For this experiment, I’ll focus on the wonderfully complex and dramatic quartet from Idomeneo, “Andrò ramingo e solo.” First I will introduce some of the voice-leading schemata that Mozart used in the quartet, and then we will look at the quartet itself, and see how Mozart’s use of schemata contributed to its dramatic effect. This presentation is something of an experiment, to see how useful Gjerdingen’s analytical system is in confronting late eighteenth-century opera.
He discussed none of Mozart’s operatic music in depth, and his musical examples include only a single excerpt from Mozart’s later operas. However, Gjerdingen left in doubt the applicability of schema theory to one important part of Mozart’s oeuvre. 550 and the first movement of the Piano Sonata in C, K. His analyses of several of Mozart’s earliest compositions, as well as of later music such as the slow movement of the Symphony in G minor, K.
Gjerdingen has shown that Mozart, immersed from childhood in the galant musical language, throughout his life wrote music that brilliantly exploited galant schemata. Talk given at the conference 'Aktuelle Fragen der Mozart-Forschung,' Prague, 16–17 April 2016 Robert O.
