The Mozarts you don’t know at the Mahaiwe

For centuries, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has overshadowed nearly everyone in classical music, including the talented musicians in his own family: his father Leopold, his sister Maria Anna Mozart and his son Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart who were all prolific composers and musicians in their own right.

On March 15, Great Barrington’s Mahaiwe Theater will explore the legacy of Mozart with its “Meet the Mozarts” concert. It’s mostly Amadeus — a quartet will perform the maestro’s “Piano Trio in B-flat, KV 502” and “Quartet in G minor, KV 478” — but the evening will feature works from both the elder and younger Mozarts.

“The story of Mozart is forever an enigma,” said Close Encounters with Music’s artistic director Yehuda Hanani. “It’s really a mystery. How did a man who, as a child, dazzled the royals of Europe end up in an unmarked grave?”

Leopold Mozart is best known for writing a foundational textbook on playing the violin. His catalog included church music, opera dances and symphonies, though much of it has been lost over time. Amadeus was his seventh child, and he served as the boy’s primary music teacher after the toddler began imitating the piano lessons taken by his older sister.

“Mozart’s father really made him what he was,” Hanani said. “He was a devoted pedagogue. He drilled him, and he corrected his early pieces. And then, of course, he was a great promoter. He created the legend.”

Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang, was born just four months before his famous father’s death. His musical education included lessons connected to such figures as Joseph Haydn and Antonio Salieri, and he socialized with contemporaries such as Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. He was a renowned composer in his own right, “and he probably would have been much more acknowledged and known if not for his misfortune of being the son of a great genius,” Hanani added. Wolfgang would often perform his father’s work alongside his own. As his tombstone notes, “May the name of his father be his epitaph, as his veneration for him was the essence of his life.”

The Mahaiwe’s concert will feature a fourth Mozart: AI Mozart. “We are living in a very revolutionary technological, artistic, cultural time with AI, and it’s creating some kind of cultural crisis,” Hanani said. “So, we’re doing something a little whimsical, a little naughty and a little serious at the same time.” The three-minute piece uses Mozart’s existing oeuvre to create a composite work.

Hanani has mixed feelings. “If you compare [AI Mozart] to Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart, it’s not so bad. But next to the real Mozart, it’s full of clichés and platitudes, and it’s really drawing on something that was already there… There’s no spark in it.”

For more information and tickets, visit Mahaiwe.org