Next Sunday, August 5th, the Woodstock Opera House will host the continuation of one of its best and most time-honored traditions – formerly known as the Woodstock Mozart Festival, Midwest Mozart will mark the 32nd year of live classical performance held by a professional symphonic orchestra in Woodstock’s historic downtown. Zach Dylan, president of the festival board, and his wife Carol, assistant concert master and second chair violinist, are marking their third year keeping the concert alive out of the passion and dedication of themselves and their fellow musicians. In 2016, this paper gave the ominous report that the festival would “close permanently,” its traditional backers withdrawing their funds to Cook County in the face of the Illinois budget crisis. With local attendance declining and similar concerts dying out all over the country in the seven years prior, the board decided it had been a “great run” and dissolved – but nobody told the musicians.
“When the other board was at the point where they didn’t want to continue anymore, we were looking at the 30th concert season coming up, and nobody could believe it,” recalls Zach Dylan. “One of our advisors said it was like having the wind sucked out of Woodstock.” But the orchestra itself refused to accept the decision, and with the help of Krista Coltrin from the City of Woodstock’s Economic Development, they were able to form a new board with a new name, and host the same festival for its 30th consecutive year. “We had a window of about four and a half months from the time we had the notice of the other group going away to the time we had our first concert,” Mr. Dylan says. Two years and, as of next week, three performances later, the passion of the almost musician-only successor group remains as strong as ever. The question anyone must ask – especially those unfamiliar with the two hundred sixty two year old composer who makes up the heart and soul of their work – is why?
“Because he writes perfect music,” says Mrs. Dylan. “Mozart’s music is utterly perfect. His music is accessible to everybody, whether you’re a classical music aficionado with a PhD, or if you’re just somebody off the street, you can always appreciate Mozart.” Mr. Dylan responds, “talking with other musicians you might ask, who is the greatest composer ever? They might say, ‘I like Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven…’ but they always come back to Mozart. You take a piece like Eine kleine Nachtmusik, that’s something that kids can learn and play in our own youth music education program, and yet the complexity of his music is amazing.” It was this range that was Mozart’s claim to fame in his own day and to immortality in the years to come – from simple to staggeringly complex (“too many notes,” the emperor of Austria was said to have told him, and his response, “as many as there should be”), from expressive joy to sorrow both between and within his pieces, and in the range of his appeal from the educated to the layman and from the well-to-do to the working class.
Indeed, in his own time, Mozart was an early version of what’s now called “pop culture” – works with staggeringly high production value, in this case the writings of a musical genius, but created with the “common folk” in mind. “You think ‘pop music’ today and nothing classical comes into your head, but if you look at [Mozart’s works] at the time, there’s a parallel,” Mr. Dylan says. This is especially true with Mozart’s operas, like “Abduction From The Seraglio,” which entertained Austrians in their own language with the rescue of a noblewoman from the harems of the nearby Ottoman Empire, “The Magic Flute,” a hybrid of upper-class opera and lower-class vaudeville, and most controversially, “The Marriage of Figaro,” based on a three-part French play banned by Mozart’s own patron Joseph II for its heroic depiction of a servant struggling against his lecherous master (a decision not without cause, as Joseph’s own sister Marie Antoinette would learn only three years later in 1789). Unfortunately, Mozart’s creative freedom walked hand-in-hand with his inability to find a sponsor. “The way you made it as a professional musician was to have a benefactor,” Mrs. Dylan says. “Mozart didn’t get along with these people… he wanted to do his own thing and he didn’t like to have a boss.”
But just as Mozart took apart the conventions of the day, social, musical, and otherwise, he also contributed as a supreme builder of the Classical tradition itself. Like his peers of the 18th century, and unlike the producers of modern pop music, Mozart did not write his music simply to be enjoyed – classical music is an act of communication beyond and above human words, and Mozart sets himself apart from the more formal bearers of the style by putting his own emotional heart and soul on display. It’s not the sort of music that can be taken in at three minutes a piece on the Kennedy Expressway, or even necessarily over the speakers at the Square Park. When conditions are right, as they once were in Vienna after the religious upheavals of the 1600s but before the technological ones of the 1800s, it allows a bond to be shared between composer, conductor, performers, and audience, as they each seek higher meaning in this life on Earth. With Woodstock having its own small inheritance of that tradition in the architecture of the Square and nearby Victorian neighborhoods, the pairing of the venue with a live, professional orchestra shouldn’t be overlooked.
The Midwest Mozart Festival will perform at the Woodstock Opera House on Sunday August 5th and August 12th. Their first performance will feature Mozart’s Symphony No. 3, Piano Concerto No. 25, and Symphony No. 30, as well as the first-ever North American performance of his friend and contemporary Joseph Eybler’s Overture in C, acquired by the Festival from its archive in Geneva, Switzerland. Their second performance on the 12th will feature the Lucio Silla Overture, the Concerto for Flute, and last, Mozart’s final Symphony No. 41 Jupiter, considered to be his greatest work and one of the finest classical pieces of all time. Tickets remain on sale at the time of this writing at midwestmozart.org, woodstockoperahouse.com, and the Opera House box office, at $48 for A seating, $31 for B seating, and $10 for students.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 