Mozart's Piano Concertos

John Irving

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557887
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

Mozart's piano concertos stand alongside his operas and symphonies as his most frequently performed and best loved music. They have attracted the attention of generations of musicologists who have explored their manifold meanings from a variety of viewpoints. In this study, John Irving brings together the various strands of scholarship surrounding Mozart's concertos including analytical approaches, aspects of performance practice and issues of compositional genesis based on investigation of manuscript and early printed editions. Treating the concertos collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the first section of the book tackles broad thematic issues such as the role of the piano concerto in Mozart's quasi-freelance life in late eighteenth-century Vienna, the origin of his concertos in earlier traditions of concerto writing; eighteenth-century theoretical frameworks for the understanding of movement forms, subsequent historical shifts in the perception of the concerto's form, listening strategies and performance practices. This is followed by a 'documentary register' which proceeds through all 23 original works, drawing together information on the source materials. Accounts of the concertos' compositional genesis, early performance history and reception are also included here, drawing extensively on the Mozart family correspondence and other contemporary reports. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

PART ONE
Contexts: Form, Reception and Performance

CHAPTER ONE

Heinrich Koch and the Classical Concerto

The concerto genre was discussed at considerable length by the foremost late eighteenth-century music theorist, Heinrich Christoph Koch (1749–1816). While best known for his theoretical writings, Koch had a background as a practical musician, serving for much of his career in the Hofkapelle at Rudolstadt (his birthplace), being appointed Kapellmeister there in 1792. He was also a composer of cantatas, sacred vocal music and some instrumental works (all lost). His most famous and extensive theoretical text is the Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Koch, 1782–93), a comprehensive account of musical theory and aesthetics published in three volumes (1782, 1787, 1793). It draws on the repertoire of its own day, and builds on earlier theory such as that of Riepel (Riepel 1752; Riepel, 1755), particularly in the importance accorded to melody in volumes ii and iii. Koch termed these sections ‘The Mechanical Rules of Melody’, and in them its constructive principles are treated in well-nigh exhaustive depth (see Baker, 1976). Koch’s melodic theories pay particular attention to periodicity, taking as a starting-point the notion of the four-bar phrase, and treating its conjunction to other phrases in exact symmetrical relation as axiomatic in composition. Symmetry, to Koch, was naturally pleasing, even suggestive of an ideal ‘order’. Phrases were most effectively grouped in larger paragraphs and, in turn, in balancing sections: most famously, this type of step-by-step extension is illustrated by an eight-bar minuet, expanded to 32 bars by such techniques as repetition, repetition in sequence, phrase insertion, interruption and the multiplication of phrase-endings and of cadences, either half- or full (see Sisman, 1982). The systematic extension of this fundamental principle leads to a discussion of the main outline divisions within a movement in which tonal - rather than thematic - factors play a major role in the conception. Neither melody nor harmony was of absolute primary significance in music, according to Koch (although each could temporarily take primacy within a phrase). Rather, key, or mode, is its primary substance (Koch calls it ‘Urstoff ’ - see Baker, 1988). The Versuch contains a great many musical examples by Koch himself, but is notable for its reference to recent or contemporary compositions including excerpts from Haydn symphonies, and keyboard sonatas and concertos by C. P. E. Bach. He also lavished praise on Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets (published in 1785). Koch’s other major contribution to music theory was the Musikalisches Lexicon (Koch, 1802) organised, as its name suggests, more as an inventory of terms rather than as a discursive discussion. Koch’s aesthetics is indebted to the work of Batteux (Batteux, 1746) and Sulzer (Sulzer, 1771; Baker and Christensen, 1996), namely that the purpose of music (indeed, of the fine arts generally) was to awaken feelings in the listeners so as to inspire them to noble deeds.¹ Both the Versuch and the Lexicon influenced early-nineteenth-century theorists such as Gottfried Weber, though as the century progressed, the work of Reicha, Czerny and Marx tended to accord a greater role to theme in the representation of structure than had characterised Koch’s work.²

Koch approached the concerto twice in his widely influential published writings. The more extended treatment appears in the third and final volume (1793) of the Versuch (Koch, 1782–83, iii, §120; Baker, 1983, pp.210–12; Baker and Christensen, 1996, pp.132–3, 153–4 ; 175–6). A briefer account, drawn essentially from the description originally printed in the Versuch, occurs in the Lexicon (Koch, 1802, columns 349–55). Probably Koch knew none of Mozart’s piano concertos in the 1780s and early 1790s when he was compiling and publishing the Versuch; indeed, to begin with, his structural ideal in the concerto genre was represented by the work of C. P. E. Bach.³ But by 1802, when the Lexicon was published, Mozart’s work had come to represent for Koch the epitome of what was achievable within the concerto genre, and he generously concluded his description of the concerto by describing Mozart’s examples as masterpieces representative of all of the characteristics of a good concerto.⁴ A review of Koch’s survey of the solo concerto therefore seems appropriate in a study of Mozart’s piano concertos.

Koch and the concerto genre

Koch tells us that a concerto is a three-movement structure, consisting of two Allegros and a central Adagio, which ‘can assume every mood which music is capable of expressing. It is that piece with which the virtuosos usually may be heard on their instrument’ (Baker, 1983, p.208). He goes on to affirm that it is only possible to write an effective concerto for an instrument which one plays oneself. In these general areas Koch is in agreement with Daniel Gottlob Türk’s description of the concerto in his Clavierschule (Türk, 1789; Haggh, 1982, iv, §27).⁵ Whereas Koch deals with the first movement at considerable length, the slow movement and finale are dismissed in two and one paragraphs, respectively (Baker and Christensen, 1996, pp.212–13). He differs in his assessment of the concerto from his mentor, Johann Georg Sulzer, author of the important Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig, 1771–4; Baker and Christensen, 1996), whose views on music (and the arts more generally) he usually takes over verbatim both here in the Versuch and in the later Musikalisches Lexicon. Sulzer’s opinion of the concerto was not high: ‘basically nothing but an exercise for composer and player and an entirely indeterminate pleasure for the ear, aiming at nothing more’ (Sulzer, 1771, i, p.229). Koch believed that this view was unfair:

But consider a well-worked-out concerto [movement] in which, during the solo, the accompanying voices are not merely there to sound this or that missing interval of the chords between the soprano and bass. There is a passionate dialogue between the concerto player and the accompanying orchestra. He expresses his feelings to the orchestra, and it signals him through short interspersed phrases sometimes approval, sometimes acceptance of his noble feelings ... now it commiserates, now it comforts him in the adagio. In short, by a concerto I imagine something similar to a tragedy of the ancients, where the actor expresses his feelings not towards the pit [meaning the audience], but to the chorus [which, in a Greek tragedy, stood between the actor and the audience in a section of the theatre known as the ‘orchestra’]. The chorus was involved most closely with the action and was at the same time justified in participating in the expression of feelings. Then the listener, without losing anything, is just the third person who can take part in the passionate performance of the concerto player and the accompanying orchestra (Koch, 1782–93, iii, §119; Baker, 1983,p.209).

Subsequently Koch draws the same analogy between concerto and tragedy in the Lexicon. Central to Koch’s model is the implication that the chorus in the ancient Greek tragedies of, for example, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides was analogous to the tutti in the classical concerto, and functioned as a ‘mediator’ between actor (soloist) and audience. Evidently Koch felt that the interaction of a soloist and orchestra in the concerto paralleled to some degree that of actor and a chorus in the tragedy (Keefe, 1998; Keefe, 2001; Schulenberg, 1984, pp.28, 133). Probably he intended his analogy only in general terms and not as a direct parallel to the actual structure of classical Greek tragedy. For instance, a scene within a tragedy unfolds diachronically, reaching forwards in time from one defined situation to another. In the tragedy as a whole, the end-point in this diachronic progression involves the resolution of the intertwined threads of the plot. Obviously, the unfolding of a concerto movement (or even an entire three-movement work) does not literally parallel the narrative unfolding of a scene within a tragedy. For example, there are frequent reprises of some themes, acting as articulating moments in the musical form;⁶ the tutti and soloist frequently share the same material (not commonly a feature of tragedy); and the tutti’s role within the concerto is not restricted to self-contained segments, for instance, but invades solo episodes too, sometimes engaging in dialogue with the soloist.

Central to late-eighteenth-century understanding of the tragedy was Aristotle’s portrayal of the genre in the Poetics (Ars Poetica), a treatise central to the developing tradition of art criticism since the renaissance. Despite a growing contemporary awareness of the doctrines of Plato (specifically the Republic, but also Ion and Phaedrus) and an increasing interest in the notion of the Sublime, gained largely through Boileau’s 1674 translation of the classical treatise, On the Sublime,⁷ Aristotle’s description of the tragic genre remained the classic textbook account of the manner in which an individual and a group interact in the presentation of dramatic ideas.⁸ Within the Greek tragedy, the function of the chorus is often to comment on the progress of the drama, and the manner in which the distinction is drawn depends largely on the opposition of different metres: iambic trimeters in which the actor usually speaks (advancing the drama) and lyric metres for the chorus, mapped out in broad strophes and antistrophes, tending towards stasis (reflecting on the situation).⁹ Contrasting metres (iambic and lyric) thus encode different dramatic attributes: the episodes for the actor sustain the plot’s forward momentum, while the chorus provides punctuating stasima. The strict opposition between epeisodia (scenes for one or more actors) and stasima diminished somewhat during the evolution of the tragic genre, especially in the work of Euripides, who introduced a greater variety of metres, breaking down the stylistic distinction between chorus and actor. While tragedy and concerto each unfold in an episodic manner, alternating ‘tuttis’ and ‘solos’, there is an important distinction to be made, for within the Mozart piano concerto, textural opposition and similarity coexist, involving actual sharing of material between solo and tutti on the one hand (as found, for instance, throughout much of the first movement of K.491), and extreme contrast on the other (for instance in the frequent virtuosic episodes within the first movements of K.450 in B flat and K.451 in D). Insofar as there is a generic correspondence between tragedy and concerto, Mozart’s concertos, with their closer mingling of tutti and chorus, come closer to the tragedies of Euripides than those of Aeschylus, which separate the roles of chorus and actor rather rigidly in their contrast of metres - a stylistic trait keenly observed in Aristophanes’s comedy, The Frogs.¹⁰ An example of Euripides’s metrical flexibility within a solo speech is to be found in the monody of the Phrygian in Orestes, a long speech, mixing during its course a variety of metres (anapests, cretics, bacchics, iambic dimeters and dochmiacs), punctuated on several occasions by the chorus which, however, retains its iambic trimeters throughout. Euripides applies his command of metre in order to delineate clearly the respective roles of the Phrygian and the chorus, whose identities derive from a deliberate contrast of ‘dynamic’ and ‘static’ metres - an especially satisfying case of technique applied in the service of genre.¹¹ A similar approach to the relation of solo and tutti is found in some movements of Mozart’s piano concertos. As in the case of Euripedes’s Orestes just discussed, the specific identities are defined by the appropriate application of a technique, in this case by contrasting a pronounced flexibility of phraseology within solo episodes against a somewhat ‘squarer’ profile in the surrounding tuttis. As an illustration of this practice, we may take the Siciliana from the Adagio of the A major concerto, K.488. It begins by setting out the solo and tutti paragraphs in opposition: an Unsupported solo phrase is answered by the tutti, which, in turn, gives way once again to the solo (the two are not heard in combination until bar 25). Within such a structure the individual characteristics of solo and tutti emerge clearly and whereas the solo’s opening ten-bar phrase unfolds as a theme and accompaniment, whose scansion moves exclusively from ‘strong’ (first beat) to ‘weak’ (second beat) in a clear periodic balance, the tutti’s answer is contrasting in both respects. It features shorter, fragmentary phrase-units which overlap in counterpoint, so that, while its statement is actually eight bars long, it is seamlessly woven, mixing together different scansions, rather than being cadentially ‘rhymed’. In its next episode the solo’s phrasing becomes more sophisticated. Its opening turn figure gives it an ‘upbeat’ scansion, in contrast to the ‘downbeat’ scansion of the previous material. In particular, the shape of the melodic line gives prominence to the repeated treble A on the second beat, which progressively acquires an accentual stress greater than the first beat. The scansion throughout this phrase is thus weak-strong. It begins with periodic balance (bars 20–2 feature a four-beat unit, symmetrically answered in bars 22–4). Bars 24–6 (highlighted by the piano entry of the tutti) sound like a predictable continuation of this even-numbered scheme, but during the ensuing phrase there is a subtle gear-change. By the beginning of bar 28 the first beat of the bar has regained its natural stress (partly for harmonic reasons), reinforced by the entry of the horns in octaves. From this point there is a contrasting periodic balance, strong-weak, up to the next tutti entry in bar 35. This merging of different scansions within the episode is to some degree an adaptation of the solo’s ‘character’ to that of the tutti. It retains the function of a ‘dynamic’ solo episode, though, in that it is here that the decisive modulation (to the relative major, A) is achieved.

Idiosyncratic phraseology is likewise a defining characteristic of the solo episode beginning at bar 49 of the Larghetto of K.595 in B flat. In contrast to regular four- and eight-bar periodicity earlier in the movement, it features a shift to five-bar phrases at bars 49–58 (the second phrase is a decorated reprise of the first), and further irregularities follow. Bars 603–622 begin as a decorated repeat of 583–602, but are extended into a six-bar pattern, clinching a modulation into G flat (and subsequently V/E flat, preparing the later reprise at bar 82). This episode is quite consistent in itself; all the phrase irregularities are achieved by ‘internal’ repetition of a melodic element (the phrase beginning at bar 49, for instance, is extended by sequential repetition of the falling scale steps of bar 501 in bar 51). The result, however, is a contrasting ‘dynamic’ as opposed to ‘static’ effect, which marks out the episode from its surroundings.

It should be reiterated, finally, that the purpose of this section is purely to investigate one way in which late-eighteenth-century criticism attempted to deal with observable differences (perhaps encoded in contrasting phraseologies) between the kind of discourse pursued by the soloist and that of the tutti. It is not proposed that the first movement form operates as a ‘tragedy’ in the sense that it unfolds a specific narrative. If there is a narrative here, then that narr...