Mozart and His Piano Concertos

Cuthbert Girdlestone, Sara Davis Buechner

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486310831
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This classic of music criticism provides detailed studies of 23 of Mozart's piano concertos. In addition to establishing the lines along which the genre developed, the concertos also shed light upon the technical and inspirational growth of their creator.
The first full-length survey devoted to these works, this scholarly book presents a full, concrete musical analysis that makes liberal use of musical examples — 417 in all — and presents authoritative information on the concertos' form, tone, style, and balance as well as the circumstances of their composition. The author compares and contrasts each piece with Mozart's other works and with compositions by Beethoven, Haydn, and other composers. A definite text for musicologists, performers, teachers, and students, this study's clarity and personable tone make it accessible to any lover of Mozart's music.

PART I

1. Introduction

THE twenty-three concertos that Mozart wrote for his favourite instrument play, in the history of their genre, a part comparable to that played by Beethoven’s nine masterpieces in the history of the symphony. Just as Beethoven’s works established the form of the symphony for nearly a century, so Mozart’s piano concertos, owing to their number and the great beauty of most of them, were at the source of the modern concerto and laid down the lines along which it was to develop for many years. The structure of most concertos of the last century is fundamentally the same as that of his own and even modern works show proof of his influence.

Mozart has enriched the concerto form with a larger number of masterpieces than any other of the great composers. In the work of most of them concertos have occupied but a small place, much smaller than that held by symphonies or quartets. With him, on the other hand, they are more numerous than any other kind of composition except symphonies, and he has left in all some forty for instruments or groups of instruments of all kinds. The partial neglect of the form by most of the masters has thrown his into greater prominence, especially those which he wrote for the piano.

Nevertheless, for the music-lover who is less concerned with the history of the form than with the personality of each work, with the thought that inspires it and the joy it gives, his twenty-three concertos are still more precious. They are an inexhaustible spring of delight. Their diversity corresponds to our most varied moods, from the state of quiet content in which all we ask of art is entertainment, exquisite rather than deep, the exuberance of animal spirits, the consciousness of physical and moral health, to melancholy, sorrow and even revolt and to an Olympian serenity breathing the air of the mountain tops. The comparative uniformity which we notice between them at first sight disappears with closer scrutiny. The feeling is never the same from one to the other; each one is characterized by a personality of its own and the variety of their inspiration shows itself ever greater as we travel more deeply into them.

Thanks to this variety, Mozart is one of the few composers who can become one’s daily bread. Formal diversity matters little; what we demand is diversity of inspiration. Many composers have a more varied form than he and yet their work, when we steep ourselves in it, soon brings on a tedium which his greater works never cause and from which we suffer only when we persist in studying him in compositions where he did not express his full being.

It is this privilege of giving lasting satisfaction to mind and spirit, even more than their historical importance, that causes his concertos to rank among the masterpieces of their art. We shall therefore seek above all to discover the inner character of each one of them and the nature of the emotion which makes it what it is. Formal study cannot be neglected, however, for form is never separable from matter and formal analysis often reveals beauties of an emotional order. Formal studies exist already³ but no one has attempted to show how rich and deep is the inspiration of these works. The tendency has been rather to underestimate their inspirational value, to consider them as “drawing-room music”, and to put them below his symphonies and chamber music. We hope to show that they deserve a higher place and represent as worthily and as fully as these the personality of their creator.

Not only in the work of Mozart but in general, musical critics have been inclined to deny the concerto an exalted position and to regard it as an inferior genre, unworthy to stand beside the symphony. Such an attitude is seen in definitions like that of Ebenezer Prout in the first edition of Grove⁴ and in pronouncements like that of Paul Dukas: “The concerto, compared with the symphony, is an inferior genre since its only object, generally speaking, is to show off the talent of an instrumentalist.”⁵

Similar definitions are still current and depreciate the genre by accusing it of placing the executant’s muscular agility and his vanity above artistic expression. They are just when they apply to the virtuoso concertos of certain soloist composers, but it is unfair to take the poorest representatives of a form as its models. Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Franck never devoted their genius to satisfying the vanity of a virtuoso, to helping an “executant” to “show his skill”. The numerical preponderance of bad concertos is alone responsible for these definitions; there lies the reason why the mass of the public, when it hears a concerto, whatever be its value, admires first of all the accomplishments of the soloist, and why the meaning of its applause is less “How beautiful this music is!” than “What a lot of notes this performer gets in!”

The essence of the concerto lies in the struggle between the orchestra on one hand, and the solo instrument, or group of instruments, on the other. The struggle is broken by truces during which orchestra and solo collaborate on friendly terms, and it ends with a reconciliation—but it is none the less a struggle. Sometimes the weapons are common to both sides—the main themes which return in solos and tuttis; sometimes each side has its own—themes reserved for the solo and others that belong to the orchestra. There are vicissitudes; the strife may remain indecisive, and solo and orchestra may toss the chief subjects from one to the other; the tutti may win a momentary victory and loudly proclaim its triumph, or the soloist may see his endeavours carry the day by dint of chords, scales and arpeggios, and spurn the vanquished orchestra with a series of scintillating trills. But, whatever the temporary issue, we know that in the long run neither side will win and that the final cadence will conclude peace and alliance between the former adversaries.

For this result to appear likely, the forces must be evenly balanced, The orchestra uses its polyphony, its mass, its colour; the soloist, his virtuosity. Semi-quavers and demi-semi-quavers are his only means of defence against the weight and colour of the band. Take away this defence and his instrument is just one among fifty; the orchestra crushes and absorbs it. Virtuosity is not a mere display of “skill”; it is a source of beauty and the very condition of survival for the solo instrument. The orchestra is not forbidden to exploit its colour and its mass; why forbid virtuosity to the soloist? The fact that certain composers of concertos have misused the weapon is irrelevant; the soloist must have recourse to it or succumb.

The danger of absorption by the band is a real one for the solo instrument, and it is often by reaction against it that so many mediocre concertos fall into the extreme of limiting themselves to being just series of runs, preceded, interrupted and followed by interventions of the tutti. This danger threatens especially concertos for string and wind instruments; those for the piano fear it much less, for the tone of the instrument stands out clearly against the orchestral background.

For this reason, the piano concerto is perhaps the ideal of the form. The battle between a single fiddle and the whole host of strings, woodwind and brass always appears unequal, but with the piano we know that the orchestra will find its match.

If, then, we consider the concerto as a struggle between two forces, one simple, the other complex, it ceases to be an “inferior genre” and becomes as worthy of study as the sonata, quartet or symphony. Now, of all the concertos that exist, those of Mozart form the largest group of masterpieces. That is one of their claims to a special study. There is another. Nowhere in all the composer’s work is there a form wherein he has expressed himself so completely. His twenty-three piano concertos, extending from his eighteenth to his thirty-sixth year, reveal him at all ages; they are the most varied and most extensive witness to his artistic life. We find in them his joys and sorrows, his hopes and disappointments; we penetrate through them into the inner sanctuary where the harassed and overworked man found afresh the radiant life which never ceased to spring up within him. Not that his finest concertos are greater than the best of his other works; the four great symphonies, certain of his quartets and quintets and many other compositions are in every way their equals. In almost every one of the mianifold genres within which he poured forth his treasures one finds one or two works which are among his finest, but none of these genres show so abundant a succession of masterpieces as his piano concertos. He wrote some fifty symphonies, but thirty-eight of these were composed before the age of twenty-one and only the last four of the remaining ten can be called great. He composed also some thirty quartets, but only the last thirteen date from his maturity; the others were all written before he was twenty-three and most of them much earlier. The eight quintets, too, do not form a homogeneous group. One is very early; the horn quintet and that for piano and wind belong to his twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth years; the next two were written at thirty-one; the clarinet quintet at thirty-three; and the two others right at the end of his life. It is the same with the rest, except the operas which space out fairly equally over the years of his maturity, and are the only group which might vie with the concertos in reflecting fully the personality of their creator. If only one part of his instrumental work had survived,⁶ the one which would give us the completest picture of him, the one whose survival would come nearest to consoling us for the loss of the rest, would be the group of the piano concertos.

Mozart’s life is so short that it does not seem possible to give to his work the threefold division which, since Lenz, we recognize in that of Beethoven and which, according to Vincent d’Indy, can be found in the life of every creative mind. In his life of thirty-six years it seems impossible to distinguish the ages of initiation, of maturity, and of full self-possession which mark the “law of the three periods”. Is it reasonable to suppose that Mozart could have reached before the age of forty the point which most artists reach only after fifty? Moreover, in a work which seems so uniform, how can one discover three “periods”? The opinion once prevalent that all his works are alike and show no sign of development would make it seem arbitrary to divide into three periods the music of a composer who, from one end of his short life to the other, always harped on the same theme.

And yet, despite appearances, a deeper knowledge of his music shows that one can apply the “three periods” law to him without losing oneself in hair-splitting distinctions. To deny its existence in his work is to go against the facts. The notion that he never changed is due to the fact that so many people still know little of his work beyond the piano sonatas, often “interpreted” by the pitiless hands of children, and these are the weakest and least personal part of his output. When one gets beyond them and comes to the quartets, quintets, concertos and symphonies, the impression vanishes and one recognizes in him a variety indicative of growth.

If, therefore, we divide his work into three periods, the first, that of initiation and formation, will cover the years of his youth, at Salzburg, in Paris, and during his travels, from 1762 to 1780. The second, his maturity, begins at twenty-five with Idomeneo and finishes with the three great symphonies and the last quartets, at the moment when the silence of 1789-90 marks the lowest point of discouragement and wretchedness. The third is when the artist, overstepping the limits which had bounded him hitherto, enters new lands and walks under new skies; it is the culmination of his existence. True, with Mozart one hardly dares to speak of culmination; his career was checked too early for him to reach one, and this third period, which corresponds to the works of his last year, is incomplete. It is but the beginning of a period of which the Magic Flute and the Requiem show how magnificent the harvest would have been. None the less, his last year is distinguished from his earlier periods. After the almost complete silence of 1789 and 1790 it is a new and sudden blossoming of masterpieces. His two “testaments”, the Magic Flute and the Requiem, the one secular and humanitarian, the other Christian, bear indeed a stamp of finality. Their place is at the end of a life and they strike chords which Mozart had never touched S0 deeply till then. Other works of that year show this character to a lesser degree and justify our calling it his “third period”.

For the composer’s biography, two rather than three periods is the right division. The watershed is his departure for Vienna in 1781. Freed from the yoke of the Archbishop of Salzburg and from the guardianship of his father, against whom he rebelled, not only by leaving the Archbishop but also by marrying in the following year, Mozart asserted his independence as son and as servant, and his newly-won freedom was soon reflected in a greater originality in his music. The story of both his life and his work agrees in marking 1781 as the date of a deliverance, of a taking-off, and the turning-point of his career.

This taking-off happened at twenty-five. At an age when most artists begin to produce, Mozart reached his maturity. Although so young he stands almost alone in that his creative life up to this point is long enough to constitute a “period”, and one which includes works of which several, notably some of the violin concertos, still survive in our concert halls and the mass of which is bulky enough to have provided material for the two large volumes of Wyzewa and Saint-Foix.⁷ Schubert and Mendelssohn alone are comparable to him in this.

Nevertheless, despite this voluminous output, he was not an infant prodigy. The works of his youth contain neither a Gretchen am Spinnrade nor an Erlkðnig nor a Midsummer Night’s Dream overture. It is true that before he was twelve he had composed seven symphonies. But the symphony in 1760 was a slight thing, hardly more than “drawing-room music”, and these symphonies are merely the playthings of a clever, imitative child, of quick sensibility, able to incorporate in his work anything that strikes him in what he hears. Most of what he wrote before eighteen is not more valuable than the sonatinas which Beethoven, it is said, composed at twelve, and Beethoven has never been looked upon as a precocious composer. On the contrary, he is always contrasted, as one who ripened late and whose growth never stopped, with the precocious geniuses who gave all they had to give at twenty and produced nothing later. This contrast is partly valid when it is applied to Mendelssohn; it is less so of Schubert who produced real masterpieces at an early age but continued, nevertheless, to evolve all through his short life; it is quite invalid for Mozart who wrote nothing great before his journey to Paris at twenty-two, and who went on developing to the very end, to the Magic Flute and the Requiem.

Mozart wrote his first concerto in 1773 at the age of seventeen. At this time the period of youthful journeys was over and the young man, who had visited Vienna, France, Holland, England and Italy (the latter country thrice), was back in Salzburg. Until his final departure, in 1781, his only absence was to be his journey to Mannheim and Paris, during which he wrote no piano concertos. We can therefore look upon his six first, written between 1773 and 1780, as belonging to one period.

But they were composed at dates too widely separated for them to constitute a homogeneous group. The first is distinct from the five others and, indeed, from all those that follow it; the second, third and fourth, on the other hand, are alike and are his best examples of the galant concerto; the fifth and sixth, again, stand out from their neighbours and can be included with them in a chronological sense only. But in spite of these differences it is convenient to class these six Salzburg concertos together and we can thus distinguish four groups.

The first group comprises the works composed at Salzburg between 1773 and 1780.

The second is made up of the three concertos written at Vienna during the summer of 1782.

The third, by far the most important and interesting, includes the twelve masterpieces written in 1784, 1785 and 1786; and the fourth, an arbitrary group, will serve to bring into this classification the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Dover Edition
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• THEME GUIDE - FOR MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTOS
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• PART V
• Conclusion
• Appendix I - CADENZAS TO K.365