Zhu Xiao Mei, what does Mozart represent for you ?



Mozart is for me a composer very much in a category of his own. Everyone knows him from an early age. His name has become a byword. We celebrate his anniversaries. His is adored by everyone, from children to the most eminent intellectuals, and his music is heard everywhere. But having said all that, we are still faced with a great mystery : why ?



If we try to investigate that mystery, can you tell us what you think the characteristics of his music are ?



Perhaps two things : its freedom and its profundity.



To play Mozart, I think you have to know what freedom is, happiness and joie de vivre, contempt for conventions, the life force. Mozart was someone with a tremendous love of life. He loved enjoying himself; he spent all the money he could earn, and more besides. Nobody can ever have got bored in his company, and it must have been extremely amusing to be one of his friends. He had a whimsical side to him with which I can readily identify.



I have the impression one hears that freedom in your recording !



I hope so. In any case, I tried to get that spontaneity, that freedom. His music is so alive ! I think our way of performing Mozart has changed a lot over the last few years, notably under the influence of Baroque musicians who while being more faithful to the text have also introduced a lot more freedom and imagination, whether in the choice of tempos, or colours, or dynamics. That’s especially true of the operas. And I think they’re right.



On the whole, you choose fairly swift tempos, as at the start of the Variations on Ah! vous dirai-je Maman.



I find that if you play that theme too slowly, you begin counting the beats. I don’t like that and I think it’s the last thing you should do in this music.



Let’s take another example : the opening of the sonata in D major. There’s an irrepressible momentum in this music : if you play it too strictly in time, in my opinion, you destroy it. Mozart’s contempt for convention can also be seen in his contempt for the bar-line. But that doesn’t at all mean contempt for rhythm !



And the profundity of this music ? 



Oh, it’s everywhere !



First of all, in the dialogues between the voices, which all represent different characters.

Mozart is perhaps the greatest of all composers of opera. Take Cosi fan tutte an watch how Mozart set up a dialogue among theses six characters, so different from each other, how he makes them express, often simultaneously, such contradictory and wide-ranging emotions and feelings. You find the same skill at depicting different personalities in his concertos and of course his music for the piano. The finale of the Sonata in C major, for example, in my view announces the finale of the second act of The Marriage of Figaro and its improbable accumulation of Characters.



Mozart’s profundity is also to be found in the chiaroscuro effects of his music, the way it shifts from shadow to light. That’s particularly true here in the slow movements of the Sonatas in C and D major, which oscillate between major and minor and, like the Adagio in B minor, end in the major. It’s as if Mozart didn’t want to end on too sombre a note and was saying to us : after all, it’s not as serious as that. All this creates an indefinite feeling, neither cheerful nor sad, halfway between laughter and tears, which is the stamp his genius and is neither more nor less than a refection of that way life is.



What challenges does Mozart’s music set performers ?



I think he’s the most difficult composer to play, the one who, by his very essence, most frightens musicians.



In a sense, to play Mozart, you have to go back to childhood and let his music speak, naturally.

The difficulty, precisely, is that as time goes on, you try to add something. Expressive intentions, effects. You’ve become an adult, now you’re someone serious, you pursue perfection, you want to raise yourself to Mozart’s level. You want to show you understand this music. But it’s terrible : by doing that, you get further away from it, you make it disappear.



I recall that Rudolf Serkin couldn’t begin a concert with Mozart. He used to say that he had to start with another composer, to relax, to forget himself, to reach a state of purity that would let the music through. Then, he could play Mozart.



That’s also why, in certain exceptional cases, children can be very good interpreters of this music. I remember Isaac Stern’s visit to China in the 1970s. A boy of about ten played him the Variations on Ah ! Vous dirai-je Maman. He was by far the youngest of all the musicians he worked with, almost a baby. ‘Magnificent ! I have nothing to say !‘ was Stern’s only comment.



Your programme Concentrates on the last years of Mozart’s life. The earliest work dates from 1778 and the latest from 1791, the year of his death.



Yes, the earliest work, the Sonata in C major, was composed while Mozart was staying in Paris, the city I love so much and which has become my city too. His mother died there and was buried in Saint-Eustache, and he played in many places in the historic part of Paris not far from where I live. It’s an exciting experience to follow in his footsteps in the rue François Miron, the place des Vogses, the rue du Sentier, to imagine him at the Concert Spirituel. It makes his genius more familiar, brings him closer. I picture him walking through Paris, a foreigner in an unwelcoming city. In the slow movement of the Sonata in C major, which I think is one of his loveliest creations, you can feel the doubt peeping through. To be a foreigner in another country is an experience I’ve known several times in my life. There’s nothing easy about it.



All the same, you prefer to begin with the Variations on Ah ! Vous dirai-je Maman, which we now know were probably written in Vienna in 1781 or 1782 and not during Mozart’s time in Paris.

It’s a wonderful start to a recital, so simple, so evident !



But the rest of your programme is in chronological order, isn’t it ?



Yes, the Fantasia in C minor, initially written for the piano and violin, was begun in Vienna in 1782. I love its orchestral side. The Adagio in B minor - which I see, in a way, as the slaw movement of this programme - dates from 1788, while both the Variations in D major on a theme of Duport and the Sonata in D major were written in 1789. The Andante für eine Walze in eine kleine Orgel (Andante for a cylinder in a small organ) is dated 4 May 1791.



What strikes you in the development of Mozart’s piano writing over all theses years ?



If you think about it, Mozart stays the same all though the works on this programme. Tomorrow he’s going to die. But does that make him change ? No.



A few years ago, I recorded the last Sonata of each of the great Viennese Classical composers : Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. I wanted to understand what these towering geniuses felt at the approach of death. Beethoven’s op.111, Schubert’s Sonata D.960 :  they’re just breathtaking.



I didn’t want my recording of the Sonata in D major to be released. I didn’t feel anything special in it. I didn’t see Mozart becoming wiser, more philosophical with maturity. He was still the same man, as smiling as ever. I gradually came to understand that what I thought was a weakness is reality a strength. 



Mozart is a child, to be sure, but a child who has known everything. His career makes me think of that phrase of Lao-Tseu :
‘He who possesses in himself the plenitude of virtue 

Is like a new-born child‘.

​

Can we talk about the Andante für eine walze in eine kleine Orgel, which is so rarely played ?



It’s a little gem of a piece. And it’s Mozart’s last keyboard work. What I find deeply moving is that, just a few months before his death, Mozart continues to look at the world through the eyes of a child. Just think of The Magic Flute : it was at this precise moment that he began composing the opera.



In the end, what do you think Mozart’s attitude to death was ?



I think it didn’t frighten him, and even that he didn’t care about it. He remains eternally young. He’s totally free in the face of death. That’s his strength. Everyone sees late Mozart through his Requiem…



…which was commissioned by a mysterious messenger in the summer of 1791, a few months before his death, and which he never managed to finish…



Exactly. Of course, all of that makes quite an impression.

But, during that same summer of 1791, he did finish The Magic Flute. And listen to the music at the end of the second act, when Tamino and Pamina, accompanied by the sound of Tamino’s flute, undergo the ordeal of fire and water…



…that’s to say, of death…



Yes. What do they sing to the sound of Tamino’s flute, which plays the most simply joyful music you can imagine ? ‘We walk cheerfully through death’s gloomy night.’ It’s at the same time overwhelmingly simple and overwhelmingly spiritual.



So Mozart is the composer who walks cheerfully through death’s gloomy night ?



Definitely.

That’s why I want there to be Mozart playing when I die…



But what about Bach, for whom you’re always done so much ?



There will be some Bach too. But Mozart is the best composer to go out on ! (laughter)

Interviewer : Michel Mollard

Translation : Charles Johnston