Apollo et Hyacinthus

Is it possible to establish, looking beyond the subjectivity of each listener, what Mozart wanted to express with his music when he wrote a piece? Unfortunately, he did not leave behind any great verbal explanations in that regard, making the score of each piece the only document for us to refer to when trying to solve this question. Therefore, the purpose of this book dedicated to Mozart’s first opera consists of an attempt to discover the expressive background of the music by means of a formal analysis of the score.

Asit is an opera, this expressive background reveals itself from the outset in the dramatic content of the text. Analysis of how the music conveys thisstarts from the physical elements that the score explicitly presents (horizontal structure units, gestures within the melodic design, harmonic and tonal contexts, timbre of the instrumentation, etc.). However, the study of these elementspoints tothe particularly substantial role of non-explicit phenomena, namely, the “implicit” form that the musical units should have in connection with the verbal meter. This is a form that is usually modified due to the author’s additions or deletions, applied for the purpose of expression, which ultimately bestow the musical fragments with the appearance with which they finally appear in the score. Thus, comparing the implicit form and the final form of the same fragment becomes, throughout the book, one of the methods that help to reveal the expressive intentions of the composer more eloquently.