So last fall I bought this 170-disc collection of everything Mozart composed ($120, Amazon), and since then I've pretty much sampled a few discs here and there every now and then. Let's face it, 170 takes time to go through, and while I consider myself a fan and own many smaller compilations of his works, I've got stuff to do and other things I also want to listen to.
It wasn't until this past January and February that I decided to take a more academic approach to listening to old Wolfgang. I'd started to listen to a 2-disc set of some of his works at night while driving in the cold (or relative cold of where I'm at). It was relaxing, like in the car commercial kind of way. And I developed some favorite parts. But when you've got tracks of varying length for compositions whose structure you're still unfamiliar with, well, all I'm saying is that I can't drive and keep my eyes on the CD player to mark my favorite track and times. Here I was appreciating something, and I couldn't even identify it to look for it elsewhere or name it to anyone if we were talking about it. Yes, I'm sure I could play the "match game" at home with the disc liner notes and a fast-forward button, but that wasn't the point. When you hear a Rolling Stones song on the radio, you know it's them. When you hear Eric Clapton, you know it's him. I wanted to at least be able to know Mozart when I heard him.
Then I found myself wanting to learn more about the man. When I was a kid, parts of "Amadeus" scared the daylights of me, but it was just a movie based on a series of very "creative" plays that just plain made a lot of stuff up. Plus, I knew there were stories about his compositions, too. He was a child prodigy, after all, as well as one of the leading composers both of and after his time. I guess it came down to my wanting to know as much as I could.
The Compleat Mozart is just the book I was looking for, and I got a used copy on Amazon. There's basically a blurb on every composition of Mozart's on a track-by-track basis. I can literally read about a specific composition as I listen to it, because both books use the Kochel notation method to identify Mozart's works, some of whom are named or numbered or have similarities among their names. What's good for me is that includes some biographical information about each piece as well as some discussion about Mozart's possible influences and how the respective piece was critiqued during Mozart's time and since. What's bad for me is that other parts of the discussion are too technical. They're clearly by musical scholars for other musical scholars.
That's where The NPR Classical Music Companion comes in. It's basically the encyclopedia I use to understand the esoteric (to me, granted) musical terms and concepts that are used throughout the book. It's a good thing I got it, too. I couldn't read one passage about Mozart's 1st symphony without referring to the guide after almost EVERY sentence. But I'm coming along. Soon I hope to retain some definitions and move up into concepts. While I do that, I'm also going to look into a book on music theory. Do those come in "book-on-tape" format?
I guess I'll start at CD 1, which also begins the Symphonies section, and list the tracks I've heard. It'll be nice to start the week this way.
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