A Slip of Mozart's: Its Analytic Significance

Author(s): Hans Keller

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 42 (Winter, 1956-1957), pp. 12-15
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/942915 .
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A SLIP OF MOZART'S:
ITS ANALYTIC
SIGNIFICANC
by Hans Keller

My method of musical analysis, which aims at nothing more obscure than showing
the unity of contrasting themes, has received a certain amount of unwelcome
journalistic publicity, and I am reminded that I must find a name for it before
my critics do. Rudolph Reti, the respected author of The ThematicProcessin Music
(New York, I951) which has had a stimulating influence on the development
of my method, has suggested " Process-analysis " for what our respective
analytical approaches have in common, but apart from the fact that their
differences are as striking as their similarities, the term would not seem to
convey a great deal, at any rate on this side of the Atlantic.
In point of fact, I find my critics more helpful than my analytical comrades,
if only negatively. The anti-analysts (as we might call those who mistake descrip-
tion for analysis) have suggested that mine is a method of dissection. This is
exactly what it is not, and it seems to me that its name ought to clarify so central
a point. What is dissection is the traditional form of " analysis "-" first
subject, bridge passage, second subject, closing section " and so forth. This
kind of investigation is essentially anatomical. My own method, on the other
hand is essentially physiological: it attempts to elucidate the functions of the
living organism that is a musical work of art. Accordingly, I propose to call
my method functional analysis. By way of incidental advantage, I shall now be
able to discontinue my references to "my method," a description whose
repeated use must have been even more tiresome for the reader than it has
been for the writer.
The following investigation, a farewell to the Mozart-Freud Year, applies
the psychoanalytic method to a Mozartian slip of the pen and, in the process,
may prove to substantiate some of the claims of functional analysis.
Musicologists are aware of the fact that in the autograph of the Figaro
Overture, the natural before the fourth bar's seventh quaver is missing in the
first violin (see Ex. i). What has so far escaped attention is that in his private
thematic catalogue, his musical diary as it were, Mozart repeated the slip in
his entry under April 29, 1786 (p. 8). It would of course be fantastic to suggest
that he needed the autograph of the actual Overture in order to enter this
incipit-the first seven bars of the piece (Ex. i)-in his diary, and that the slip
thus slipped, by way of copying, from the score into his private record. In fact,
the diary entry, of which Ex. i is a faithful copy (including Mozart's idiosyncratic
key signature in the bass), shows that he was not anywhere near the MS in space
or spirit when he recorded it: in the autograph (where, incidentally, the title
is Sinfonie, not Ouverture)the tempo is Presto, and the time signature moreover
shows the alla brevemark.

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 A SLIP OF MOZART'S: ITS ANALYTIC SIGNIFICANCE I3

Ex. 1
Ouverture. A119assai

771 It 17
#v"g L^P J?fTO?4W? j
~
r- j f
t^ f^Q,rnprcc. r 6 _rrrrrr rf
Nor again can we assume that the omission of the natural was the result of some
idiosyncratic habit or intention, for in the autograph it occurs only in the first
violin part, not in the other parts or anywhere in restatement or recapitulation;
whereas in the diary entry it occurs in both staves: see x in Ex. i.
Our initial conclusion, then, is that Mozart was guilty of a triple slip which,
if we remember Freud's findings (first adumbrated as early as 1898 in a short
paper On the Psychic Mechanism of Forgetfulness and later elaborated in his popular
Psychopathology of Everyday Life), points to heavy unconscious motivation.
What can it mean? Let us try to list the basic possibilities. (i) If we read
Ex. i's bar 4 literally, we get the kind of illiterate, premature modulation to
the dominant which Mozart might ridicule in A MusicalJoke. In terms of un-
conscious motivation, the possibility arises that the parapraxis (to give the slip
its technical title') represents a guilty reaction to, a " denial " of, a belated
modulation to the dominant. (2) The parapraxis throws a spotlight on (a) the
sharp fourth, including (b) its melodic leading-note significance which is not in
evidence in the theme, but which, by implication, is established from the very
first bar-the model, that is, of bar 3. The sharp fourth may in fact be more
important than is immediately apparent. (3) The parapraxis throws into relief the
phrase descending from the pivotal submediant or-if you accept the slip as
" true "-from the secondary supertonic. Ex. i's bar 4 may, as the psycho-
" of the " real " version and the
analyst has it, represent a " condensation
" slipped " version which, in a different context, may be just as real.
Now for the main step in our investigation-the viewing of these possibilities
or starting-points of interpretation in the light of subsequent events in the
composition.
(I)
All the descriptive, anatomical " analyses " of the Overture, from Hermann
Abert's introduction in the Eulenburg score of Figaro to the Boosey & Hawkes
synopsis (if I may call it thus) attached to the pocket score of the Overture itself,
regard Ex. 2 as the first theme of the second subject group. With great respect,
I
Ex.I2
Ob

fp
va fp fp fp f'
opra) P Str 8va

I must say that this is where descriptive dissection may lead you. "It's a new
theme, it's in the dominant, what more do you want? ", I can hear our analysts
ask. But, considered functionally, in its organic context, is it really in the
dominant? By no means; the dominant has never yet been established.
Harmonically, Ex. 2 is, on the contrary, one element in the large-scale, extended
I Freud's own technical term, the perfectly natural Fehlleistung, has resisted equally natural translation,
as have so many of his unobtrusively new terms. Ernest Jones' neo-Greek parapraxis is a brilliant enough feat
so far as precise translation of meaning is concerned, but it will of course never escape the outsider's charge
of jargon. No substitute has been found, and the new Freud translation which is in the process of emerging
has been compelled to retain " parapraxis." But it ought to be more generally realized that most of Freud's
neologisms show no trace of Latin or Greek. If, for instance, the clear and simple Uberich has become a
" superego," this is only because the English language would not easily tolerate an " over-I."

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I4 T EMPO

establishment of the dominant which, conventionally, would go by the name

of bridge passage, and of which the turn to the dominant's dominant in Ex. 2's
bars 3-4 is indeed typical. The first dominant cadence, and a highly imperfect
one at that, does not occur until the end of Ex. 2; follows an overlapping
restatement and a modulating section leading up to Ex. 3 which, from the
thematic point of view, is more transition:

Ex. 3
i >
|*;r2-i j I;"^
coll' otava

In fact, it runs into another harmonic deviation which, to be sure, at last goes to
establish the dominant via the Overture's first perfect dominant cadence (with
the secondary tonic in the treble), though even here we are led into A minor
before A major unfolds with Ex. 4-the third theme of the second subject
according to Abert, the second theme of the second subject according to Boosey
& Hawkes:
Ex. 4

-f" r l" ,J trr r r Ir-'Lz.

h I
In organic reality, it is by now too late for the second subject anyway: Ex. 4, the
first proper melody in the piece, assumes the significance of a closing section,
a codetta. Mozart has intentionally drawn out the modulation and transition
to the dominant to the extent of missing a stable second subject stage altogether,
keeping the structure fluid and thus lending it the required sense of urgency.
In technical terms, he has more than made up for the absence of a development
section in this " abridged " sonata form by investing exposition and recapitulation
with something of an urgently developmental character without any actual
thematic development (which would have been out of style)-a uniquely
unconventional feat, a stunning master-stroke. But the unconscious superego,
the primitive conscience, even that of a genius, is unrealistic: it may well have
been cross with Mozart about his disrespectful attitude towards conventional
sonata form and its harmonic requirements, about his dilatory behaviour in the
matter of establishing the dominant, and may consequently have revenged itself
by playing " a musical joke " upon his first subject, " repairing " the second's
damage by a zealous slip into the dominant at the first impossible opportunity.
(2)
The sharp fourth turns out to be a central element in the unity of the
Overture's contrasting themes.
(a) Ex. 3 will easily be heard to be a compression of the main theme up
to and excluding the point of the parapraxis (see Ex. i), proceeding as it does in
octave unison from the secondary tonic over the natural and sharp fourths to
the pivotal submediant and back to the dominant. The three last notes of Ex. 3
compress the whole of Ex. i's bar 3 plus three-quarters of bar 4 into a three-note
motif whose sharp fourth, mere colour in Ex. i, now gains in weight through
the omission of the dominant and its own sharp colouring. Indeed, bottom and
top of the overlapping two-note figure in Ex. 3 represent a straight and inverted
imitation, further abridged and harmonically utilized, of this three-note motif,
the background structure being Ex. 5; and the functional significance of the

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 A SLIP OF MOZART'S: ITS ANALYTIC SIGNIFICANCE

Ex. 5
1
#$# t t# -i=
CIf
sharp fourth continues into the ensuing chromaticisms. We may already feel like
exclaiming, albeit a little crudely-no wonder Mozart had the sharp fourth on
his brain!
(b) In melodic line, bars 2-4 of Ex. 2 are identical with bar 3 of
Ex. I: dominant-sharpened subdominant-dominant-sharpened subdominant-
dominant. But this dominant's dominant is in itself assuming momentary tonical
office, with the sharp fourth acting as leading note. Insomuch, then, Ex. 2's bar 2-4
are identical in melodic outline with Ex. i's bar i (tonic-seventh-tonic-seventh
-tonic), and the melodic leading-note significance of the sharp fourth which the
parapraxis has been at such pains to stress is fulfilled.

(3)
The phrase in which Mozart slipped re-emerges in bars 7 and 8 of Ex. 2.
Bar 7 contains the " real " version-down from the pivotal submediant. In
bar 8, however, it is the " slipped " version that comes into its own-down
from the pivotal supertonic, with the rest of the bar completing, as it were,
the answer to the question posed by the slip:
Ex. 6
)
,7#n
[#I
- #? I 5 J

We now realize that Ex. I's bar 4, without and with its mistake, rolls Ex. 2's
bars 7-8 into one. It remains to be added that the pivotal sixth reappears not
only, as we have already seen, in Ex. 3, but also in Ex. 4, where the melodic
line of that crucial stretch from Ex. i is in fact resumed:
Ex. 7

PU j j j j 1^ #} $ h; 2 I

CONCLUSION
Functional analysis postulates that contrasts are but different aspects of a
single basic idea, a background unity. Without attempting a complete analysis
of the unity of contrasting themes in the Figaro Overture, sections (2) and (3)
above tend to show, in my submission, that Mozart's slip was partly motivated
by the intrusion upon his mind of contrasts of the basic theme he was committing
to paper.
The interpretation offered in section (i) is more hypothetical. The
repetitiveness of Mozart's slip, however, does point to an obsessional, i.e.
"moral " factor, and Freud has shown how these parapraxes are, as he puts it,
" over-determined."
One thing we must remember in any case: it is scientifically impossible
for a parapraxis to be unmotivated. If you don't like the idea of motivation,
you don't like the idea of cause and effect.

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