Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante

Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me.

Beautiful though this is, I’d like it even better if it grooved. So I brought the Barenboim recording into Ableton Live and put some beats under it, and now it really hits me where I live.

I had an educational purpose for putting beats under the Bach Chaconne: I couldn’t understand its rhythmic structure otherwise. I did the Mozart concerto for fun, but there turns out to have been a similar learning benefit. I had assumed that the Andante was in triple meter. Listening to the strings at the beginning, it seemed obvious to me that I was hearing 12/8. However, musicologists on Twitter pointed out that Mozart wrote the Andante in 4/4 and just put a lot of triplets in it. (See for yourself in Mozart’s handwritten score.) The beats I added make the West-African-sounding 12/8 vs 4/4 polyrhythm explicit that Mozart was probably hearing implicitly.

The Andante is nicknamed “Elvira Madigan” after it appeared in a Swedish movie of that name from 1967.

For people of my age cohort, the name Elvira has a very different association. It’s weird and distracting to be thinking about the Mistress of the Dark while listening to a sublime canonical masterpiece. That said, “Elvira Madigan” is certainly easier to remember (and type) than “Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467, II – Andante.”

I’m sure I heard the Elvira Andante on classical radio as a kid, but my first memorable exposure was in The Spy Who Loved Me.

The piece is a standard in film soundtracks, used to signify grace, elegance and upper-class sophistication (sometimes ironically), in everything from 12 Monkeys to Toy Story 4.

According to Wikipedia, the Andante has three big sections. I would reference a more legitimate source, but few theorists appear to have written anything about this piece’s structure in the past hundred years, presumably because it’s such a cliché. That’s okay, Wikipedia is enough to get us oriented. The first section is the orchestral introduction.

The overall concerto is in C, but tradition demands that its middle movement be in F instead. The introduction includes all of the main melodic ideas, mostly in F major or F minor. There are also a couple of brief trips through B-flat major and D minor, though apparently these are too quick to count as “real” key changes for classical analysis purposes. There’s a B diminished chord bridging the B-flat and F minor segments, hot pink in my screencap, which is hard to categorize. Maybe we’re supposed to hear it as an inverted F diminished, making it a common-tone diminished chord in F minor? Or maybe it’s just a moment of tonal zero gravity, a moment when we’re just floating in space without being in any particular key? That’s definitely how I hear it.

In the second section, the piano enters.

The piano plays the main melody in F major, but it ends differently, and then wanders into new material in B-flat major, D minor (for real this time), G major briefly, C minor, C major, A minor for a second, G minor, back through D minor and B-flat minor and G minor again, and finally to F minor. That’s a lot of jumping around among the keys, but it’s all close to the home base of F on the circle of fifths.

In the third section, we hear the hook one more time, but now, surprise! It’s in A-flat major, the relative major of F minor.

Then Mozart winds his way back home to F major via B-flat minor, C minor, C major for a second, and F minor. There are a few more ambiguous diminished chords, too. Here are all the keys that the piece visits, shown on the circle of fifths:

Here are the key center movements in flowchart form:

To Western people, chord roots and key centers that are adjacent on the circle of fifths feel related to each other. Stepping sequentially around the circle in either direction is a good way to make your music seem logical and orderly. Another common move is to go from relative major to relative minor or vice versa, or to switch between parallel major and minor. Mozart does all of these things, which is why his music is so reassuringly orderly. If you want your music to be jagged and disorienting, then make sure not to do Mozartean key center movements.

Next, let’s look at all the individual chord changes. Major key tonic chords are in green, minor key tonic chords are in blue, dominant chords are in red, diminished chords are in hot pink, and other miscellaneous chords are in grey.

I like this flowchart representation, because if you want to produce your own Mozart-approved chord progressions, all you have to do is pick a chord and follow the arrows. Also, I just noticed that Mozart uses ten out of the twelve possible diminished chords. Thorough!

I use modern chord symbols because I understand them better than Roman numerals, and because several of these chords could be interpreted as functioning in multiple different ways. For example, some of the diminished chords function unambiguously as dominants (rootless 7b9 chords in jazz terms), but others are totally up in the air. Classical theorists particularly dislike it when you describe augmented sixth chords as their enharmonic dominant sevenths, but that’s what they sound like, and they make more sense to my jazz-playing brain that way.

The large-scale structure is interesting, but the thing that keeps me coming back is that hook. Scott Burnham includes a good analysis of it in his book Mozart’s Grace.

The long C descends on the last beat of the bar through four sixteenth notes back to F, traversing by step the space so elegantly opened up through the triad. But there’s no resting on that F. An arresting volte face turns the melody back upward a crucial half step, from the would-be point of maximum stability to a highly expressive chroma (F-sharp, the sharp-1 scale degree), which endures for a long beat on its way to the second scale degree. The phrase is then answered by a more straightforward arpeggiation of the dominant seventh (without dotted rhythms), followed by another downward stretch in eighth notes (rather than sixteenths) that also swerves into an upward chroma (sharp 2), on its way to the third, A. Both of the dissonant notes occur at the change of harmony and inflect tones in the new harmony—they are thus coupled with a change of parameter, helping to mark harmonic boundaries. Sharp-1 marks the turn to the dominant; in the next phrase, now on the dominant, sharp-2 marks the return to tonic.

After these two phrases, the melody indulges in huge registral swoops: C–A–B-flat, with C as appoggiatura; then D–B-natural–C. The A and the B-natural function somewhat like the earlier dissonant notes, for they ascend as leading tones to the next harmony. A hidden chromatic line emerges from the composite of all these “leading” tones: F–F-sharp–G–G-sharp–A–B-flat–B-natural–C. This line of course fills in the original leaping figure from F to C. There is a logic operating here; dissonance creates an expressive rhythm, actuates and motivates a lengthy linear process through expressive hinge points (yearning chromatic ascents, to be precise).

In spite of its chromatic richness, the melody is simpler and less adorned than Mozart’s stuff tends to be. Apparently he left all that empty space on purpose, so that he could improvise elaborations during performances. I was stunned to learn that all of the canonical composers improvised; certainly nobody told me that in music school. The movie Amadeus gives you a good idea of what that might have looked like.

A commenter under this clip points out that Mozart is SpongeBob and Salieri is Squidward, and I will never be able to think of them any other way ever again.

I can’t bring up Amadeus without referencing the iconic “too many notes” scene.

We’re supposed to understand the Emperor as being an ignorant philistine here, but he had a point. Mozart’s music is beautiful, but it can be a lot, and I would rather hear the best parts get repeated than endless tweedly elaborations. Ableton Live turns me into a mini-Emperor, able to cut the notes I deem to be “too many” at my whim. Listening to Mozart is fine, but I’m only willing to really engage with him if I can participate actively. It isn’t just about imposing my own taste on the music. It’s about engaging Mozart in an active creative conversation, about finding the new possibilities in his music, and not just in the abstract notes on the page, but in the actual audio of an actual performance. While making my remixes, I listened to the Andante more repeatedly and more closely than I ever would have otherwise.

Classical music is important for historical reasons, and there are people who find pleasure and meaning in it. But it’s also a vast and untapped sample library for the creation of music that can do more kinds of emotional work. Whether or not Mozart would have enjoyed my remixes in particular, I like to believe that he would have found the general idea to be exciting and inspiring.