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Every field has its orthodoxy, and one of the rules in classical music is that you don’t change what the composer wrote. Oh, you can make cuts, and you can add flights of fancy for a soloist, in certain works which, historians tell us, were written to allow that.
But you aren’t supposed to second-guess Mozart. You aren’t supposed to decide that you could have written parts of his music better than he did, and substitute your version for his -- which makes it fascinating to hear a hybrid work in which another member of the classical composer’s pantheon, Richard Strauss, did precisely that.

The piece Strauss played with -- and which the annual Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center presented in his version -- is "Idomeneo," an opera that isn’t performed very much, though it’s full of astonishing music. Mozart wrote it just before "The Abduction from the Seraglio," the earliest of his famous operas, and maybe more than anything else in the classical repertoire it represents a heartbreaking road not taken. No other mature Mozart opera (except the hastily written "La Clemenza di Tito") is wholly serious, with no mixture of comedy. No other comes as close to being structured as a single piece of music, with musical numbers flowing into each other, rather than starting and stopping as they normally would.
Why, then, don’t we hear it more often? Because the formal conventions of opera seria (as non-comic opera was known in Mozart’s time) didn’t allow for much drama. All the action, as in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, leaving us mostly with talk, and, even worse, with chunks of that talk conducted in secco recitative, a sketchy kind of music in which singers are accompanied only by chords on a harpsichord.
Some of us can accept this now; we can understand, historically, why "Idomeneo" isn’t theatrical, in the way we’d use the word today. But in 1930, when Strauss made his version, musical scholarship wasn’t so well developed. A daring conductor wanted to revive the piece, but thought it needed help; Strauss, riding to the rescue, quite literally recomposed the score. He cut parts of it, reordered some of what remained, and replaced secco passages with his fuller and more fluent recitative, accompanied by the full orchestra. He even wrote his own finale, to replace the much more brusque ending in Mozart’s original.

And at Lincoln Center, the result -- despite an annoying performance -- turned out to be much more than a curiosity. Strauss, after all, didn’t only write loud, modernist operas like "Salome" and extravagant symphonic poems like "Ein Heldenleben." He had a delicate side as well, apparent in his opera "Ariadne auf Naxos," his oboe concerto, and in his incidental music for Moliere’s "Le bourgeois gentilhomme," which delightfully spoofs older styles.
He was capable, in fact, of a Mozartean transparency, and some of his "Idomeneo" additions dovetail perfectly with Mozart. Some, like his finale, strike a compromise. By 1930, Strauss had turned his back on the shrieking style of "Salome," instead adopting his own expansion of more traditional harmony. Sounds arrange themselves in patterns Mozart could have understood, but with long moments when the music stretches lazily, shifting colors as it lingers over visiting chords from distant keys.
To us, this music sounds nostalgic, which is perfect for a backwards look at Mozart (and helps explain why Strauss’s later works didn’t catch on till our time, when their implicit ambiguity about their own era strikes a kind of pre-postmodern note). But in his "Idomeneo" finale, Strauss limits the nostalgia, using fewer visiting chords than he usually did, as if he were trying to meet Mozart halfway.
As for the moments that are purely, even flagrantly Strauss -- I loved them, and why not? In 1912, long before Strauss played with Mozart, Picasso added a found commercial object to one of his paintings, creating the first collage. In 1917, Stravinsky recomposed 18th century music in his ballet "Pulcinella." More recently, we’ve had Luciano Berio reworking Schubert, the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (who sadly died last week) creating music in many idioms at once, novels deliberately written in archaic styles, and Tom Stoppard turning Shakespeare upside down in "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Why should Strauss shock anybody? If "Idomeneo" somehow seems forbidden, then the classical music mainstream hasn’t been touched by 20th century art.

And now a word about the performance. Maybe I wish the tenor in the title role had sounded less boyish -- Idomeneo, after all, is a king -- and that he had more strength in his lower range, where much of his music lies. But he sang well, and in any case he and the other singers (Angelika Kirchschlager, Olga Makarina, and Christine Brewer, nicely chosen for the other leading roles) weren’t the problem.
What almost killed the evening was the conductor, Gerard Schwarz, who’s been music director of Mostly Mozart for 16 years. In his favor, I can say that he kept the soloists, chorus and orchestra together and moved everything along at the proper speed.
But in his hands the music had no line, no motion from place to place. It had no color, only the most routine kind of clarity, and no sense of  Mozart’s style. Mr. Schwarz didn’t even breathe or phrase with the singers, giving them no support at all, as if to him they were just some minor element in an otherwise orchestral texture. Sometimes he’d demonstrate his control by emphasizing details -- accented notes, or momentary counter-melodies, all of which seemed pointless in a performance with no tone or shape, no strong contrast between loud music and soft, and sometimes in fast passages (like the final chorus) not much rhythm.
Why, I might ask, should someone with so little to offer be entrusted with a major musical event, let alone one that so clearly demands a point of view? But there’s a larger issue.
For years, Mostly Mozart hasn’t mattered very much. People bought tickets, and that, it seemed, was all its planners cared about. The performances mostly were routine.
Lately, though, Lincoln Center’s programmers, Jane Moss and Hanako Yamaguchi, have revived the artistic spark that created the series in the first place. Within a week, I’ve heard not just "Idomeneo," but heartwarming and deeply original performances by Emmanuel Ax (playing Chopin’s second concerto on a period piano, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and by the deeply original Latvian-born violinist Gidon Kremer, with an irrepressible ensemble of 20-something string players from the Baltic states, which he calls KREMERata BALTICA.
In a festival of this emerging quality, Schwarz -- once known for running chamber orchestras in New York, but now not much respected outside Seattle, where he leads the Seattle Symphony -- wouldn’t be invited to conduct. That he should be music director is, quite simply, astonishing.

[Some people find this review very strong. Maybe I should have added an explanation, which would have gone something like this:

We have two baseball teams in New York, and when there's an issue concerning one of them, everybody knows it, sportswriters and fans alike. It's debated intensely.

But that's not true in classical music. There's hardly any debate at all. Gerard Schwarz can be a washout as music director of Mostly Mozart and everybody in the business knows it -- but it's never discussed openly. The critics don't say a word.

So I thought I'd try writing what everybody says backstage. One of my colleagues, by the way, praised Schwarz for renovating the Mostly Mozart programs. He should have made a phone call to check his information. Don't music critics do journalism any more?

Late flash -- I got a phone call from a member of the Seattle Symphony, whom of course I won't name, though I'll stress that it's someone I'd never met or spoken to. This musician wanted to thank me for this review, and said, assuring me that all but two or three players in the orchestra would agree: "If they fire him at Mostly Mozart, maybe that will make it easier for us to get rid of him here."

Never before, after writing a review, have I gotten a call like this.]

Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1998