Mozart. The Piano [2].

Das Klavier, part 2.  From: Mozart. Sein Charakter, sein Werk, by Alfred Einstein. (Zürich, Stuttgart 31953, S. 275-291. Permalink: www.zeno.org. Lizenz: Verwaist. Kategorien: Musik.)

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In this excerpt, Einstein discusses the emergence of Mozart’s piano composition style. Early sources and models appear, along with influential later figures like Haydn and J.C. Bach. The principal works covered are the six piano sonatas, K. 279-284.

(Part one of this series on Mozart’s piano compositions can be found here.)

(Free) scores and recordings are available online for these works. For example, on YouTube, the first movement of the sonata in D major, K. 284, with the score and performance synchronized: www.youtube.com – sonata in D. There are other links to recordings in the main text below.

One can also find scores and recordings online in the excellent Digital Mozart Edition. (A Project of the Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg and the Packard Humanities Institute.)

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Mozart. The Piano [2].

In early 1775 Mozart wrote six sonatas (K. 279-284), five in Salzburg, and one in Munich. These sonatas were intended for publishing as a set, shown by the planned selection of keys: C, F, B-flat, E-flat, G, D. Mozart moved first from the central key down three fifths, then two fifths upward. Only one was later published, though, and we look to see the reason. We understand when look back to Mozart’s piano sonata ideal, and remember its development in later works; with the sonatas in B-flat (K.333), c minor (K.457), B-flat (K.570), and D (K.576). His constellation of models also makes this clear: Italy-Paris-Hamburg-London; or Italian and French masters, then Carl Philipp Emanual (C.P.E.) and Johann Christian (J.C.) Bach.

Mozart received his earliest piano sonata impressions from a collection by the Nuremburg lutenist and publisher Johann Ulrich Haffner. These appeared in twelve parts in 1760, “making the works known with an especially attractive printing” (Gerber, Altes Lexikon). One supposes the entire collection was in the Mozart home. The main part contained Italian works: Galuppi, Pampani, Perotti, Pescetti, Rutini, Serini, Paganelli, Paladini, Sales, Chiarini, Sammartini, and G. Scarlatti. German names only appeared later, such as Krafft, Fasch, Krause, Marpurg, Kirnberger, Rackemann, Roth, and above all C.P.E. Bach.

Mozart was strongly inclined toward the Italian side, with their light, charming, and unburdened art – pure “Rococo”; full of high spirits and graceful figuration. This reached a kind of end, however, as Mozart became acquainted with Schobert and his contemporaries in Paris. The piano composition type for enthusiasts in Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna was different from the Italian – and one had to compose in this other manner or form.

Rutini, whose works also appeared in the Haffner collection, was recommended in letters by the Mozarts, (yet) declined around 1770 toward “simplicity”; in truth, toward superficiality. This might be due to the influence of Rousseau and the “return to nature”. Nothing is more descriptive for the style of these works than the letter of February 18, 1771, written by Pietro Metastasio as thanks for receiving Rutini’s op. 7:

“Dear Sir: I acknowledge the gracious Signor Rutini again, with all due respect, for giving me his piano sonatas. In them I have enjoyed not just their clear, fine, and correct harmony, but especially admired the skill of conception; so that attractiveness is combined with deftness of composition. In this the student is drawn to enjoyable practice, where difficulties that might discourage them are concealed…”

Mozart did not write such “light” sonatas; or when he did, he marked them this way, i.e. the “Small Piano Sonatas for Beginners” (K.545), from 1788. It is true today, however, that his sonatas are misused as materials for students at the beginning of their studies. Metastasio’s praise, in a deeper sense, is far more fitting for Mozart’s sonatas than Rutini’s. Yet for the combination of attractiveness and deft execution, Mozart’s model was not Rutini, or another Italian; or C.P.E. Bach, whose basic disposition must have been repellent. He found his model in J.C. Bach.

It is strange, and in a certain sense a pedagogical misfortune, that the six piano sonatas of 1774/75 do not form a clear and unified view of Mozart – as they are, for every young keyboard student, the beginning point of their acquaintance with his work. These works offer a microcosm of feeling and refined form, but in a complex way. It is like wanting to develop acquaintance with Wagner, starting with “Die Feen” or “Das Liebesverbot” – but instead offering “Lohengrin” and the Faust Overture.

[Note: Die Feen (The Fairies) 1834, Wagner’s first opera. Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love) 1836, was the second. The opera Lohengrin (1847) and the instrumental Faust Overture (1840) were then later and contrasting as vocal versus instrumental works.]

Mozart is still, in any case, more Mozart in these six sonatas than Wagner in the youthful works just noted. Yet they are in part – to use an expression from astronomy – an aberration from his path [Bahn]. This is like the group of string quartets, of Vienna in 1773; and the responsibility lies again with Joseph Haydn – or of C.P.E. Bach in Haydn’s formulation.

Haydn wrote six sonatas in 1773, which appeared as printed works the following year (Op.13). Mozart could have easily become familiar with them during his Vienna stay. Thus we find Mozart’s sonata in F (K. 280) modelled on Haydn’s work of the same key; and also the sonata in E-flat (K. 282), where not only the finale is “Haydnesque”, but the whole is infiltrated with Haydn’s irregularity and subjectivity. In these works, Mozart is not really himself. He would have to find himself again. There is the point, however, that even when not completely himself, he is always a born pianist. Haydn, rather, was a born symphonist, or composer of quartets.

How often, in Haydn’s piano writing, one sense the transposing from another instrumental sphere, whereas by Mozart everything flows with (pure) pianistic finesse! This is shown in the first sonata of this group, in C (K. 279), written before the “aberration” that followed [K. 280-282]. The C major sonata suggests improvisation; and brings out the instrument’s potential and character with real spirit. This must be how young Mozart played, when improvising a sonata in a favorable circumstance. When other composers have ordered their ideas, they repeat this in the reprise; but here one finds nothing mechanical. In Mozart’s imaginative manner there is continuous variation of details, as with the dynamics of the otherwise thoroughly “Italian” andante. And in the B-flat sonata (K. 281), where the first two movements might be called more Haydnesque than Haydn, the final movement awakens, suddenly, as purely Mozartian. Not only is Haydn forgotten, but J.C. Bach too. So if this rondo, with its modestly concerto-like manner and melodic grace, was not so securely dated – we would place it ten years later, in the Vienna period. The fifth sonata too, at least, shows Mozart returning to his own path (K. 283, G major). This path reflects J.C. Bach, more than C.P.E. Bach. In the presto finale, there is a richness of pianistic invention one rarely if ever finds in the works of Haydn.

The last sonata of this set is in many ways an independent work (D major, K. 284). Composed for the music enthusiast Baron von Dürnitz, of Munich, it appeared in February or March of 1775. The first movement beginning has two versions: one, a version that approximates the style of the previous sonatas; the second, with a rather different, more brilliant “French” character. Either the patron must have asked for the second version, or Mozart was personally compelled – after having a personal or musical experience, that led him rather suddenly to a new and higher level. What was this experience? We do not know, but a passage from a letter of October 17/18, 1777, might shed some light.

Mozart wrote there that his sonata in D “comes forth in an incomparable way from the piano made by Stein.” We note that Stein’s oracle and authority in piano performance was Captain von Beecke, famous for his “heavy” sonatas – which Mozart also found somewhat heavy, if also “fairly miserable” – and thus well known to the Mozarts. That is then one possibility; but can we not, also, consider the idea of the “favorable hour”, or special circumstance in the life of such a gifted individual – without which artistic progress would not be possible?

In any case, after this yet “Italianate” first movement, we have a Polonaise en rondeau, where each time the rondo theme returns, it is more richly elaborated. Following this middle movement, for the first time in Mozart’s piano sonatas, a theme with variations. The entire sonata, including the rewritten first movement, reflects a sensuous fullness, a concerto-like liveliness, that is always surprising and wondrous. The fullness of sound and coherence of the variations, above all, reflect this character of wondrous innovation. Mozart wrote piano variations in previous years, often serving as pieces for virtuosic display: the variations based on an arietta by Salieri (K. 180), from 1773; the so-named Fischer variations (K. 179), from 1774. Yet these works seem merely attractive or brilliant, in comparison with this richness of continuous invention; where also (for the first time) a variation in minor appears, introducing chromaticism, which does not in any way detract from the somewhat dated and (at times) overextended adagio variations of previous compositions.

The six sonatas served in Mozart’s repertoire as a virtuoso soloist for a surprisingly long time – even the weaker pieces. He performed all of them repeatedly on the long journey of 1777/78 to Mannheim and Paris. Yet while in Mannheim the need arose to expand his repertoire, and so from November 1777 to late summer 1778 he composed seven new sonatas. These new works were no less individual and kaleidoscopic than the previous group…

[To be continued.]

Translation by Edward Eggleston.