MOZART AND THE MARATHON: Running to the Beat

The silvery strains of the basset clarinet filled the air at the United Church of Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago. Is there any work of music more lyrical than the Mozart Concerto in A Major, particularly its haunting Adagio second movement, especially when played by as gifted a player as Larry Combs, principal clarinetist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At the Hyde Park concert, Combs was playing not with the CSO, but rather backed by the Music of the Baroque Orchestra, Thomas Wikman conductor.

What does Mozart have to do with running? First, I had stopped at the concert en route to the Chicago Area Running Association's annual awards banquet. Second, Larry Combs' wife Gail Williams (horn player for the CSO) is a runner. She participated in The LaSalle Banks Chicago Marathon, her first, last fall. Several other members of the CSO run.

I had met Gail and Larry while profiling her for an article in the August 1991 issue of Runner's World. Gail believes the endurance she derives from running makes her a better horn player. She told me she planned to run a marathon--some day. A half dozen years passed before that "some day" arrived. Then she learned that the daughter of a colleague with the CSO had leukemia; this inspired her to join the Leukemia Society of America's Team in Training (which raises money to cure that disease) and run Chicago last fall.

Gail enjoyed the race so much, she plans to run a half-marathon in Berlin while playing a concert there next spring and maybe run Chicago again in the fall. Larry walks, bikes and supports his wife. He watched the marathon from several points along the course, then met his wife after she finished. "Larry was more emotional at the finish line than I was," Gail recalls. "I was jumping up and down with joy, but he was crying."

Sonata Allegro Training

But what does Mozart have to do with running? Music at the end of the eighteenth century was all about simplicity. The musical instruments common in today's symphony orchestras were still being invented. Even the clarinet was relatively new during the time of Mozart. The horn did not yet have valves to control the sound. Themes were repeated again and again for audiences who did not yet own CD players. Theme and variations was a familiar symphonic form, then as now. A rondo describes a theme than keeps coming around, again and again. The sonata allegro form used in the first and last movements of many symphonies states a theme, a sub-theme, repeats both, then there is a bridge of different musical matter, before the theme and sub-theme return, followed by a coda, or ending.

And that's the way you train for a marathon--or a running race of almost any distance for that matter.

At its simplest level, running is running. You head out the door. You run two or three miles. You do this three or four days a week, usually at the same pace. Think of the Gregorian chants, the plain church music that preceded Bach, Haydn and Mozart. Beautiful, but very monotone.

At some point, runners become motivated to do a marathon. Their schedules change, becoming somewhat more complex. They add a long run on the weekends (principle theme), a medium long or fast run mid-week (secondary theme). Easier runs between the harder workouts serve as bridges. That haunting adagio from the Mozart clarinet concerto comes between two allegro (fast) movements. And all symphonies have rests between movements where players sometimes retune their instruments.

Beethoven's Finishing Kick

The marathon itself is the coda, but now we have to move past Mozart where Beethoven really knew how to bang the drums and sound the horns. For symphonies that seem to stretch forever, think Brahms, think Bruckner.

Life isn't one continuous marathon, however. Larry Combs frequently moves away from classical music and plays with the jazz group Ears. Earlier in his career when he played with the New Orleans Philharmonic, he often would hike with his clarinet to Bourbon Street for jam sessions.

Successful running careers are built on themes and variations. If you want to attain your peak as a runner--whether in the 5-K or the marathon--you need to train by doing different workouts: sprints, strides, fartlek, tempo running, interval training, and don't forget repeats. Like in most works of classical music, themes keep repeating themselves, but with variations.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died young at age 36. I often have mourned the loss of music he might have produced had he lived a few more decades, and wondered which directions that music might have taken. What sort of music might Mozart have produced had he been living in America at the end of the millennium? Would Mozart have played in a rock band and written musicals like Rent?

Then again, Mozart might have been motivated like so many others of us to run a marathon.

Copyright © 1998 by Hal Higdon. All rights reserved.