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Mozart was not an innovator after the likes of Monteverdi, Beethoven or Wagner, partially due to music patrons and aristocratic hierarchies of the 18th Century not allowing composers freedom to engage in willful personal expression. The era of the fully ‘freelance’ composer was a generation hence.

Instead, composers were either in the employ of a church parish/diocese, or wealthy aristocrats/nobles, both of whom expected their composer-servants to conceive music within certain boundaries and styles, providing serviceable but pleasing material for specific occasions/ceremonies. Rarely were these compositions performed more than once or twice in a composer’s lifetime, while outbursts of individualism were viewed askance by most employers.

Very few examples of truly freelance composers existed before Mozart, who in fact came as close to freelance as any composer could before the French Revolution of 1789. Innovation therefore was also expected to be held at bay by composers, writers and artists in general, though we are in no doubt Mozart was composing at the very cutting edge of his time. His increasing use of chromatic harmonies and inner voicings, leading us into territories no other composer was capable of, including Haydn, audiences found eccentric, even mystifying. He often explores very dark places, occasionally for a few moments, sometimes for long periods, and in a few instances, entire works, and these chromatic harmonies appeared far more frequently in his later works.

One need not look for anything before, nor for a decade or more after, his Rondo in A minor (K511), or his Adagio in B minor (K540), to find more darkly introspective, melancholic, wrenching chromaticism! Even Mozart’s father complained of “excessive demands made on his listeners”. Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt says “Mozart was told he should write “easier” music with a less complicated elaboration of the individual voices – that it was difficult to follow and understand his music; that he should not go so far in his harmonies (hard, dissonant tensions), etc. Despite universal admiration for his genius (few critics doubted Mozart was the greatest composer of his time), these opinions reveal a certain dismay at the unsettling effects of his tonal language: could and should music convey such things?”.

Gil Sullivan, Steinway & Sons Model D Concert Grand Piano, Hamburg