Music: Rough Year for Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 200 years ago come next Jan. 27, in Salzburg. At seven, he was examined by a scientifically inclined Englishman who published his findings about the “amazing and incredible” boy. But despite early promise Mozart died (at 35) leaving the world largely unappreciative of his 600-odd compositions and his towering stature as composer.-In 1956, practically every musical organization from Valparaiso to Vienna will stage some kind of commemoration, aware that the 20th century cannot produce a genuine allegro of its own.

Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera will mount a newly designed production of The Magic Flute for its sole contribution; the Philharmonic-Symphony will offer two Mozart programs and play his music a bit more than usual the rest of the season. Closer to the composer’s home territory, the activity gets more feverish. Vienna, in fact, has had to organize a central Mozart Festival Bureau, as a kind of musical traffic cop. Movie men are dreaming up a biographical film, while elsewhere, scholars are toiling at a new, complete edition of the master’s music. Mightiest of Mozartean memorials is a project to record the bulk of all his compositions. It is being undertaken by Holland’s giant Philips Phonographic Industries (U.S. outlets: the Epic and Columbia labels).

Eighty Hours. A newcomer to the record industry, Philips is boldly stepping into the crowded Mozart field with a “Jubilee Edition” that will contain 66 LPs by Jan. i, plans another 60-odd to fill out its list of 430 works by 1960—about 80 hours of music altogether.

Boss of the mammoth project: Austrian Musicologist Bernard Paumgartner, 67, Mozart biographer, scholar, conductor and president of Salzburg’s famed Mozarteum school. Shaggy, energetic Conductor Paumgartner first divided Mozart’s total output into eight categories, selected works from each as representative of a special genre or period in Mozart’s life. The big symphonies are being recorded by Amsterdam’s splendid Concertgebouw Orchestra, smaller ones by Paumgartner’s own Camerata Academica orchestra; concertos are assigned to Dutch artists, who may be excellent but are rarely the top Mozart specialists. Among Epic’s U.S. releases so far: four Violin Concertos, sensitively played by Arthur Grumiaux; a lovely, liquid-toned performance of the Clarinet Concerto by Richard Schonhofer; intelligent, sometimes-intense versions of Concert Arias.

How to Get Screams. Paumgartner himself has been a Salzburg institution for 40 years. In the 20’s he teamed up with Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss and Poet-Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal to start the Salzburg Festival. As recording boss Paumgartner showed his capacity for speed as well as scholarship, as he shuttled between his Mozarteum office and the huge reception hall of the 18th ‘century Klessheim Castle, where he finds the acoustics ideal for recording. There, wearing black corduroys and sleeveless sweater, he leads his performers through six hours of recording daily. His energy is matched only by his resourcefulness. At one point, dissatisfied with a soprano’s rendition of one passage in Don Giovanni, he slapped the singer hard to get a properly furious scream out of her.

As a man who has made a profitable career out of his love of Mozart, Paumgartner views the bicentenary jubilee with a wary eye. “I’ve never tired of Mozart since I was a child,” says he. “He’s always new. But I hope the celebration won’t kill him. He has a rough year ahead.”

* Mozart left his works without opus numbers, but a loving Austrian named Ludwig Ritter von Kochel sorted them out to the best of his ability 71 years later, gave them numbers (ever since signified by a prefixed “K”), and thereby won immortality. The Köchel listing, with proofs and comments, ran to 551 pages, was later challenged and revised by the late noted German-born musicologist Alfred Einstein.