to Mozart anyway. Okay, so let's hear the recapitulation of his Prague Symphony First Movement. We won't have time, which is probably just as well at this point, to go into it in detail. Suffice it to say that the recapitulation of the exposition is not literal. In the first place, the two theme groups that in the exposition were in the tonic and dominant keys, respectively, are now both in the tonic.
But composers almost always change more than would be required just to accomplish that. At one point here, Mozart whittles a section that lasted 54 seconds in the exposition down to 18 seconds. Among the measures missing are the whole build-up to and beginning of the second theme group. See, the thing is, composers don't or shouldn't read textbooks. It's recap time in Prague.
[music excerpt: Mozart, Symphony No. 38 in D (K 504), "Prague," 1st Mvt.; Prague Chamber Orchestra/Mackerras]
End of the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 38, the Prague, performed by Charles Mackerras and the Prague Chamber Orchestra on a Telarc CD. An exciting, propulsive performance. I could do without the harpsichord myself, but that's my own little hang-up. Its inclusion is perfectly authentic. You know what I love about that piece? It combines the emotional shadows and contrapuntal sophistication of Mozart's late symphonies with the exuberant, kinetic dance energy of his early symphonies. Most of... uh oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, the red light is flashing. Schickele Mix is about to go off the air and be replaced by the station manager's Classical lite list. I guess his son Chip finally got bored. Here it goes.
[music: Webern, Drei Volkstexte für Singstimme und drei Instrumente, Op. 17; Halina Łukomska/Ensemble conducted by Pierre Boulez]
What the?
Wait a minute, I know this. This is the Webern Three Traditional Rhymes, right? What's going on here?
Hold on, I gotta find out what's going on. It's not... I can't believe this.
Oh, okay, here comes the end.
Hey, that's him! That's Chip! ...und drei Instrumente, Op. 17, by Webern. Hey, Dad, how do you like them apples?
Hey, the red light's off. I'm back on the air. Hey, Chip, way to go. That is, I'm sure your father will appreciate your independent spirit.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
That's Schickele Mix for this week. Our program is made possible with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by this radio station and its members. Thank you, members. And not only that, our program is distributed by PRI, Public Radio International. We'll tell you in a moment how you can get an official playlist of all the music on today's program with album numbers and everything. Just refer to the program number. This is program number 151.
And this is Peter Schickele saying goodbye and reminding you that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. You're looking good. See you next week.
[theme: Mozart, Symphony No. 24]
If you'd like a copy of that playlist I mentioned, send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to Schickele Mix. That's Schickele, Schickele Mix. Care of Public Radio International, 100 North 6th Street, Suite 900A, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 55403.