Mozart at Tafelmusik

Tafelmusik is a highly professional group of musicians that perform at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre in Toronto. 

The evening of December 4, the concert Mozart and Hayden, a successful performance, was also the occasion to take a glimpse at the facsimile edition of the manuscript of the Concerto no. 12 for fortepiano that Mozart wrote at age 9.

Composed a year after settling in Vienna, the A-Major Piano Concerto is the first of the great series of 15 piano concertos Mozart composed in the 1780s.

On December 1782, the young boy wrote to his father:

“I must write in the greatest haste, as it is already half past five and I have asked some people to come here at six to play a little music. I have so much to do these days that often I do not know weather I am on my head or on my heels. The whole morning until two o’clock, is spent giving lessons. Then we eat. After this meal I must give my poor stomach an hour for digestion. The evening is therefore the only time I have for composing and of that I can never be sure, as I am often asked to perform at concerts. These concertos are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural, without being vapid. There are also passages here and there from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less discriminating cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why”.

Despite his busy schedule, Mozart had finished the remaining two concertos a few weeks later. 

Interesting note! It makes me feel less lonely. Between what is “too easy and too difficult” in Mozart’s words, I get to see that I am not the only one to go though hectic days, especially these weeks at the end of the year, the end of the school term. That’s how I come to think that music and teaching are about sharing and being here, there and everywhere. They are about going through easy and difficult challenges that sooner or later along the line entail satisfaction. And sometimes, it’s true, this satisfaction comes “without knowing why” and how..