Mozart's Viennese Instrumental Music: A Study of Stylistic Re-Invention (review)

Simon Keefe's engagement with Mozart's compositions of the 1780s presents a daring reappraisal of the scholarly genre of style history. Crucially, Keefe has untied the knots between climactic works and their biographical position, which have formerly held together the complicated web woven from Romantic notions of biography and the idea of compositional maturity. Instead, Keefe's style history explicates in detailed analyses the intricacies of works traditionally considered as mature as well as those of works considered stylistic oddities, leading to a much-needed reappraisal of the latter. In doing so, Keefe grounds the notion of a stylistic development in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy, by tying it on the one hand to the traditional rhetorical interest in invention and, on the other, to the rising concern with originality. In combination, these two yield an approach to style-change that considers the merits of process, not of result.

It is undoubtedly Keefe's previous engagement with Mozart's piano concertos that yielded his notion of the titular stylistic reinvention, a two-fold process initiated by the composer's own arch-awareness of his compositional and aesthetic tools, which at first allows him to manipulate his own stylistic building blocks, forcing him ultimately into a reformulation of his musical language. Keefe unravels this idea most convincingly in the first section of his threefold study, in which he engages with the genre of the piano concerto. Starting with the traditionally perceived uniqueness of K. 449, Keefe understands the composition as pivotal, attributing its masterful features to newly self-conscious compositional processes that betray Mozart's awareness of the stylistic implications of specific concerto features. Here, Mozart establishes his own language of concerto style, one that is characterized by its passages of confrontational dialogue; this presents a dramatization of the concerto's traditional dialogue trope through the fast-moving opposition of forces, familiar particularly from the genre of opera buffa. Having established the attributes of his concerto style, Mozart works with these in an almost topical manner in the eleven concertos between K. 450 and K. 503. Keefe's analyses of these concertos focus on a negotiation between stylistic balance and stylistic experimentation, between the rules of the game and their contortion, as Mozart engages with conventions of the concerto genre that transcend interior dialogue to comprise questions of grandeur and virtuosity. In Keefe's reading these are aesthetic, not social and performative attributes and, as such, they infiltrate Mozart's compositional constructs as conceptual elements. Rather than asking, then, how Mozart deliberates public display with compositional coherence, Keefe shows that brilliance here becomes an aesthetic rather than a technique. On this level of internalization Mozart's moments of intimacy are no longer opposed to the concerto's aesthetics of grandeur. Keefe anchors this reading of Mozart's personal style with intricate historical explanations of the concepts of grandeur and intimacy, leaving out, regrettably, a contextualization of the third element, brilliance.

Ultimately, the fusion of these concepts in Mozart's "middle period works" is challenged in his last two concerti, K. 537 and K. 595. In Keefe's reading, the disjunction and rigidity of sectional divides, characteristic of these two concertos and formerly seen as regressive, mark the pinnacle of stylistic experimentation. Further, these concertos present Mozart's transfiguration of conventions into a synthesis of multifarious elements from within and without the genre. Keefe's reading, then, presents a key to understanding these works' style and meaning, thereby undermining any conception of them as late works; for Keefe's insight explains that these are not purely personal constructs that resist the audience's comprehension. Instead, they demand the audience's acute awareness of the genre in general and of Mozart's stylistic development in this field in particular. This music is truly for the Kenner, not just for one merely well-versed in late eighteenth-century conventions...