The Giant's Son

His mother called him Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Jr. Why not? He was the second surviving son of a great composer, and it was a name certainly worth preserving. The only problem was that when Mama made the decision, the boy was well along in childhood and already had a name: Franz Xaver. Wolfgang Jr. or just plain Franz? It was a dilemma that plagued the young Mozart most of his life (1791-1844). Having studied with such notables as Hummel and Salieri, he was a talented enough musician to make his piano debut at age 13. Yet Franz was not another Wolfgang and would not push himself. His mother Constanze, whose ambitious nature may be partly explained by the fact that her husband's death left her impoverished, came to resent her son's lackadaisical nature. "Although he gets help on all sides," she wrote to Franz's older brother Karl, an Austrian government official, "he does almost nothing unless he is forced."

Bouncy Spirits. The pity of it is that Franz did have talent. Last week in New York at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival (Wolfgang Sr., that is), listeners got a rare chance to hear Franz's Piano Concerto No. 2 in E Flat, Op. 25. The soloist was the eminent Gary Graffman, that master of diverse styles for whom the score was reconstructed and edited from the original edition by the New York composer and musicologist Douglas Townsend.

Apparently written in 1818, when Franz was 27, the work shows the unmistakable influence of the concertos written by the elder Mozart a generation before. But then so did most everything written in the post-Mozart era. What is interesting about Franz's concerto is the way it has absorbed some of the innovations of Beethoven and Weber and gone on to anticipate some of the expressive, warm-blooded styles that would be heard later from the leading German romantics. There is a point in the first movement, for example, when the piano becomes a discreet accompanist (arpeggios mostly) and the clarinet takes a solo: pure Schumann. The piano's entry in the second movement has a stride and harmonic ingenuity prophetic of Chopin.

Obviously, Franz knew his trade and all the latest trends. The Concerto in E Flat (one of his father's favorite key signatures, by the way) makes up for a certain lack of profundity with its bouncy good spirits and melodic charm. Franz performed it frequently as a concert pianist, and if he was able to bring it off as brilliantly as Graffman did last week, he must have had a first-rate keyboard technique. He also played (and revered) his father's music and quite clearly was burdened by the comparison. Finally he had to get away from it all and, still in his 30s, exiled himself to a life of teaching and conducting in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lvov. He died at 53 in Karlsbad, where he had gone to take the cure. In death as in life, he was proof of the words that would later be uttered by Richard Wagner's sole male heir, Siegfried: "You don't know how difficult it is being the son of a giant."

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