Mozart's Viennese Instrumental Music

INSTRUMENTAL MUSICA Study of Stylistic Re-Invention

MOZARTS VIENNESE

SIMON P. KEEFE

Mozarts Viennese Instrumental MusicA STUDY OF STYLISTIC RE-INVENTION

Mozarts Viennese Instrumental MusicA STUDY OF STYLISTIC RE-INVENTION

Simon P. Keefe

THE BOYDELL PRESS

Simon P. Keefe 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Simon P. Keefe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2007 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 9781843833192

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paperTypeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

List of Musical Examples List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Mozart and Stylistic Re-Invention

vii ix xi 1

I. PIANO CONCERTOS 1. An Entirely Special Manner: Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb, K. 449, and the Stylistic Implications of Confrontation K. 449 as a hybrid of Mozarts 178283 and spring 1784 concertos The stylistic implications of confrontation in K. 449 On the Grand, Brilliant and Intimate: Mozarts Piano Concertos K. 450 K. 503 (178486) Grandeur, intimacy and brilliance in late eighteenth-century concerto criticism Grandeur, brilliance and intimacy in Mozarts piano concertos Mozarts piano concertos K. 450503 (178486) K. 449 re-visited K. 491 and K. 503 A Complementary Pair: Stylistic Experimentation in Mozarts Final Piano Concertos, No. 26 in D, K. 537 (the Coronation), and No. 27 in Bb, K. 595 Stylistic experimentation in the first movements of K. 537 and 595 Mozarts stylistic experimentation in context K. 491 re-visited

19 25 34

2.

43 44 47 49 53 55

3.

64 68 77 80

II. STRING QUARTETS 4. An Integrated Dissonance: Mozarts Haydn Quartets and the Slow Introduction of K. 465 K. 465/i and the Haydn set K. 465s slow introduction as peroration Mozarts Prussian Quartets, K. 575, 589 and 590: Towards a New Aesthetic of the String Quartet Musical contrast in the Prussian quartets K. 465 re-visited The Prussian quartets in musical and aesthetic context

89 94 102

5.

105 107 121 123

III. SYMPHONIES 6. The Jupiter Symphony in C, K. 551: The Dramatic Finale and its Stylistic Significance in Mozarts Orchestral Oeuvre The Jupiter finale: reception and context Dramatic dialogue and the late eighteenth-century symphony Dramatic dialogue in the Jupiter finale The stylistic significance of the Jupiter finale in Mozarts oeuvre

137 139 144 152 160

IV. CONCLUSIONS 7. Mozarts Stylistic Re-Invention in Musical Context The Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452 The piano quartets The piano trios, Kegelstatt trio and string trio The piano sonatas and violin sonatas Conclusion: the process of re-invention 167 169 174 177 182 188

Bibliography Index of Mozarts Works by Kchel Number Index of Mozarts Works by Genre General Index

201 211 213 215

Musical Examples

1.1

Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb, K. 449, 1st movement, bars 22845 1.2 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K. 414, 1st movement, bars 19195 1.3 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 13 in C, K. 415, 1st movement, bars 189201 1.4 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 15 in Bb, K. 450, 1st movement, bars 18698 1.5 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb, K. 449, 1st movement, bars 18896 1.6 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 16 in D, K. 451, 1st movement, bars 187201 1.7 Mozart, String Quartet in G, K. 387, 4th movement, bars 22133 2.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491, 1st movement, bars 32946 2.2 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K. 503, 1st movement, bars 11626 3.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, K. 537, 1st movement, bars 17889 3.2 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, K. 537, 1st movement, bars 395401 3.3 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 27 in Bb, K. 595, 1st movement, bars 185204 3.4 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 27 in Bb, K. 595, 1st movement, bars 33842 3.5 Mozart, Symphony in G minor, K. 550, 1st movement, bars 99105 3.6 Mozart, Symphony in G minor, K. 550, 4th movement, bars 12535 3.7 Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 26 in D, K. 537, 3rd movement, bars 18488 4.1 Mozart, String Quartet in C, K. 465, 1st movement, bars 15 4.2 Mozart, String Quartet in Eb, K. 428, 1st movement, bars 6976 4.3 Mozart, String Quartet in Eb, K. 428, 2nd movement, bars 458 4.4 Mozart, String Quartet in Bb, K. 458, 3rd movement, bars 1416 4.5a Mozart, String Quartet in C, K. 465, 1st movement, bars 1316 4.5b Mozart, String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, 1st movement, bars 656 4.6 Mozart, String Quartet in G, K. 387, 3rd movement, bars 5862

26 27 28 29 31 32 41 57 60 70 71 73 76 78 78 80 91 99 99 100 101 101 101

viii5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 7.1

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Mozart, String Quartet in F, K. 590, 1st movement, bars 928 112 Mozart, String Quartet in F, K. 590, 1st movement, bars 18698 113 Mozart, String Quartet in Bb, K. 589, 3rd movement, bars 6077 114 Mozart, String Quartet in D, K. 575, 3rd movement, bars 3148 11415 Mozart, String Quartet in F, K. 590, 3rd movement, bars 1542 11516 Mozart String Quartet in F, K. 590, 4th movement, bars 13288 11920 Mozart, String Quintet in C, K. 515, 2nd movement, bars 5768 127 Mozart, String Quintet in Eb, K. 614, 1st movement, bars 87106 133 Mozart, Quintet for Piano and Winds in Eb, K. 452, 2nd movement, bars 104109 173 7.2 Mozart, Piano Quartet in Eb, K. 493, 1st movement, bars 10617 176 7.3 Mozart, Piano Trio in G, K. 496, 1st movement, bars 7788 179 7.4 Mozart, Piano Trio in C, K. 548, 2nd movement, bars 317 180 7.5 Mozart, Kegelstatt Trio in Eb, K. 498, 2nd movement, bars 7782 181 7.6 Mozart, Piano Trio in E, K. 542, 1st movement, bars 12437 182 7.7 Mozart, Piano Trio in G, K. 564, 1st movement, bars 4953 183 7.8 Mozart, Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457, 1st movement, bars 16876 184 7.9 Mozart, Tradito, schernito from Cos fan tutte, K. 588, bars 2943 195 7.10 Mozart, Concert Aria for Soprano, Piano and Orchestra, Chio mi scordi di te, K. 505, bars 6570 198

Figures

4.1 6.1 7.1

The tonal and formal arrangement of the Haydn quartets Dialogue in the Finale of K. 551 Symmetrical distributions of dialogue in the slow introduction, exposition and recapitulation of K. 452/i

96 15355 172

For Celia, Abraham and Madeleine

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Queens University Belfast for granting me sabbatical leave in spring 2002 to carry out initial work on two chapters of this book, and to colleagues at City University London (2003 ) for promoting and supporting a vibrant research culture. My Mozart-related dialogues with Cliff Eisen are a continual source of inspiration, and our even more frequent conversations about English footballs Premiership (especially the relative merits of Aston Villa and Arsenal) a most welcome distraction from the rigours of academic work. My warmest thanks are reserved for my family Robert and Virginia Hurwitz, Terry, Sheila and Rosanna Keefe, and my grandmother, Laura Keefe, in anticipation of her 100th birthday in August 2007. To my wife, Celia, and children Abraham and Madeleine, I owe far more than traditional avowals of love and respect can express. I dedicate this book to them, remembering the wonderful experiences of times past and looking forward to the years ahead. I am grateful to the following for permission to reprint versions of my previously published work, revised to incorporate new material: Oxford University Press for An Entirely Special Manner: Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb K. 449 and the Stylistic Implications of Confrontation, Music & Letters, 82 (2001), pp. 55981; the University of California Press for A Complementary Pair: Stylistic Experimentation in Mozarts Final Piano Concertos, K. 537 in D and K. 595 in Bb, The Journal of Musicology, 18 (2001), pp. 65884; Brenreiter-Verlag Kassel for An Integrated Dissonance: Mozarts Haydn Quartets and the Slow Introduction of K. 465, Mozart-Jahrbuch 2002, pp. 87103; and BrenreiterVerlag Kassel for The Jupiter Symphony in C, K. 551: New Perspectives on the Dramatic Finale and its Stylistic Significance in Mozarts Orchestral oeuvre, Acta musicologica, 75 (2003), pp. 1743. Simon P. Keefe City University London 5 October 2006

Introduction Mozart and Stylistic Re-Invention

The extraordinary popularity of Mozarts works composed during his years in Vienna (178191) is a product of, and a factor contributing towards, the intense public fascination with the man and his music. Scholarly attention to Mozart, no less remarkable in volume and intensity, is also motivated by, and is a motivating factor for, the continued allure of his music as a topic for intellectual investigation. The explosion of secondary literature on Mozart in the last fifty years or so, in musicological sub-disciplines as diverse as source studies, history and context, gender studies, and music analysis (to name but a few major areas), sets the composer in as sharp a critical perspective, perhaps, as any composer before or since. Such fertile scholarly investigation, of course, feeds an insatiable scholarly appetite the more information and interpretation we are afforded, the more we crave. Equally and perhaps more surprisingly the proliferation of diverse standpoints, methodologies and approaches leaves major areas of Mozart scholarship, and basic questions about his music, conspicuously under-represented, or even misrepresented. One fundamental area of investigation eliciting little systematic attention in recent years and one that will provide the focus for this monograph is the development of Mozarts instrumental style in his Viennese works of 178191. While the absence of up-to-date book-length volumes focussing on stylistic development that traverse the generic boundaries of Mozarts instrumental output may not be significant in itself, the absence becomes more striking when recent advances in our collective appreciation of the aesthetic and historical contexts of Mozarts Viennese works are factored into the equation.1 Study of the

1

Important book-length studies in English include: Elaine R. Sisman, Mozart: The Jupiter Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Neal Zaslaw, Mozarts Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); David Schroeder, Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999); John Irving, Mozarts Piano Sonatas: Contexts, Sources, Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Robert W. Gutman, Mozart: A Cultural Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Andrew Steptoe, The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural and Musical Background of Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cos fan tutte (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Daniel Heartz, Mozarts Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozarts Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Mary Hunter and

2

INTRODUCTION

stylistic evolution of Mozarts Viennese instrumental repertory as a whole has yet to benefit substantially from expanded knowledge of late eighteenth-century aesthetic and compositional contexts; the time is right, therefore, for an extended stylistic investigation that is closely tied to historical and contextual lines of enquiry. Ultimately, this approach will enable us to probe a series of far-reaching issues hitherto represented in only haphazard, impressionistic or otherwise limited fashions for Mozarts 178191 works in total that have a fundamental impact upon our appreciation of Mozarts Viennese instrumental repertory. Where do apparently original instrumental works or movements (in the context of Mozarts canon) stand in relation to contemporary aesthetic trends, and how do the works or movements in question relate to Mozarts preceding and succeeding works in the same genre and his contemporary works in other genres? To what phenomena aesthetic or otherwise can stylistic changes in works from the composers final years be attributed (assuming stylistic changes can be demonstrated in the first place)? How do musical, contextual and aesthetic considerations bear witness to the exceptional stylistic gravitas and climactic status of certain works? And, to what extent is stylistic development in Mozarts oeuvre an inter-generic, and to what extent an intra-generic phenomenon? Studies of an individual composers style, irrespective of historical period or methodological orientation, must always account, of course, for normative and individualistic musical practices. Even a cursory survey of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century dictionary entries on style an important barometer of prevailing contemporary opinion reveals that classical writers are just as aware of this fact as preceding and succeeding generations of theorists, historians and aestheticians. J.J.O. de Meude-Monpass claim in the Dictionnaire de musique (1787) that style denotes expression peculiar to each individual presumes both expressive norms and departures from these norms.2 Equally, Jrme-Joseph de Momignys assertion in the Encyclopdie mthodique: musique that every piece by a great composer will have something that makes their style and their manner recognizable, along with John Hoyles and Daniel Gottlieb Trks remarks that one speaks of the Bach manner, the Benda manner, the Gluck manner, the Haydn manner, and so on, implicitly acknowledges the mutual dependence of the general and the idiosyncratic for understanding style.3 Heinrich Christoph Kochs brief, incisive definition of style in the Musikalisches Lexikon (1802) neatly links the general and the characteristic components of style to the numerous dimensions assigned to style (according to level, function, genre, nationality and topical implication) in late eighteenth-century discourse. Consideration of the mostJames Webster, eds., Opera Buffa in Mozarts Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Meude-Monpas, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1787; reprint Geneva: Minkoff, 1981), p. 192. Momigny, Style, in Encyclopdie mthodique: musique, vol. 2, ed. Pierre-Louis Ginguen, Nicholas-Etienne Framery and Momigny (Paris, 1791 and 1818), p. 400; Hoyle, Style, in A Complete Dictionary of Music (London, 1791), p. 242; Trk, School of Clavier Playing (1789), trans. Raymond H. Haagh (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 399.

2 3

MOZART AND STYLISTIC RE-INVENTION

3

important elements of a work establishes its important characteristic features, which are classifiable in two ways and lead in two directions: an assessment of the diversity of the treatment of artistic materials, through which passions are expressed, points towards two stylistic levels, the strict and the free; and an evaluation of the passions themselves has an impact upon stylistic function, namely whether a piece belongs to the church, the theatre or the chamber style.4 For the most part, the relationship between Mozarts instrumental repertory as a whole and earlier and contemporary stylistic practices and musical trends has been well served by the secondary literature. Indeed, it could be said that the principal strategy for delineating Mozarts style in general has remained more-or-less unchanged, albeit considerably refined, since Otto Jahns monumental biography of the composer in the mid nineteenth century, and involves a determination of what Mozart was taught, what he learned from other composers and where he stands in eighteenth-century musical-historical terms.5 The single most important landmark in this respect is Georges de Saint-Foix and Thodore de Wyzewas epic Mozart: sa vie musicale et son oeuvre (5 volumes, 191246), intensely rigorous and systematic in its division of Mozarts work into 36 periods, in its relentless search for influences on the composer and in its determined expos of Mozart as a historical pinnacle in musical-stylistic terms. Richly detailed and analytically sophisticated though the volumes are (in the context of early twentieth-century Mozart criticism), they cannot ultimately answer the oft-cited criticism of procedural abstraction. Since influences of one kind or another account for almost every compositional element in Mozarts works according to Saint-Foix and Wyzewa, we are presented ultimately with a closed system which detaches itself not only from the work as a whole and from the intentions and the individuality of the artist, but also from the influences, which may have come from outside the musical data themselves.6 While Saint-Foix and Wyzewas magnum opus suffers from an over-wrought and tendentious line of stylistic enquiry, life-and-works studies of Mozart have traditionally painted with a broad brush where stylistic issues are concerned, incorporating relatively little critical or analytical detail in justifying assertions made about the stylistic evolution of Mozarts music.7 Konrad Ksters Mozart: A Musical Biography redresses the standard imbalance in favour of life-based rather than work-based issues in an extended, chronologically arranged survey of isolated works and groups of works from the beginning to the end of Mozarts compositional career. Ksters individual studies are admirably lucid and refreshingly free of methodological axe-grinding, but collectively fail to uncover in an

4 5 6 7

Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt, 1802; reprint Hildesheim: Goerg Olms, 1964), col. 1451. Gernot Gruber, Mozart Verstehen: ein Versuch (Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1990), p. 121. Gernot Gruber, Mozart and Posterity, trans. R.S. Furness (London: Quartet Books, 1991), p. 194. Two notable exceptions are the classic twentieth-century biographies by Hermann Abert ostensibly a revision of Jahn and Alfred Einstein, both of which contain substantial musical-stylistic discussion.

4

INTRODUCTION

explicit fashion underlying strategies that govern the development of Mozarts style over extended periods. To be sure, Ksters volume has no pretensions to being a stylistic study per se; indeed, its fundamental concern for the artistic development which cannot be separated from the life8 puts it firmly in the mainstream biographical tradition, albeit with a welcome and long overdue emphasis upon Mozarts music. If Kster and Saint Foix / Wyzewa unwittingly demonstrate that musically based biographies are apparently not a suitable place for an over-arching thesis (or theses) about the evolution of Mozarts style, in what type of study should we engage, and in what ways should our study be orientated, in order to develop such a thesis? A crucial element in the stylistic analysis of Mozarts music, yet to receive the systematic attention it deserves and especially relevant to the music of his Viennese period, is the extent to which certain movements represent an original stylistic approach in relation to Mozarts own earlier practices. As Gernot Gruber explains, Mozarts originality is often either inadvertently (or deliberately) marginalized in stylistic studies since writers have preferred to consider his music in relation to the music of his predecessors or is simply discussed in an uncritical or reverential fashion. But if we begin from the perspective that Mozarts music is categorically different to that of his predecessors, Gruber continues, we no longer obligate ourselves to frame a consideration of his style in relation to that of his compositional antecedents.9 Even if we side-step broad claims about Mozarts compositional uniqueness in historical-stylistic terms, we can acknowledge that the study of seemingly original, innovative works judged in relation to his Viennese instrumental canon as a whole and situated in appropriate musical and aesthetic contexts could help explain how, why and in what ways Mozarts instrumental music evolved in the last decade of his life. The aesthetic concept of originality, closely linked to that of creative genius and supplanting earlier fixation with compositional correctness, takes centre stage in reviews of instrumental music in Germanic music magazines and scholarly review journals from the 1770s and 1780s, lending hermeneutic weight to discussion of originality in Mozarts Viennese instrumental repertory. Creative genius and originality are manifest, for example, in vaguely defined novel ideas, . . . witty turns of phrase, . . . modulatory ingenuity, and . . . imaginatively varied melodic structure and once Haydn and C.P.E. Bach in particular acquire an exalted status require bold, conspicuous and unanticipated writing.10 More explicit theoretical debate from the mid eighteenth century onwards sees originality explained either as innate, introspective and self expressive (Edward Young through Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann

8 9 10

Kster, Mozart: A Musical Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. ix. Gruber, Mozart Verstehen, pp. 12728. See Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially pp. 99133. (Quotation from p. 123.)


5

Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Georg Sulzer) or as process- rather than product-driven (Alexander Gerard and Immanuel Kant).11 References to Mozarts originality during his decade in Vienna fit comfortably into these aesthetic contexts. Stylistic boldness is often associated with the overwhelming momentum his music conveys. Mozart is praised in 1785 for great . . . original . . . compositions and for a piano concerto displaying a wealth of ideas . . . variety . . . and contrasts in passionate sounds: One swims away with him unresistingly on the stream of his emotions.12 In 1790 his great genius is said to [embrace] so to speak, the whole extent of the art of music, his works representing a river in spate which carries along with it every stream that approaches it.13 And in 1791 Bernhard Anselm Weber, finding the greatest possible originality in Mozarts linking of profound knowledge of the art with the happiest talent for inventing lovely melodies, explains: Nowhere in his work does one ever find an idea one had heard before: even his accompaniments are always novel. One is, as it were, incessantly pulled along from one notion to another, without rest or repose, so that admiration of the latest constantly swallows up admiration for what has gone before.14 Writers in the 1780s are collectively undecided about whether the putatively overwhelming nature of Mozarts original ideas is positive or negative; in some circles, indeed, criticism of this aspect of Mozarts musical personality becomes a scholarly tick, even if faults themselves are worthy of praise.15 At any rate, the originality of Mozarts music extends to the listening experience for individual works: Die Entfhrung aus dem Serail produces new fascination with each repeated hearing on account of music that is so individual and varied that on first hearing it is not entirely understandable even to a trained ear (1789).16 The Prager Oberpostamtszeitung reporting on the memorial ceremony for Mozart in Prague on 14 December 1791 goes further still, linking repeated hearings to procedural evolution in the works themselves: Everything that he wrote carries the clear stamp of classical beauty. For this reason he pleases each time even more, for one beauty evolves from another, and so he will always please for he will always seem new.1711 12 13 14 15

16 17

Thomas Bauman, Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult of Genius, The Musical Quarterly, 87 (2005), pp. 33357. (Quotation from p. 338.) Given in Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom, Peter Branscombe and Jeremy Noble (London: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 233. Ibid., p. 372. Ibid., pp. 41112. Well-known examples include Dittersdorfs claim that Mozarts Haydn quartets deserve the highest praise, but . . . because of their overwhelming and unrelenting artfulness are not to everyones taste (Cliff Eisen, New Mozart Documents: A Supplement to O. E. Deutschs Documentary Biography (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 54) and Cramers explanation that the same quartets have a decided leaning towards the difficult and the unusual. But then, what great and elevated ideas he has too, testifying to a bold spirit! (Deutsch, Documentary Biography, p. 349). See also Deutsch, Documentary Biography, p. 412 and Eisen, New Mozart Documents, p. 123 for comments from 1791 that offset tentative criticism with fulsome expressions of praise. Given in Eisen, New Mozart Documents, p. 57. Ibid., p. 123.

6

INTRODUCTION

Explaining precisely how specific movements manifest stylistic innovation in the context of Mozarts oeuvre cannot be undertaken lightly, and requires scrupulous musical justification in each and every case. The innovation/tradition binary is not a straightforward one in Mozarts repertory, with every innovative work remaining convention-laden to some extent;18 this state of affairs is recognized by late eighteenth-century reviewers of instrumental music who value above all in the context of creative genius and originality the skillful presentation of the unexpected within the confines of the familiar.19 In addition, a realization that Mozarts instrumental style does not evolve in a vacuum necessitates an equally careful consideration of prevailing aesthetic factors pertaining to a particular innovative stylistic orientation. Only through an approach informed by both musical and aesthetic factors will it be possible to ascertain the stylistic significance of key works in Mozarts evolving instrumental style.

Stylistic re-inventionAn identification and examination of stylistically innovative movements among Mozarts Viennese works requires an understanding of how stylistic development is manifest at various levels. In terms of Mozarts stylistic practices, for example, we need to establish where striking musical procedures in a specific Mozart instrumental work stand in relation to musical procedures in his preceding and contemporary works. Equally, and at a deeper level, we need to determine whether and if so how and why a spirit of stylistic innovation characterizes certain works, and whether Mozart apparently re-appraises his aesthetic views of a genre on account of stylistic novelties. There is evidence to suggest that Mozart was acutely self-aware in matters of style, very often with pragmatic concerns at heart. In the first movement of his Paris Symphony, K. 297 (1778) he freely acknowledges assimilating one stylistic gesture (the premier coup darchet) in order to accommodate Parisian taste, in spite of a jocular lack of respect for the gesture itself (It is really too much of a joke), as well as writing a passage that I felt sure must please in the middle of the movement subsequently re-stated at the end in order to please the audience still further.20 And the close correspondences between refined aspects of wind18

19

20

For a vivid account of how dependent Mozarts operas are on opera buffa conventions of the day, see Mary Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozarts Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), especially pp. 24798 (on Cos fan tutte). Morrow, German Music Criticism, p. 123. Johann Georg Sulzers discussion of originality (Originalgeist) albeit not in a specifically musical context also explains that One can . . . be original and still conform in many other ways to the ordinary. See Allgemeine Theorie der schnen Knste, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 177174), vol. 3, p. 626, as given in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35. See Emily Anderson, ed. and trans., Letters of Mozart and his Family (3rd edition, London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 553, 558; letters of 12 June 1778 and 3 July 1778.


7

orchestration in this movement and French commentary on wind orchestration in the years preceding his Parisian visit suggest a desire to please connoisseurs as well.21 Mozart even boasts to his father, a few months earlier in 1778: I am, as you know, pretty well able to assimilate and imitate every manner and style of composition.22 His ability to survive as an independent composer depended upon audiences (and potential performers) finding his music stylistically accessible; the famous remark to his father in 1782 about the happy medium of stylistic qualities he strikes in his first Viennese piano concertos (K. 413415) recognizes this.23 Moreover, the advice that the publisher Franz Anton Hoffmeister gave to Mozart after poor sales of the piano quartets K. 478 (1785) and K. 493 (1786) Write in a more popular style, otherwise I can neither publish anything by you nor pay you24 lends further evidence of Mozarts alertness to the fact that stylistic factors directly affected commercial success. It would be wrong, however, to attribute Mozarts self-awareness in the stylistic domain purely to pragmatic and commercial factors. His statement that the Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb, K. 449, is written in an entirely special manner has far-reaching stylistic implications (see Chapter 1), as does his identification of his piano concertos from No. 15 in Bb, K. 450 onwards as grand concertos (Chapter 2); similarly his remark about the happy medium of stylistic qualities witnessed in K. 413415 has important stylistic as well as commercial resonances (Chapter 2). Given Mozarts attentiveness to stylistic matters, it is surely not too far-fetched to suggest that he would always have been alert to the stylistic characteristics, implications and resonances of his works, if only to identify those of his existing works that might be appropriate for a planned concert or series of concerts; consequently, he must have contemplated even if only in a general way the musical direction in which he was heading. His Thematic Catalogue, the Verzeichnss aller meine Werke, begun with an entry for K. 449 on 9 February 1784, would have provided him with an excellent aide mmoire of pre-existent compositions, and, by extension, of their stylistic qualities. This study, however, will be constricted neither by Mozarts purported intentions regarding style, nor by late eighteenth-century understandings of style. Kochs definition in the Musikalisches Lexikon outlined above points to the expression of passions, in other words to communication between musician(s)

21 22

23 24

Simon P. Keefe, The Aesthetics of Wind Writing in Mozarts Paris Symphony in D, K. 297, Mozart-Jahrbuch 2006, forthcoming. From Kster, Musical Biography, p. 131; letter of 7 Feb. 1778. Emily Anderson gives a slightly different translation in Letters, p. 468. Elaine Sisman has recently identified the real meaning of this remark as not merely that he was a virtuoso chameleon (as well as a chameleon virtuoso) but that he actually drew inspiration from the work of others to rise to his own heights; the better the model the better the result. See Observations on the First Phase of Mozarts Haydn Quartets, in Words About Mozart: Essays in Honour of Stanley Sadie, ed. Dorothea Link and Judy Nagley (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2005), p. 58. Anderson, Letters, p. 833; letter of 28 December 1782. As reported by Mozarts early biographer Georg Nikolaus Nissen. See Gruber, Posterity, p. 12.

8

INTRODUCTION

and audience. The crucial passages I discuss in this volume as hinges for Mozarts stylistic development contain especially rich and intense expressive material, and thus by definition constituted powerful means for Mozart to communicate with his contemporary audiences; but, on account of resonances with earlier and later works, these passages also invite us to examine their musical procedures in ways that do not always conform explicitly with late eighteenth-century critical practices (for example through comparison of specific techniques used across a series of works). Theorists contemporary with Mozart nonetheless provide invaluable guides to stylistic issues in his music, not least (as we shall see) because their priorities and judgements often overlap with Mozarts own, highlighting contemporary critical expectations of particular genres, and because their views provide catalysts for historically based interpretation of moments of originality in his instrumental oeuvre. Writers contemporary with Mozart, then, did not prioritize discussion of the stylistic development of an extended corpus of works by a single composer the absence of sufficient numbers of widely available editions by individual composers in the late eighteenth century would have made the task more or less impossible but their insights can still stimulate our own account of this development. At any rate, the study of technical features within the remit of style (if not in explicitly comparative or developmental contexts) is never far from the surface in the late eighteenth century. The rhetorical elocutio (usually translated as style), one of the five partes of the oration, involves mastering grammatical and presentational issues as explained by writers such as Aristotle, Cicero and Quintillian, and parallels late eighteenth-century, rhetorically driven discussion of musical periodicity and melodic figures (figurae).25 It is logical to begin an investigation of Mozarts instrumental style and his innovative stylistic practices with the act of creation itself, especially the rhetorical idea of invention (inventio, or Erfindung in German) that permeated so much eighteenth-century musico-theoretical discourse and in which Mozart a few years after his death is said to possess inexhaustible richness (unerschplicher Reichthum).26 Historically, the invention stage of a rhetorical process is concerned with pre-compositional thoughts and ideas, inspired by a rhetoricians (or composers) innate, un-teachable genius.27 In reality, however, eighteenthcentury explanations of invention, as well as recent interpretations of its continued relevance to scholarly discourse on eighteenth-century music,28 stress the intertwining of invention and elaboration, the un-teachable and teachable25 26 27

28

On elocutio in rhetorical and musical-rhetorical contexts, and applied to several of Mozarts works, see Irving, Mozarts Piano Sonatas, pp. 15161. See Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 3 (180001), col. 31. For recent discussions of invention in eighteenth-century contexts see: Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 132; Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), passim; Irving, Mozarts Piano Sonatas, Part 3, Style, passim. See, in particular, Dreyfus, Patterns of Invention, pp. 132.


9

elements of rhetoric collectively encapsulating the mysteriously inspired and the more industrious, mechanical aspects of the rhetorical/compositional process. Transplanted from a compositional context to one of style, then, the interdependence of putatively inspired idea and industrious, erudite process through which such an idea takes shape provides an aesthetic starting point for understanding stylistic innovation in Mozarts music. Assuming that a moment or passage can be identified as stylistically original in the context of Mozarts instrumental music necessarily involves also accepting that a musical process of some kind must have laid the foundation for this originality process and product are inextricably linked. And if musical process and original stylistic product belong together, it becomes necessary to explain what musical process (or processes) follows an original stylistic product and whether, in fact, another innovative practice ensues as a result. The on-going nature of such a model of development assuming it is shown to exist would render Mozarts stylistic invention, stylistic re-invention. At any rate, an emphasis on the process by which Mozarts originality evolves original stylistic practices come into being, rather than appearing from nowhere resonates with a famous remark made by Joseph Haydn towards the end of his life. At Eszterhza, Haydn explains to Georg August Griesinger, he had the opportunity to make experiments (Versuche machen) and had to become original (so musste ich originel werden). The confluence of originality and experimentation brings Haydn into line with the ideas of Alexander Gerard and Kant, rather than with those of Young, Herder and Sulzer among others who regard originality as innate and antithetical to the idea of learned genius.29 I contend that originality in Mozarts Viennese instrumental music belongs in a similar, process-orientated category; and writers from 178191, who associate Mozarts originality with dynamic musical procedures as we have seen, would support this view. Moving from an aesthetic perspective on stylistic development and originality (what I shall call stylistic re-invention) in Mozarts instrumental oeuvre to a practical perspective requires us to address several key questions.30 Which stylistic features of a particular work are to be foregrounded and why? Which works assume prominence in a re-invention process and why? And how do localized events individual passages, sections etc. ultimately contribute to a deeper understanding of the process of stylistic re-alignment? No doubt claims could be made for the stylistic significance and originality of events in a whole host of musical domains (formal, motivic, thematic, harmonic, tonal, textural and rhythmic) in individual Mozart Viennese instrumental works; requiring such events and procedures to be set in historical-theoretical and aesthetic contexts and thus to be regarded as stylistic means to ends rather than ends in themselves

29 30

On Haydns famous statement about Eszterhza, situated in the context of discussions of originality and genius in the late eighteenth century, see Bauman Becoming Original. By stylistic re-invention I certainly do not intend the often cynical, modern meaning of the term, whereby a pop artist re-invents him or herself primarily for commercial gain or a politician re-invents him or herself in order to garner the popular vote.

10

INTRODUCTION

still leaves open numerous avenues of investigation. In determining which procedures, events and works to prioritize in my study I am guided by the confluence of striking contextual factors relating to Mozarts situation at a given moment in a given genre, informed by contemporary aesthetic perspectives that cast light on this situation. As Leonard Meyer makes clear in the most substantial theoretical deliberation on style in recent times, any stylistic study with a historical dimension needs to accommodate factors external to the music under consideration (cultural, aesthetic, ideological etc.) as well as technical features of the music, ideally bringing both internalist and externalist perspectives to bear on explanations of style change.31 Those works that resonate in pronounced ways with fundamental aesthetic features of individual genres (above all concerto, string quartet and symphony), while also occupying prominent places in Mozarts instrumental oeuvre for any number of musical and/or non-musical reasons, thus receive special attention. My perspective on stylistic re-invention as an on-going process also affects the choice of works accorded significance. If stylistic change arises as a result of the type of process outlined in the paragraph above, then originality will be predominantly strategic, whereby Mozart devises new ways of working with existing stylistic rules, rather than overhauling them completely in a purportedly more radical act of originality.32 The first six chapters of this book focus on Mozarts piano concertos (Chapters 13), string quartets (Chapters 45) and symphonies (Chapter 6); discussions of works from other genres are included, most notably the string quintets in Chapter 5, but come to real prominence only in Chapter 7, which adopts a broad, intergeneric perspective. The genre-centred approach in no way indicates that the concertos, quartets and symphonies are hermetically sealed entities insusceptible to stylistic influences outside their immediate generic surroundings; such a view is plainly unsustainable. But for each of the concertos, quartets and symphonies considered in detail in this study, Mozarts primary stylistic reference points would seem certainly to comprise works in the same genre: the piano concerto K. 449, left incomplete for over a year, was composed alongside both K. 413415 and K. 450, 451 and 453; another concerto K. 491 came at the end of a two-year, ten-work sequence (K. 450491, 178486), during which the concerto dominated Mozarts creative energies and the projection of his public persona; the string quartets K. 465 and K. 575, 589, 590 were conceived in genre-specific sets (the Haydn and Prussian respectively); and the Jupiter symphony K. 551 follows hot on the heels of Eb major and G-minor symphonies (K. 543 and K. 550) in the summer of 1788. Only the final two piano concertos, K. 537 and K. 595,31

32

See Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Meyers principal focus in the later part of this book is the music of the Romantic period. Meyer distinguishes between these two types of stylistic originality in Style and Music, p. 31, defining strategies as compositional choices made within the possibilities established by the rules of the style (p. 20). He also identifies Mozart as one of musics incomparable strategists (p. 31).


11

chronologically detached from Mozarts main body of work in the genre, are different: as we shall see, internal musical evidence points in any case to Mozarts closer stylistic engagement with earlier piano concertos than with any of his other preceding or contemporary works. Where Mozarts early Viennese piano concertos are concerned, the trail begins with No. 14 in Eb, K. 449 (178284). Mozart draws attention himself to a shift in his stylistic conception of the genre from the small-scale works that could be performed without wind-instrument accompaniment (K. 413, 414, 415) to grand concertos (from K. 450 onwards) that feature obligatory wind instruments and a larger orchestra. He situates K. 449 written in a self-professed entirely special manner at the precise nexus between these two different conceptions. Other original features of K. 449 by Mozarts standards of the time, including formal characteristics of the first and second movements, point to an important stylistic juncture in Mozarts piano concerto oeuvre. The stylistic nexus between small-scale and grand concerto is mirrored in the compositional genesis of the first movement K. 449 is interrupted at the end of the solo exposition probably in late 1782 and picked up in spring 1784, being initiated alongside K. 413415 and completed alongside K. 450, 451 and 453 thus adding grist to the mill. Chronological and contextual factors coalesce in the development section of the first movement; the first music composed after the compositional hiatus contains a demonstrably original type of interaction between piano and orchestra in Mozarts piano concertos (confrontation) that pertains to the orchestras role and status in the concerto genre and thus to Mozarts own proclamations about stylistic change in the context of a new type of involvement for the orchestra in grand works. The solo-orchestra confrontation itself develops from an intensification of procedures witnessed in the three preceding piano concertos and re-appears in Mozarts later piano concertos and other works as well. But the influence of the technique of confrontation introduced in K. 449 on Mozarts later works is only one part of the stylistic equation; it is necessary also to determine in broader terms the relationship between the events of K. 449 and Mozarts subsequent concerto style. By illustrating that Mozart re-configures fundamental aesthetic and stylistic features of the concerto as extrapolated from late eighteenth-century discussion in his works from K. 450 onwards, we are able to appreciate K. 449 more vividly as a hinge between the old and the new. K. 449 is a stylistic hybrid of K. 413415 and the later grand concertos in a number of respects, and it is the development section confrontation that dramatizes this status most clearly, since it intersects directly with aspects of intimacy, grandeur and brilliance that are central to an appreciation of Mozarts concerto style and to an understanding of the changed role of the orchestra (to which Mozart himself draws attention). Just as the nascent opposition of piano and orchestra in K. 413415 intensifies in K. 449 to the point where Mozart introduces direct confrontation, so the balance of intimate, grand and brilliant stylistic characteristics from K. 450 onwards reaches its zenith in K. 491. Again, the works context alerts us to its

12

INTRODUCTION

important stylistic position in Mozarts concerto oeuvre. It is the last in a sequence of ten piano concertos from K. 450 onwards (eleven if we include K. 449) written in an intensive two-year period; and it features the longest and most formally complex first movement and the most orchestrally ornate slow movement in Mozarts piano concerto oeuvre. Mozart juxtaposes passages of the greatest grandeur and intimacy in the first movement development and recapitulation sections and introduces unparalleled wind brilliance in the slow movement. After K. 491, as after K. 449, stylistic elements are reconfigured, first in K. 503 and later, more systematically (as explained in detail in Chapter 3), in the two remaining piano concertos K. 537 and 595, confirming K. 491s position as a hinge in Mozarts re-invention process. The changes put into effect in K. 537 and 595, moreover, enable us to cast the concept of experimentation in a corpus of late eighteenth-century instrumental works in a more positive light than is traditionally the case.33 Mozarts experimentation in these works represents neither a lapse in quality, nor uncertainty and lack of commitment vis--vis the concerto genre; instead, it demonstrates active engagement with the re-invention process. As with Haydn (at least as reported by Griesinger), experimentation and originality go hand in hand. Mozarts written comments on stylistic change in the 178283 and spring 1784 piano concertos are lacking for his string quartets. It is more difficult then to navigate a path through these works in order to identify re-invention strategies and procedures. But, in the Haydn set in particular, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reception if not Mozarts words then the words of those temporally close to him provides an important catalyst. Mozarts contemporaries recognize the extreme technical difficulty of these works, above all their harmonic and tonal intricacies, and consider no individual section more problematic in this respect than the slow introduction to the Dissonance quartet, K. 465. In a set replete with harmonic audacity, we need to explain why Mozart left his greatest audacity until the last quartet, what function he intended his slow introduction (the only one in the set) to fulfil and how the passage relates (if at all) to the earlier Haydn works. In the process of addressing these issues, we establish that the K. 465 slow introduction manipulates material and technical procedures from earlier works (as do the first movements of K. 449 and K. 491) in order to produce a rhetorical peroration; the resulting contrast between the slow introduction and the ensuing allegro, moreover, is most striking of all. Moving on to the Prussian33

James Webster takes a similarly positive step in this direction, in relation to Haydns instrumental music. Explaining that experimentation has traditionally represented an implicit mark against a work (since a putative style has not reached fruition), he argues for a positive understanding of the term: instead of an evolutionist interpretation according to which [Haydns] maturity and Classical style are linked, as the foreordained results of a teleological historical process . . . I would argue that experimentation was a fundamental aspect of his musical personality, throughout his life. See Webster, Haydns Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33573 (passim) and especially pp. 36166 (quotation at p. 361).


13

quartets, K. 575, 589 and 590, we explain that heightened contrast for which K. 465 is the stylistic precursor takes centre stage, a re-configuration of stylistic and aesthetic paradigms in the wake of the exceptional events of K. 465/i. Mozarts six Viennese symphonies again challenge a theory of re-invention. Each symphony could lay claim to significant originality in the context of Mozarts works in the genre, in particular the Prague K. 504 for its topical heterogeneity, the G-minor K. 550 for among other features its lithe, sinuous opening (seemingly in mid phrase) that is difficult to relate to an eighteenth-century style category, and the Jupiter for its dazzlingly contrapuntal finale. But the most clearly climactic movement interpreted by so many as his symphonic apotheosis is the last. Like other hinges in the re-invention process, K. 465 and K. 491, it draws an extended series of works to a close (three symphonies completed in less than two months in the summer of 1788), also offering through dialogue a popular late eighteenth-century metaphor for instrumental participation in a symphony an immediate stylistic point of comparison with Mozarts earlier symphonic works. We are of course deprived of the opportunity to determine how Mozarts symphonies might have changed stylistically after the Jupiter, as this is his final contribution to the genre. My theory of stylistic re-invention, then, is practically and empirically based, but grounded in the notion that two related aesthetic phenomena play active roles the innovative, putatively inspired idea itself (confrontation, contrast, rhetorical peroration, taut dramatic dialogue etc.) and the industrious, erudite process through which this idea takes shape, effects a moment of stylistic climax and leads to stylistic re-formulation. In essence, then, stylistic re-invention comprises a two-stage process: Mozart manipulates pre-existent features of his music to climactic effect, in so doing introducing a demonstrably new stylistic dimension with broad aesthetic resonance; he subsequently re-appraises his style in response to the dimension in question. Thus, through contemplating musical procedures from his earlier Viennese piano concertos and string quartets, especially in the development section of K. 449/i, the development and recapitulation of K. 491/i and the slow introduction of K. 465/i, Mozart not only writes movements exhibiting stylistically climactic qualities in terms of piano/orchestra confrontation in K. 449, heightened intimacy and grandeur in K. 491 and rhetorical peroration and strong contrast in K. 465 but also movements that prompt significant alterations to his stylistic paradigms. (Only the first of the two stages is evident in the Viennese symphonies.) By its very nature the causal connection between climactic moment and subsequent style change remains an interpretative hypothesis on my part, based on internal musical evidence above all; it has indeed been recognized from a theoretical standpoint that single salient innovations can often have a wider impact on compositional styles and that incremental modifications can result in a trended change.34 At any rate it is my hope that stylistic

34

Meyer, Style and Music, p. 150.

14

INTRODUCTION

re-invention will satisfactorily explain the relationship between Mozarts stylistically climactic works, his preceding works and his subsequent stylistic re-appraisals, thus offering a theory of compositional development in his Viennese instrumental music. By representing a complex of related musical procedures in Mozarts Viennese instrumental works including his manipulation of existing musical procedures to climatic effect or in response to a stylistic climax, and his extended re-appraisal of standard modus operandi in a genre stylistic re-invention can be identified both as a specific procedure manifest in a specific passage of a Mozart movement and, in a more wide-ranging way, as a dynamic process behind, and powerful impetus for Mozarts stylistic evolution. Since, as we shall discover, the musical procedures in question result in tangibly original works, movements or passages in the context of Mozarts instrumental oeuvre, it is no coincidence that most of the key works under discussion here are among the most consistently misunderstood or undervalued in Mozarts Viennese repertory (for example, the piano concertos K. 449, 503, 537, 595 and the string quartets K. 575, 589, 590); the others, at the very least, are among the most hotly debated (the string quartet K. 465, piano concerto K. 491, and symphony K. 551). It is vital in coming to an appropriately well-developed understanding of all of these works, and of how they collectively embody re-invention processes, that both similarities and differences from preceding, contemporary and succeeding works are sufficiently well represented; such stylistic contextualization thus forms an important part of my study. No-one would surely suggest that these particular works bear Mozarts distinctive fingerprint any less markedly than his Viennese works not exhibiting pronounced tendencies towards re-invention. It is only by accounting for the distinctively Mozartian qualities of the instrumental works upon which we focus in this study that we fully appreciate stylistic re-invention as a consistent and coherent rather than an ad hoc and incoherent manifestation of stylistic development. While the majority of this volume explains stylistic re-invention predominantly (but by no means exclusively) in the respective contexts of Mozarts piano concertos, string quartets, and symphonies, the rich vein of stylistic cross-fertilization affecting all genres in the late eighteenth century together with mutable generic boundaries and innumerable generic cross references, necessitates broader, more wide-ranging consideration of stylistic re-invention as well. To this end, Chapter 7 situates those Viennese instrumental works that most clearly embody generically hybrid qualities, such as the piano trios and quartets, and the Piano and Wind Quintet K. 452, as well as other groups of instrumental works (the violin sonatas and piano sonatas in particular; the string quintets are discussed in Chapter 5) in the context of Mozarts stylistic re-invention in the piano concertos, string quartets and symphonies. This contextualization of re-invention allows us, in turn, to draw broad conclusions about the periodization and categorization of Mozarts Viennese instrumental works internal periodic divisions and concepts of late style in particular as well as


15

about prevalent aesthetic and stylistic trends, such as the progressive increase in dramatic concentration in the instrumental music of his final years. It would be too much to claim that my study offers a completely comprehensive account of stylistic development in Mozarts Viennese piano concertos, string quartets and symphonies. Those adopting different perspectives an entirely inter-generic one, say, focusing on individual formal, thematic, motivic, rhythmic, gestural or textural elements, or on topical usage and development across a diverse selection of works will likely detect further re-invention procedures, foregrounding the same or different works. I have deliberately prioritized biographical, contextual and reception factors motivated as I am by historical considerations in determining initial points of re-invention; a scholar choosing not to do so may well locate different points. Given that the waves of re-invention detected here by no means coincide in temporal terms in spite of highpoints of activity in 1784 and 1786 I see the plurality of re-invention possibilities as entirely positive. For re-invention highlights, above all, the great energy and vibrancy associated with Mozarts stylistic renewal we ultimately unveil richly interwoven musical tapestries that reveal that Mozarts extraordinary musical mind is constantly engaged with the complementary and contrasting resonances of his music. If such tapestries are revealed by future scholars to be richer still, this will be a cause for celebration.

.I. PIANO CONCERTOS

1An Entirely Special Manner: Mozarts Piano Concerto No. 14 in E b, K. 449, and the Stylistic Implications of Confrontation

HIGHPOINT in Mozarts career as a composer-performer in Vienna came rduring the spring of 1784. In a letter to his father Leopold, dated 4 March 1784, Mozart listed an astonishing 22 engagements for the period 26 February to 3 April, including three concerts in a subscription series at the Trattnerhof, two at the Burgtheater (one of which was subsequently cancelled) and several at the salons of Prince Galitsin and Count Esterhzy.1 According to Mozart, the Trattnerhof and Burgtheater performances were particularly well received: he won extraordinary applause, had a hall that was full to overflowing and was praised repeatedly for the first subscription concert on 17 March. He described the Burgtheater concert for which he performed the Piano Concertos Nos. 15 and 16 in Bb and D, K. 450 and 451 and the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452 as most successful and remarked that it was greatly to my credit that my listeners never got tired.2 Even if Mozart can hardly be relied upon as an impartial witness to his own success, his list of subscribers to the Trattnerhof series, containing 176 names (thirty more than Richter and Fischer together), many from the highest artistic, intellectual, cultural and aristocratic echelons of society,3 testifies to the high regard in which he was held. The Wunderkind who had charmed the Viennese in his youth had become a fully endorsed member of the Viennese musical establishment. The foundation for Mozarts considerable successes in early 1784 was laid by the three piano concertos composed for the aforementioned Trattnerhof and Burgtheater concerts, K. 449 in Eb, K. 450 in Bb, and K. 451 in D (Nos. 1416), as well as by K. 453 in G (No. 17), performed by Mozart at a subsequent concert at the Burgtheater on 29 April.4 Sending these works to his father on 15 May 1784,

A

1 2 3 4

See Anderson, ed. and trans., Letters, pp. 86970. Ibid., pp. 872, 873. Mozart gives a complete list of his subscribers for these concerts, boasting of his greater popularity than Richter and Fischer, in a letter to his father on 20 March 1784. See Ibid., pp. 87072. The concertos K. 449, 450, 451, 453 were entered into Mozarts thematic catalogue, the Verzeichnss, on 9 February, 15 March, 22 March, 12 April respectively.

20

PIANO CONCERTOS

Mozart distinguished K. 449 from the later three concertos on the grounds that it was scored for a smaller accompanying orchestra:I regard them both [K. 450 and K. 451] as concertos which are bound to make the performer perspire. From the point of view of difficulty the Bb concerto beats the one in D. Well, I am very curious to hear which of the three in Bb, D and G you and my sister prefer. The one in Eb does not belong at all to the same category. It is a concerto of an entirely special manner, composed rather for a small orchestra than for a large one. So it is really a question of the three grand concertos.5

Two weeks earlier, Mozart had even suggested that K. 449 like his first set of Viennese Piano Concertos from 178283, K. 413 in F, K. 414 in A and K. 415 in C can be performed a quattro without wind instruments in contrast to his self-professed grand concertos, all three of which have wind-instrument accompaniment.6 The newly intricate and sophisticated writing for woodwind in K. 450, 451 and 453 indeed the prominent role given to the orchestra in these works generally has elicited much critical comment from the late eighteenth century onwards. A reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in October 1799, for example, comments very favourably on K. 450s accompanimental writing, and particularly on the ornate nature of several of its wind passages:it is not as well-crafted as some better known and newer concertos by the same composer: on the other hand, though, its delicateness accounts for a great deal lighter and more suitable instrumental accompaniment, more practical on the whole than some of the others. It is certainly easier to find ten pianists who completely perfect even the most difficult of these concertos, before one finds a single good accompanying orchestra. But in the last Allegro of the concerto in question there are also some short passages in the first oboe which, if they are to be performed well, in style and with precision, require just as much practice and assurance as any passage in the concerto part.7

5

6

7

Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch and J.H. Eibl, eds., Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. Gesamtausgabe. Band III: 178086 (Kassel and London: Brenreiter, 1963), p. 315. Translation adapted slightly from Anderson, Letters, p. 877. Mozarts representation of K. 449 as a ganz besonderer Art is better rendered an entirely special manner than Andersons a quite peculiar kind. Although Mozarts stylistic pronouncement about K. 449 is unique in his correspondence (to my knowledge), it is intriguingly similar to Haydns famous remarks from letters in 1781 about his Op. 33 set of string quartets constituting an entirely new and special manner (eine gantz neue besondere Art). For Haydns comments, see Dnes Bartha, ed., Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichungen (Kassel and London: Brenreiter, 1965), pp. 106107. Anderson, Letters, p. 877. For Mozarts reference to the a quattro performance of K. 413, 414 and 415 see his musical announcement in the Wiener Zeitung of 15 January 1783, reprinted in Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, p. 212. As Neal Zaslaw pointed out, Mozarts a quattro reference in all likelihood designated performance in four parts and not necessarily by four instruments with one to each part. See Contexts for Mozarts Piano Concertos, in Mozarts Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Zaslaw (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 716, at p. 10. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 2 (17991800), cols. 1213. Zwar ist es nicht so sehr gearbeitet,

AN ENTIRELY SPECIAL MANNER

21

In similar fashion, a reviewer for the Musikalische Korrespondenz der teutschen Filarmonischen Gesellschaft remarks in 1792 on the scoring and obbligato writing that require K. 451 to be performed by large, fully-manned orchestras, identifying this concerto as among the most beautiful and brilliant that we have from this master, with respect to both the ritornellos and the solos.8 Twentieth-century writers have followed the lead of their late eighteenthcentury counterparts, readily acknowledging the originality and brilliance of the orchestral writing in K. 450, 451 and 453. Numerous critics explain the stylistic significance of K. 450 in Mozarts oeuvre in terms of the originality of its woodwind writing, several drawing special attention to the interweaving of the woodwinds and the strings in the opening bars of the first movement. For Charles Rosen, K. 450, the first [Mozart concerto] to employ the winds with a complete sense of their color and their dramatic possibilities, uses the woodwinds to boldly open the concerto on their own, as if to proclaim the new venture from the beginning.9 In like-minded fashion, Leonard Ratner clarifies that The new role of the winds was initiated precisely at the opening of the Bb major Concerto, K. 450 . . . From this time, the winds become prominent in the concertos,10 and Irving R. Eisley explains that Mozarts concertato orchestra, in which the

8

9 10

als manche bereits bekanntern und neuern Konzerte desselben Verfassers: dahingegen aber sowohl wegen der schwchern als ungleich leichtern und bequemeren Instrumentalbegleitung im Allgemeinen brauchbarer als manches von diesen. Sicher findet man eher zehn Klavierspieler, die, selbst die schwersten dieser Konzerte ganz fertig durcharbeiten, ehe man ein einziges Orchester zum guten Akkompagnement dazu auftreibt. Doch sind auch in dem letzten Allegro des vor uns liegenden Konzerts in der ersten Hoboe einige Kleinigkeiten, die, wenn sie gut und in Ansehung der Manieren bestimmt und deutlich herausgebracht werden sollen, vielleicht eben so viele Uebung und Gewissheit erfordern, als irgend eine Stelle in der Konzertstimme. Quoted in translation in Cliff Eisen, New Mozart Documents, p. 124. Other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century critics identifying active participation by the orchestra in Mozarts piano concertos do not mention specific works. Citing Mozarts concertos as his model, Heinrich Christoph Koch explains that in a well-worked out concerto . . . the accompanying voices are not merely there to sound this or that missing interval of the chord but rather to engage in a passionate dialogue with the soloist. See Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt, 1802; reprint Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), col. 854; translation from Nancy Kovaleff Bakers edition of Kochs earlier treatise Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (178392) in which the same remarks were made, Introductory Essay on Composition: the Mechanical Rules of Melody, Sections 3 and 4 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 209. August Frederick Christopher Kollmann states that The best specimens of good modern Concertos for the Piano-Forte, are those by Mozart, in which every part of the accompaniments is interesting, without obscuring the principal part, in An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London, 1799; reprint New York: Da Capo, 1973), p. 15. And a writer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung pointed out that Mozart thoroughly worked all instruments in the accompanying orchestra, allowing the soloist to be only the most striking [hervorstechendsten] among all the performers, in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 3 (180001), cols. 2535, 5154, at col. 28. For a study of Kochs remarks, see Simon P. Keefe, Mozarts Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2001), pp. 923. See Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London: Norton, 1971), p. 220. See Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (London and New York: Schirmer, 1980), p. 297.

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woodwinds assume an equal or higher position than the strings in the orchestral pecking order, appears abruptly, with little or no hint to be found in the earlier concertos, in the Bb concerto.11 K. 451 is praised most often for its symphonic quality, through which the orchestra is liberated.12 Cuthbert Girdlestone and Arthur Hutchings rank the involvement of the orchestra in K. 451 especially highly, remarking respectively that it contains the most splendid instances in all Mozart of interplay between the protagonists and the clearest examples of the solo [speaking] . . . both through and with its newly augmented orchestra.13 Recent critics find K. 453 even more elaborate in its use of woodwinds than K. 450 and K. 451, demonstrating a finer integration of soloist and orchestra [than K. 450 and 451], approaching a chamber music style, particularly in the blending of woodwinds and piano and in the sharing of thematic material.14 Just as Mozart distinguished the Eb concerto, K. 449, from K. 450, 451 and 453 on orchestration and performance grounds, so twentieth-century critics distance K. 449 from its immediate successors according to criteria of orchestration and affect. Many remark on the absence of refined and prominent writing for the woodwind in K. 449;15 whilst K. 450 and 451 could be described as either piano concertos with obbligato orchestra or symphonies with obbligato piano solo the same could not be said of K. 449.16 Others observe striking affective dissimilarities between K. 449 and K. 450, 451, 453, finding K. 449 quite unlike the gay, elegant Mozart of 450 and 453 and of [a] very different character and less urbane manner than K. 450.17 In addition, K. 450 and 451 are described as twins in which Mozart returns to more familiar paths than in K. 449.18 In fact, the unique qualities of K. 449 have not passed unnoticed. For Girdlestone, the concerto is something exceptional, on account of its first movement born of an unstable, restless mood, sometimes petulant and irascible.19 He even goes so far as to state: In reality, it is isolated in Mozarts work; its first and last movements fall in with11 12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

Irving R. Eisley, Mozarts Concertato Orchestra, Mozart-Jahrbuch 1976/7, p. 9. Denis Forman, Mozarts Concerto Form: The First Movements of the Piano Concertos (London: Praeger, 1971), p. 184. Cuthbert M. Girdlestone, Mozarts Piano Concertos (London: Cassell, 1948), p. 213 (first published in French in 1939 as W. A. Mozart et ses concertos pour piano); Arthur Hutchings, A Companion to Mozarts Piano Concertos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; eighth corrected impression reissued 1998), p. 100. Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Mozart (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 105; Mario Mercado, The Evolution of Mozarts Pianistic Style (Carbondale, Illinois: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1992), p. 84. See, for example, H.C. Robbins Landon, The Concertos: (2) Their Musical Origin and Development, The Mozart Companion, ed. Landon and Donald Mitchell (London: Norton, 1956), p. 261; Sadie, New Grove Mozart, p. 104; Mercado, Mozarts Pianistic Style, p. 82. Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, his Work, trans. Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 302. See Forman, Mozarts Concerto Form, p. 175, and Philip Radcliffe, Mozarts Piano Concertos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), p. 33. Einstein, Mozart, p. 302. Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 178.


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no group of his compositions and do not bear clearly the mark of any period in his life.20 Einstein agrees, arguing that the first movement is extraordinary on account of [voicing] an unrest that never tires of introducing contrasting themes and that, as a whole, Mozart never wrote another concerto like it, either before or afterwards.21 As a result of its common perception as unique, K. 449 has a somewhat uncertain stylistic position in the secondary literature among Mozarts piano concertos. For the most part it is credited as the first of Mozarts genuinely mature works in the genre, constituting the initial concerto in an uninterrupted two-year stream of eleven masterpieces (K. 449491, spring 1784 spring 1786).22 There are dissenting voices, however. Forman, for example, regards K. 450 as the first mature concerto on account of notable advances such as the woodwind writing, the varied repetition of certain phrases and the easy-going self-confidence of the piano in a variety of different moods.23 In contrast to Forman, Girdlestone and Hutchings actually consider K. 449 a more forward-looking work than K. 450. For Girdlestone, on the whole . . . K. 449 is in advance of its successor, not only in the depth of its emotional life but also in its symphonic development.24 Equally, Hutchings points out both that K. 450 reverts to an older style than the operatic K. 449 and that the strings in the E flat work are used as never before in a concerto far more passionately and colourfully than in [K. 450].25 Others find K. 449 something of an anomaly, in general stylistic terms. Rosen explains that The series of six [concertos from 1784] . . . begins apparently somewhat timidly with the Concerto in E flat major but that in spite of its modest appearance, K. 449 is a bold, even revolutionary concerto.26 Eric Blom finds a basic contradiction between the first movements tempo/character marking and the overall mood it conveys: Although . . . [it] is marked allegretto vivace, it never shows the least vivacity of spirit.27 In addition, Philip Radcliffe alludes to the concertos peculiar qualities when he writes of the works curious inner intensity, of the curious coincidence whereby the opening theme of the first movement is a melodic inversion of the corresponding theme in K. 491, and of the mysterious chromatic passage in the piano that immediately precedes the recapitulation of the first movement.28 In fact, it is no surprise that critical consensus gives way both to critical

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 191. Einstein, Mozart, pp. 302, 301. Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 191; Einstein, Mozart, pp. 300301; Sadie, New Grove Mozart, p. 104; Mercado, Mozarts Pianistic Style, p. 82. Forman, Mozarts Concerto Form, p. 176. Girdlestone, Mozart and his Concertos, p. 210. Hutchings, Mozarts Piano Concertos, p. 90. See Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 219. Eric Blom, Mozart (London, 1935; first Collier Books edition, 1962, second printing, 1966), p. 199. Radcliffe, Mozart Piano Concertos, p. 30.

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disparity and to intimations of anomalous status where K. 449 is concerned. For no other Mozart piano concerto perhaps no other work in Mozarts entire instrumental oeuvre can boast quite as many compositional, stylistic and chronological idiosyncrasies as K. 449. Although (as explained below) K. 449 was written for the most part in spring 1784, Mozart actually began the first movement two years earlier, concurrent with his first set of Viennese piano concertos, K. 413415. As a result, the majority of K. 449, scored for a small complement of wind instruments (2 oboes, 2 horns), was composed at a time when a larger complement (flute, 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets in K. 451 and flute, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns in K. 453, for example) was establishing itself as Mozarts norm; K. 449 appears, therefore, at the precise nexus between the a quattro tradition of K. 413415 and the grand concerto tradition from K. 450 onwards. In addition, Mozart did not himself distinguish any single instrumental work from its immediate successors in as clear and direct a fashion as he distinguished K. 449 from K. 450, 451 and 453. If K. 449 rests intriguingly between two of Mozarts stylistic practices, it also initiates another important venture in his life, the cataloguing of his works. For K. 449 is Mozarts first entry into his famous thematic catalogue, the Verzeichnss aller meiner Werke, on 9 February 1784.29 In addition to general stylistic and chronological peculiarities, specific musical features of the first movement are also remarkable. Proportionally speaking, the orchestral exposition (or opening ritornello) of K. 449 is longer than the corresponding section of any other piano concerto.30 Moreover, the orchestra in this section introduces the theme that becomes the secondary theme in the solo exposition, in the dominant rather than the tonic, the only such occasion in Mozarts piano concerto first movements. At the other extreme of the first movement, K. 449 contains the only instance of a final cadential trill in the piano immediately preceding the cadenza that does not confirm the tonic key, inflecting instead to the relative minor. The unusual circumstances surrounding the composition of K. 449, the unique nature of Mozarts pronouncement, the fascinating chronological and stylistic position of the work in Mozarts oeuvre, and the originality of various features of the music itself suggest that a more detailed and systematic examination of K. 449s stylistic position among Mozarts piano concertos will greatly enhance our understanding of the considerable significance of the work in his compositional output. As we shall see, characterizations of K. 449 as sui generis an entirely special manner in Mozarts own words as a climactic work in Mozarts initial29

30

Daniel N. Leeson and David Whitwell posit that Mozart began his catalogue in early November 1784, rather than in February, entering the first nine items retrospectively. Although they suggest that the dates entered for the Quintet for Piano and Winds, K. 452 and the Piano Concerto No. 18 in Bb, K. 456 postdate the actual completion of these works, they conclude that 9 February 1784 is accurate for K. 449. See Mozarts Thematic Catalogue, The Musical Times, 114 (August 1973), pp. 78183. Robert D. Levin, Who Wrote the Mozart Four-Wind Concertante? (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon, 1988), p. 336.


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sequence of Viennese piano concertos, and as a work of central importance to Mozarts subsequent stylistic development (in the concerto and elsewhere) are not mutually exclusive but rather bring to life the works significance in the context of stylistic re-invention. In fact, K. 449s hybrid qualities are precisely what make it such a significant moment of stylistic re-invention, particularly in regard to confrontations between the piano and the orchestra in the first movement.

K. 449 as a hybrid of Mozarts 178283 and spring 1784 concertosIn his groundbreaking study of the paper types of Mozarts autograph manuscripts, Alan Tyson has shown that Mozart began work on the first movement of K. 449 in 1782, alongside his first three Viennese concertos K. 413, 414, 415, composing as far as bar 170 (the beginning of the orchestral tutti immediately following the solo exposition). He then abandoned the score, scribbled in the margins, and sketched an aria on the blank side. Much later perhaps over a year later, at the beginning of 1784 he resumed work on the concerto, deleted the aria sketch, and completed the score.31 K. 449 was not the only Viennese piano concerto Mozart left incomplete for an extended period: three bifolia from the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C Major, K. 503 predate the completion of the work (4 December 1786) by nearly two years; the first eight leaves of the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 in A, K. 488 probably date back to the 178485 season, although the work was entered into the Verzeichnss on 2 March 1786; and the entire first and second movements of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in Bb, K. 595 almost certainly precede the Verzeichnss date of 5 January 1791 by around three years.32 However, for reasons described above especially the way in which it straddles the a quattro and grand concerto fashions the status of K. 449 as an temporarily incomplete work has potentially the greatest stylistic significance of all. In light of the interrupted gestation of K. 449, key musical issues surface in relation to K. 449, namely the extent to which Mozart was influenced by his stylistic practices from K. 413415 when he returned to work on K. 449 in early 1784, and the extent to which the continuation of K. 449 prefigured stylistic practices in the succeeding grand concertos from the spring of 1784, K. 450, 451 and 453. The development and recapitulation sections of the first movement provide a particularly illuminating source for studying these issues, since they would have been written immediately after Mozarts extended compositional hiatus, and (one can assume) would have provided him with his greatest challenge in terms of maintaining musical continuity. Let us begin by examining an extraordinary passage in the first movement of31 32

Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 19. See Ibid., pp. 15156.

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K. 449, the end of the development section leading into the recapitulation (see Ex. 1.1), in relation to corresponding passages in K. 413, 414, 415 and K. 450, 451, 453. While the dominant is established in bar 218 of K. 449, well in advance of the beginning of the recapitulation (bar 234), it is coloured by inflections to the dominant minor (Cbs, Gbs, Dbs) in the subsequent bars (22329). The major-minor ambiguity is preserved until the moment of recapitulation by an enigmatic, chromatic ascent in all three lines of the solo piano, embodying an irresolute bVI IV6 bVII V6 progression. The orchestras forte assertion of the main theme at the beginning of the recapitulation abruptly cuts off the pianos ascending chromatic line, contrasting its presentation of the main theme with the pianos preparatory material in no uncertain terms; it is as if the full orchestra is irritated by the pianos chromatic wandering and therefore brusquely puts it to an end. Ex. 1.1: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 14 in Eb, K. 449, 1st movement, bars 22845

Although the transition from the development to the recapitulation sections of K. 449 is in one sense unique in Mozarts concerto repertory, since it conveys at once a more fervent and enigmatic quality than the corresponding moments of Mozarts earlier and later works, in another sense it is not unique at all, as its musical procedures are foreshadowed by those in K. 413, 414 and 415. The recapitulation of K. 414 (bars 196ff.), for example, is approached by ascending and descending chromatic lines in the piano and the strings (bars 19294) and is immediately preceded by two ostentatious pauses (bars 194, 195, see Ex. 1.2). While the first pause, the point of arrival for the chromatic motion, constitutes


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dominant second inversion harmony moving to dominant root position harmony for the second pause (bar 195), both pauses together with the pianos virtuosic flourish disrupt the smooth musical continuity and interaction characteristic of the movement thus far. In K. 449, then, Mozart combines two of the features of K. 414, chromatic motion and interactional disjunction (bars 23034), intensifying the former with three unaccompanied chromatic lines that provide uncertain preparation for the moment of recapitulation and the latter with an orchestral presentation of the main theme that contrasts acutely with the immediately preceding material in the piano. The final bars of the development sections of K. 415 (Ex. 1.3) and K. 413, like K. 414, also prefigure the corresponding passage from K. 449. Following the establishment of the dominant G (bar 192) in preparation for the recapitulation, the piano in K. 415 inflects to the minor for six bars (19297), just as the piano and strings provide minor colouring for seven bars in K. 449 (22329); in addition, the emphatic use of a German Augmented 6th in both K. 413 and 415 accentuated in K. 413 by an Adagio marking (bar 224) and by the orchestras only participation in the final fourteen-bar stretch of the development section, and in K. 415 by reiterated fp indications and a substantial presence for four complete bars (18891, Ex. 1.3) foreshadows the use of bVI harmony (albeit not as a German Augmented 6th), as the distinctive starting point for the chromatic rise in K. 449. (As in K. 414, musical continuity at K. 415s moment of recapitulation is compromised by a pause and a flourish in the piano; K. 415s pause bar is also marked Adagio, in contrast to the prevailing Allegro.) Ex. 1.2: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K. 414, 1st movement, bars 19195

Two of the concertos that follow K. 449 assimilate all three of the aforementioned technical features in the bars immediately preceding their recapitulations (namely minor inflections, German Augmented 6th harmony and chromatic lines). In K. 450 (Ex. 1.4), the arrival of dominant harmony (bar 182) is followed by Bb minor 6/4 and German Augmented 6th harmonies in successive bars (18788) and, in turn, leads to rising chromatic lines passed from the strings (A-Bb-B-C, C-Db-D-Eb, bars 18992) to the piano (A-Bb-B-C, Bb-C-C#-D, bars 19394) that are transformed into the main theme in the winds at the beginning of the recapitulation (D-Eb-E-F, bars 19698). Similarly, the establishment of

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Ex. 1.3: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 13 in C, K. 415, 1st movement, bars 189201

dominant harmony in bar 219 of K. 453 is followed by minor colouring of the tonic (bars 220 and 223), a German Augmented 6th (bar 222) and an ascending chromatic line in the piano that leads directly to the main theme at the beginning of the recapitulation (bars 22627). Although the chromatic preparations for the recapitulation in K. 450 and 453 on the one hand, and K. 449 on the other could not be more different in overall effect, they use similar musical devices. Significantly, however, Mozart adjusts these devices in order to create mellifluous, elegant links between the development and recapitulation (especially in K. 450), rather than an abrupt and sudden shift as in K. 449. Thus, the final bars of K. 449s development section through to its moment of recapitulation represent a hybrid of corresponding passages from K. 413, 414, 415 and 450, 451, 453: techniques from the former are manipulated in K. 449 to produce climactic confrontation; the resultant procedure in K. 449 is subsequently altered in the latter to produce smooth sectional transitions. Whereas the lack of musical continuity between the development and recapitulation situates K. 449 closer to K. 414 and 415 than to K. 450, 451, and 453, the rising chromatic line immediately preceding the recapitulation is more closely akin to the later than the earlier concertos. In any case, Mozarts isolation of the chromatic line in K. 449 which draws attention to itself through its solo performance, indecisive harmonic progression and initial bVI harmony conveys a sense of confrontational intensity between the piano and the entering orchestra not witnessed at the corresponding juncture of the other concertos.3333

Although confrontation, opposition and conflict carry slightly different inferences, it would be


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Ex. 1.4: Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 15 in Bb, K. 450, 1st movement, bars 18698

To be sure, the three musical procedures outlined above minor inflections, German Augmented 6th harmony and chromatic lines are also fairly common in the latter stages of the development sections of the first movements of Mozarts later piano concertos. Never again, however, are all three used in quick succession after the establishment of the dominant in preparation for the recapitulation (as in K. 449, 450, 453). In addition bVI (or Augmented 6th) harmony after the establishment of the dominant is not given the emphasis in later concertos that it acquires in the corresponding passages of K. 413 and 449; nor do pronounced chromatic lines in the run-up to the recapitulation again create the interactional disjunction witnessed in K. 414 and 449.34

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almost impossible to distinguish accurately between them in the context of interaction among instrumental characters. I shall therefore use these terms synonymously. Although David Grayson interpreted the pianos solo chromatic ascent immediately before the recapitulation of K. 466/i as the final moment in a protracted confrontation between the piano and the orchestra, in which the soloist [faces] the inevitable and [deals] with the consequences (Mozarts Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 40),

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The first half of the development section of K. 449, like the sections concluding bars, combines a confrontational intensity new to Mozarts piano concertos with a fusion of techniques from corresponding passages of earlier and later works. The piano initiates the development of K. 449 (bars 18288) with an adapted repeat of the orchestral theme that immediat

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