He Speaks Mozart’s Language

BOSTON —  Inside his colonial duplex on a leafy street in Harvard Square, Mozart scholar, concert pianist and Harvard professor Robert Levin is lecturing to a class of one. Nearly 6 feet tall and dressed in two shades of his favorite color (royal purple shirt and plum-colored socks), he uses any one of six nearby keyboard instruments to illustrate his main point: the importance not just of reproducing Mozart’s music but making it live.

“Today,” says Levin, 49, “the average listener has heard Mozart’s masterpieces hundreds if not thousands of times, and the idea that music is happening right now and will never happen again is all but gone from the culture.”

Classical music has become “embalmed,” he continues, in his mellifluous if slightly stilted professor’s voice. For most musicians, the rules are carved in stone.

But not for him.

Bouncing on the bench of a pianoforte built in 1830, he plays a crescendo of chords into the dead end of a single note--then his hands back-flip down the keyboard. Once again, he starts the phrase--from the G-major Concerto, K. 453--this time with a little trill. And yet again, but now with a flourish of added notes. Each version is unmistakably Mozart.

“You change the narrative for the audience, just as the mood strikes you,” he is saying, turning the passage into giddy, music box tinkling. “It’s usually played like this,” he goes on, his thin lips forming an ironic little “o.” This is someone else’s idea of Mozart.

“It’s very nice, it’s harmless, it’s very lovely, but I don’t think anything is happening. When the music tells you there’s something happening and your heart doesn’t flutter, then there’s something wrong.”

And he doesn’t mean butterflies.

“Mozart was one of the greatest dramatists of all time. I believe it’s important to do everything to make his music not as holy, as sacred, as bathed in beauty and in veneration as possible, but as dangerous, as seductive, as upsetting, as titillating, as anxiety-ridden, as erotic--things that I don’t believe have to be projected into the music, they’re all there.”

In one sense, Levin is talking about the way a performer interprets a classic composition, but the subtext of this particular lecture goes much deeper. As a concert pianist, Levin has a rare claim to fame. Often when he performs--as he will Wednesday at the Hollywood Bowl--he does something few classical performers even attempt: He improvises, a la Mozart. Not, as he is doing here, riffing on a score, but from a standing start, using musical suggestions submitted by audience members.

And how exactly does one channel the great Wolfgang Amadeus?

Levin offers one of his tailored metaphors.

“It’s like being on the freeway,” he says, “and suddenly it’s jammed and you’ve never gotten off at that exit, so you think, ‘Now what do I do?’ For most people that highway adventure is terrifying if you don’t have a map and you’re in the middle of Los Angeles.” He stops talking but keeps on playing, hopscotching in a brand-new way through another Mozart theme, smiling all the while.

Clearly, Levin doesn’t count himself among the terrified.

Levin’s critics have called him showy and self-congratulatory; his fans have called him the next best thing to W.A.M.

Says Neal Zaslaw, a professor of music at Cornell University and a noted Mozart scholar: “After he visits there’s always this slightly depressed feeling among people that they can’t do what he does.”

For his part, Levin defends the practice of creating his own 18th century musical “fantasies.”

Back when the classical canon was new music, Levin points out, it was also improvised music. The composers played their own compositions, and most likely never the same way twice. The cadenzas of the great concertos, originally improvisations that filled in purposefully blank sections in the score, existed to showcase a composer’s virtuosity. Even Levin’s practice of inviting audience participation has historical precedents: Mozart often took suggestions from his audience and made spontaneous masterpieces at most of his concerts.

But how on earth does someone in the 20th century learn to play the piano as if he were a dead 18th century musician?

“If you’re going to improvise in the style of Beethoven or in the style of Mozart,” Levin explains, “in a sense you want to time-travel, you want to put yourself in the mind-set of somebody who’s living in, say, 1785 or 1812, and you want to wipe subsequent knowledge out of your mind.”

And how do you do that?

“How do you learn to speak French?” he says with a shrug.

Well, you go to France.

“It’s true that if you had to learn French only by reading it, it would be very much more difficult than hearing native speakers or hearing recordings of people talk. And that’s a problem that all of us in music have all the time. We have the blueprint--we don’t have the sound.”

Levin has filled in the outline with research. Unlike most of his colleagues, he says, he has immersed himself in the literature of the period, instructive documents such as Leopold Mozart’s treatise on playing the violin, which his son surely studied.

“Ninety percent of the performers playing today couldn’t give a . . . fig about those books, have never opened them up and continue placidly to play these things the way their teachers told them.”

He has also dissected and decoded the language of Mozart, the way a poet might analyze Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“Once you got over being knocked out by the beauty of the language, its intensity, its elegance, its nobility, its sensuousness--you might then become interested in how he does it,” Levin says. “Most people say, ‘I don’t care about that, I just love it.’ But people who are really interested in the language will get in there and start to see how things are done with a view to trying to understand the mind-set of the creator.”

Levin began piano lessons at age 5. Growing up in New York, he absorbed his father’s love of theater, jazz and Mozart. It was his uncle--a trained wind player--who discovered that Levin had perfect pitch. He paid for his nephew’s education, chaperoning him in Paris, where as a teenager Levin studied with Nadia Boulanger, and later sent him to Harvard.

In college, Levin was a French major, but his summers were devoted to his musical training. It was one of his summer teachers, Viennese conductor Hans Swarowsky, who began to unlock Mozart for Levin, who already had a reputation, he says, as a “Mozart addict.”

Swarowsky had just made a recording with pianist Friedrich Gulda in which, Levin says, Gulda “had improvised the cadenzas and embellished a lot.” Snatching the album off a ceiling-high shelf, he continues the story. “Swarowsky said if you want to play Mozart concertos, this is what you’ve got to do. I was absolutely thunderstruck. I’d never heard anybody play like that, never, and I thought, ‘Well, how the heck am I gonna do that?’ ”

As he was pondering the question, Harvard’s choral conductor challenged him to try his hand at completing an unfinished sketch from Mozart’s Requiem.

“I thought: ‘I can’t do that, I’ll just make a big mess of it. Someone’s going to pretend that he’s Mozart and do this in front of everybody?’ ”

But that crisis of confidence didn’t last long. Levin did finish the sketch, performing it later that semester, a process that had him hooked. There are nearly 140 unfinished Mozart fragments, he points out, “really significant pieces--torsos--that he could have finished if someone had paid him to do it.”

Levin switched to the music department, went to Vienna and Paris to hunt down some of the original manuscripts and began reading, dissecting and finally composing. He graduated, at 20, with a summa cum laude thesis called “The Unfinished Works of W.A. Mozart.” According to his current 19-page resume, he has now “completed” 11 Mozart fragments--his most famous is the Requiem, which premiered in 1991 in Stuttgart, Germany, to a standing ovation. He has also published many of his own cadenzas, lead-ins and embellishments for Mozart and other composers. Along the way, he started his concert career and began teaching, including an eight-year stint in Germany, where he met his wife, Taiwanese pianist Ya-Fei Chuang.

Levin had 20 years of performing and writing under his belt before he tried his hand at improvising in front of an audience. It happened by accident. Asked to submit themes for a 1987 Austrian chamber music festival, he suggested looking at the master’s legendary ability to compose on his feet. The festival director one-upped him, telling Levin to show the world how it might have been done.

Levin, who calls improvisation “the capstone experience for me,” didn’t exactly resist.

When he performs at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, Levin says, he will deliver what Philharmonic Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann requested: “The Bob Levin Show.”

“He said, ‘We’re gonna set up a mike and we want you to talk to the audience and give them a random sampling of Mozart’s music that will be both entertaining and also allow you to do some serious playing.’ ”

The serious music will include the first and last keyboard pieces Mozart wrote, cadenzas he created for his sister to perform, and the Fantasy and Fugue in C, a work he composed after he heard the music of Handel and Bach for the first time and went into an egotistical tailspin: “That was a bad moment for W.A.M. He wasn’t used to having to work that hard,” Levin says.

The improvisations will come in the middle of the program. Audience suggestions are collected in a hat--by now, Levin’s fans know to come prepared. He tries out a few, picks finalists based on a voice vote and asks his collaborators to share in the bows. The audience-participation element, he says, isn’t just a marketing gimmick or even a nod to Mozart’s show-boating. It’s all about credibility.

“It’s no fun suffering as much as you have to suffer to make up a 10-minute piece of music straight off if, in fact, nobody believes you’re doing it in the first place,” he explains.

Not that he minds the involvement it generates. Levin has been known to wear a Mozart baseball cap during his performances to loosen up his listeners. (“The audience adores it, the music critics hate it,” he says.)

“Audiences are told they must not applaud until after the end of the piece. Why not? “ he shouts. “When Mozart played, whenever he did something good in the middle of the piece, people applauded.” And where Mozart is funny, Levin wants to be funny too.

“I’ve seen so many performances where the audience does not laugh when they’re supposed to. I look at [them] in a certain way; [they] laugh.”

Levin says that he can hear the audience hold its breath when he steps onto the improvisational high wire.

“The great advantage of actually trying to reproduce Mozart’s lingo is that we all know it,” he says. “So everybody sitting out there--even the least-trained person--is familiar enough so that if I fall on my butt, that person will know.”

And has he fallen on his butt? Never, he says; the risk is the point.

“The audience has to realize, as they must in every movie, that there is danger. Why should it be that even a grade-B movie has more of a claim on our involvement than works of art that are normally considered by any objective person as the cornerstone of our civilization? I find that very, very disturbing.

“I hope there’ll be more and more people who do what I do,” Levin says, leaning back. “Because I think the culture will be enriched and music will be much more exciting when more people take those risks and really make the music happen in front of people’s eyes and ears.

“I don’t want cottage cheese,” he says suddenly, sitting back up again. “I may eat nonfat yogurt for breakfast, but when I go on the stage, there’s cholesterol all over the place. That’s what I’m trying to do.

“I want to be the Franco Zeffirelli or the Howard Hawks or the Cecil B. DeMille of Mozart--that’s what I want.”

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* Robert Levin, Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Wednesday, 8:30 p.m. $3-$64. (213) 850-2000.