There’s some scholarly agreement that Ludwig van Beethoven is the youngest person in history to fly over the moon. The buzz is that he met the iconic Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his idol and the major influence on his early music, in 1787 at age 16. An impromptu keyboard concert reportedly yielded lavish praise for the new kid, abruptly launched skyward on the strength of his gratitude alone.
“Keep an eye on him,” Mozart said of his guest, according to a thirdhand Viennese account. “Someday, he’ll give us something to talk about.”
Even if none of that stuff is true, it’s a fitting anecdote “” a meeting between music history’s two central figures, after all, would sanction the blessings each bestowed on the world. To that end, San Diego’s Mainly Mozart group performed a historic public service with its June 10 Mainly Mozart Festival opening, having honored its figurehead with a presentation of Beethoven’s five piano concertos. It’s the closest to a reunion the organization could be expected to muster “” and given each man’s immortality in the public mind, it may as well have been the real thing.
Famed Britain-born pianist John Lill, who’s recorded the Beethoven concertos and whose 1963 London debut yielded a historic performance of the fifth, has performed in 50 countries over more than half a century; at 67, he’s outlived Beethoven by 11 years. That’s 11 years’ extra perspective on Beethoven’s titanic contributions “” and Lill didn’t waste a day of it. He was at once a consummate performer and teacher, seizing the over three-hour program with all the stamina of a marathon runner and deftly showcasing Beethoven’s evolution as a composer.
Beethoven gradually comes into his own as the concertos progress, and Lill’s artistry was vital in charting that path.
In that connection, the final piece may yield as much about Beethoven the composer as Beethoven the man. The so-called Emperor Concerto is wildly difficult, lurching and jockeying amid varying key and time signatures “” and when Beethoven wrote it at age 38, his hearing was growing weaker by the day. Perhaps a sense of panic was setting in, a desperate longing for the vestiges of his alleged meeting with Mozart. Yet there was Lill, patiently and methodically picking apart the passages for our edification, just as he may have done during that landmark London debut.
But it’s Mozart who’s driven the festival, now 20 years old and disposed to broader programs as the decades pass. For the remainder of the festival, which ends Saturday, June 21, Mozart and Richard Strauss share the stage with cutting-edge work by Claude Debussy, stately touches from Johannes Brahms and brooding dances by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Moreover, downtown’s newly restored Balboa Theatre, at 868 Fourth Ave., is the Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra’s new residence; the stage sports a spiffy new Steinway concert grand piano. It’s all a far cry from the late 1980s, when artistic director David Atherton was smitten with The Old Globe’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre as a site for the inaugural event.
Ten years later, the Festival would travel to Tecate, Mexico for the first time; in 2006, it found itself in the middle of one of the county’s biggest cultural undertakings to date “” the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday, in which 70 organizations from San Diego County and Mexico participated. A group of Mainly Mozart subscribers visited the composer’s native Austria that year, the Salzburg Marionette Theatre performed at the North Park Theatre and Atherton led the San Diego Symphony in an all-Mozart program.
So what’s the attraction? How did Mozart, who died at 35, sick and penniless amid a history of lousy investments and an impossible work schedule, come to command the world’s adulation?
The fact of the matter is that, at first, he didn’t. Upon his death in 1791, audiences had turned elsewhere for their amusements, and the courtesans for which the child prodigy had played were long dead themselves. But prophets are always without honor in their own lands “” and like the snot-nosed young guest at whom he leveled such kind words, Mozart has emerged as downright otherworldly, a seer of unparalleled proportions and the preeminent envoy of humanity’s musical insight.
More information about the Mainly Mozart Festival is available at (619) 239-0100 or by visiting www.mainlymozart.org.