If you spend any time working in the music profession you are fairly sure to encounter a sage who will tell you, in the same kind of tones that people use to tell you the tea has more caffeine than coffee, that you may think Mozart is the easiest music, but really it's the hardest. The title of this post is what the great pianist Artur Schnabel said about Mozart's piano sonatas, and we all know what he means. Mozart's music is superficially pleasing to the unquestioning listener and, a little learning being a dangerous thing, one may dismiss it as facile and uninteresting before one has the emotional maturity to appreciate the depth of beauty and the understanding of the human spirit it contains. I went through this phase and lots of people do. Some never emerge, and they are probably the most legimitate targets of the waggish wisdom I describe above.
What makes Mozart harder than Brahms is that it is underspecified. The page of music contains few instructions aside from the notes. Unlike much romantic music - particularly opera (one page of La Bohème contains more slow down/speed up instructions than the whole of the Marriage of Figaro) - the score is not a recipe whose instructions you can simply follow, add water, stir, bingo. You have to figure out for yourself what is going to make the music come alive. So some adduce from that that this makes it easy to conduct Puccini, because you can make it sound like the piece the composer composed without making any decisions for yourself.
Well, to a point, perhaps. But it depends on the individual; most of us probably find it easiest to perform the music we best understand and feel the deepest connection to. For me, that is Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Britten, Shostakovich... others too, but not (or at least not yet) Puccini, Brahms, Wagner, Strauß. I plan on getting to them later in my career, but right now I'm quite sure that I know how a Mozart phrase is meant to sound (and am perpetually driven crazy by the fact that I believe hardly anyone else does - more on this in a later post). With Puccini I don't know just from looking at the page and seeing all those rits and accels what the phrase means; if I listen to a couple of recordings I might think, oh, right, of course, that's what he means - but if you need to get it from a recording that isn't really the best start for conducting it yourself. Sometimes people think it's just obvious that it goes a certain way and they think they've always known that but they've forgotten they learnt how it went from other people's interpretations. (There is nothing wrong with this, of course. The aural tradition is important. But I generally feel it's purer to get a feeling for the music from the printed page first - you can always go to the recording later. In an ideal world, this is; when learning music in a hurry, recording submersion is a strategy I often use. Again, more on this later.)
The point I'm making is that for me, right now, Mozart most definitely is easier than Brahms. I've had older people (mostly people who didn't know quite as much about music as they thought they did) say exactly that to me - 'ah, you want to conduct Mozart because you think it is easy, you don't realise how hard it is' and I wish now that I'd resisted that more vigorously. I should have said: it's precisely because I appreciate what makes it hard that I can do it.
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