Mozart's Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

Mozart's Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment. By Simon P. Keefe. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2001. [x, 205 p. ISBN 0-85115-834-X. $75.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Every scholar and performer of Mozart's piano concertos has surely relished the way in which their sonic texture and intellectual liveliness are enriched through frequent exchanges of themes and motives among the soloist, strings, and winds. Simon Keefe's new study asserts that such examples of "dramatic dialogue" are vitally significant both to the musical design of these works and as moral paradigms through which listeners are instructed in the composer's Enlightenment values. By resolving conflict and fostering cooperation, Keefe argues, Mozart's use of dialogue places his piano concertos in the company of dramatic stage works as a medium of enlightened instruction.

Keefe's discussion proceeds clearly and logically. He first establishes a framework within which to interpret musical dialogue in Mozart's piano concertos by examining general discussions of dialogue in Heinrich Christoph Koch's Versuch einer Einleitung zur Composition (Leipzig: Bey A. F. Böhme, 1782-93) and Antoine Reicha's Traité de mélodie (Paris: The author, 1814). He then offers evidence from late-eighteenth- century classical spoken drama to define the dramatic functions of dialogue in the advancement of either cooperation or competition among characters. Turning to the Mozart concertos, he presents individual chapters explicating "dramatic dialogue" in several contexts. Piano concerto first movements are considered first, followed by a detailed study of the first movement of K. 491 as the "dialogic apotheosis" of the genre. Similarities among piano concerto dialogues and those in four operas (Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, and Don Giovanni) are addressed next, and finally dialogic relationships occurring across the three movements or within the second and third movements of a concerto are discussed. The number of musical references generated by this inquiry necessarily exceeds the space available for printed examples; therefore, the reader must keep scores of the piano concertos and the four operas at hand to follow the argument with satisfactory comprehension.

It is in fact through the great multiplicity of examples that Keefe's arguments build convincing momentum. Here it must suffice to mention a few of the resulting conclusions. Keefe's detailed examination of musical material demonstrates that "piano/ orchestra dialogue . . . is carefully designed to emphasise changes in the behaviour of the two parties toward each other over the course of the entire movement" (p. 68). Dialogue is shown to be a mechanism of formal development within movements, whereby subtle changes in dialogic practice impel the movement either toward resolving conflicts and oppositions or toward strengthening and confirming a fundamentally cooperative relationship. Through analysis of similar processes in the contemporaneous operas, Keefe demonstrates Mozart's increasingly sophisticated handling of dialogue between 1780 and 1787 to be an intergeneric phenomenon, with cross-fertilization in both directions. Interpreting the extension of dialogic procedures into second and third movements as reinforcement for the cooperative outcomes reached in first movements, Keefe contends that the listener's attention is here shifted from curiosity about the outcome to observation of the process, since the triumph of cooperative relations is never in doubt.

Fundamentally, then, Keefe sees Mozart's piano concerto dialogues as exalting cooperation as a primary moral value of the Enlightenment. "By repeating and reshaping piano/orchestra cooperation over the course of a work and by continually encouraging the listener to analyse how it is attained," Keefe argues, "Mozart renders co-operation increasingly poignant, powerful and dramatically compelling" (p. 185). Although these works could not be expected to alter the behavior of listeners directly, they could be expected to furnish instructive, ideal models for emulation. "As thorough workings out of the quest for harmonious, cooperative existence," Keefe concludes, "Mozart's piano concertos offered exemplary models to their contemporary audiences of how to live their lives—less immediate...