Understanding Mozart's Piano Sonatas

John Irving

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317004745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Mozart's piano sonatas are among the most familiar of his works and stand alongside those of Haydn and Beethoven as staples of the pianist's repertoire. In this study, John Irving looks at a wide selection of contextual situations for Mozart's sonatas, focusing on the variety of ways in which they assume identities and achieve meanings. In particular, the book seeks to establish the provisionality of the sonatas' notated texts, suggesting that the texts are not so much identifiers as possibilities and that their identity resides in the usage. Close attention is paid to reception matters, analytical approaches, organology, the role of autograph manuscripts, early editions and editors, and aspects of historical performance practice - all of which go beyond the texts in opening windows onto Mozart's sonatas. Treating the sonatas collectively as a repertoire, rather than as individual works, the book surveys broad thematic issues such as the role of historical writing about music in defining a generic space for Mozart's sonatas, their construction within pedagogical traditions, the significance of sound as opposed to sight in these works (and in particular their sound on fortepianos of the later eighteenth-century), and the creative role of the performer in their representation beyond the frame of the text. Drawing together and synthesizing this wealth of material, Irving provides an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with this repertoire.

Chapter 1
Pretexts

Mozart’s piano sonatas form a rich and diverse oeuvre. Yet they remain somewhat in the shade of his concertos for that instrument. Just a handful of the sonatas are at all regularly performed, and they suffer from a mindset that regards them as mere prefaces to the much more rewarding sonatas of Beethoven. One world-famous pianist, in a masterclass for some of my students at Bristol University about fifteen years ago said that Beethoven’s sonatas were more rewarding to play than Mozart’s because their left-hand parts were more interesting. As with all that pianist’s comments, there is a challenge about that remark intended to stimulate further thought, and it was not meant to be derogatory towards Mozart in any way. But it was a bit of a double-edged sword nevertheless, reinforcing for some of the participants on that occasion, I think, the suspicion that Charles Ives was right to pigeon-hole Mozart’s sonatas as ‘lady finger music’.1

I have begun by establishing a context for the sonatas because context is what this study attempts to address in understanding Mozart’s sonatas. Performing these pieces requires some prior investigation of their materials, possibly including detailed analysis not only of those materials in themselves (and not just pitches and durations, but also articulation marks, textures, dynamics, tempos …), but also of how they interact with each other to create continuities which the performer might express. That forces one to assess what context(s) are being assumed a priori (especially analytical contexts), sometimes with uncomfortable results. Lately, in approaching Mozart’s piano sonatas as a music historian and performer, rather than as a theorist, I have regularly been shocked to realise how slender is the a priori foundation for what I thought I understood about how the music works. Even though I have previously written about these works,2 I now see that there is value in approaching these pieces once again, this time with a focus on the plurality of contexts within which they may be understood – and most especially performance contexts.

Understanding Mozart’s piano sonatas might mean lots of different things. Whatever it means, it depends on relating them to surrounding and supporting contexts. In my previous study of these works, I attempted to combine reception perspectives with one particular theoretical model derived from contemporary understandings of musical rhetoric. These twin paths towards the music depended critically upon relating historical and theoretical claims to texts (whether autograph manuscripts, first or early editions, or various primary or secondary documentary writing about the sonatas, including the Mozart family correspondence). My approach now is somewhat different, since it invokes performance rather strongly as a tool for reaching an understanding of the sonatas. And a performance is a rendering of a text in a certain way, according to certain conditions. That is not the same thing as a text. In a performance, the text is enacted somehow. It is this context (in a literal sense of doing something ‘with the text’) that will occupy much of this book.

It seems fitting, then, to begin by establishing a context for myself as its author. I have a passion for Mozart’s music that stretches back over 40 years and that originated in early piano lessons. During that time, my attachment to Mozart’s music has deepened and has been inflected by my awareness not only of other music contextualizing Mozart’s own, but of other arts aspiring to express similar facets of the human condition, and also of philosophical reflections on the music’s potential for meaning. Crucially, it has been challenged and developed by fruitful discussions with performers, and in the act of performance. But the root of that attachment has never changed, and that is the physicality of my relationship to Mozart’s piano music – how it feels (literally) to play it and to express it with ten fingers and two knees (on a fortepiano; and with two feet if one still strives to play these pieces on a modern piano). Primarily, that means not simply playing the ‘right’ notes (though that helps, naturally), but playing them in an articulate fashion – which is not how I remember being taught to play Mozart as a youngster (it resonates in the memory still: ‘legato and cantabile, dear, legato and cantabile …’). Reflecting on that advice now (I did not, as a child, think to challenge it), one cannot help but consider a context. Why legato, and why cantabile? Well, the answer, in part, is the (ultimately late nineteenth-century Russian) tradition from which my early teacher came, the schooling that she and her teachers in turn had received. Breaking with tradition is bravely to deny a part of one’s own identity too, and there was no reason to suppose that a local piano teacher in the north of England would break with tradition in teaching a young boy to play a tiny Minuet in F major K.2 by Mozart on a large and imposing upright piano, probably dating from c.1910. So legato and cantabile it was. I realized none of that then, of course. But what I did realize was that there was some quality contained in this composer’s short piece that was lacking in everything else I had learnt up to that point (which was not very much). I doubt whether I played it particularly well, but the utterly joyful experience of learning it, and especially the feeling that it seemed to open up new vistas of musical expression and consequently to call for yet more effort every time I thought I had mastered it, has never left me. Nor would I wish it to.

As a fortepianist who is also a music historian with an interest in reception, I find that the issue of a text to be somehow represented beyond the circumstances of its notation on a page – in written or spoken prose or else in performance – is never far away from my mind. None of the tools I have for doing that can operate beyond the controlling embrace of a context. If I play a sonata by Mozart, then I do so using a particular instrument. I do so in a particular place, at a particular time, either alone or in front of listeners (who will bring their own contexts of expectation to the setting). I choose specific tempos which have consequences for the clarity of passagework, ornaments and textures (as do acoustical factors and the particular instrument). I may attempt faithfully to represent a particular text; or (more usually) to work with that text, adding my own humble contributions to the creative act in the form of embellishments, particular profiling of the slurring, staccatos and so forth – the ongoing progress of the articulations through a movement, unfolding in a kind of narrative counterpoint to the actual notes. How much of that is successfully conveyed depends on a huge number of variables constituting the environment within which the music has its being in performance. Reflecting on the ontological status of, for instance, the Andante of Mozart’s Sonata in F K.533 and 494 draws into play a range of tools for the understanding, such as:

• Analysis (of tonality, of structure, of motive, rhythm and harmony, and of intellectually constructed patternings such as theme, accompaniment, counterpoint, exposition, development, episode, recapitulation, contrast, closure…).

• Theoretical propositions for how these analyses might operate in a systematically satisfying way (for instance, Schenkerian approaches, or readings influenced by Réti, or the more flexible – and brilliant, though forbiddingly complex – recent typological project of Hepokoski and Darcy).3

• The recovery of historical modes of theorizing music, especially from Mozart’s own time and involving then-current models such as Affektenlehre (by then becoming rather old-fashioned), rhetoric and topics.

• Philosophical perspectives, both recent and from the Age of Enlightenment itself.

• Knowledge of performance practices which have a crucial bearing on the way this music speaks.

• most crucial of all, perhaps, the sound – in particular the realisation that modern pianos are inadequate vehicles for capturing Mozart’s musical language and that if we seek as performers to enable an understanding of this language that imposes the barest minimum of historical anachronisms in the listener’s way then we should abandon compromise and play Mozart’s sonatas on a fortepiano.4

None of these operates in a vacuum. Their individual and collective meanings (the way they influence our understanding of Mozart’s sonatas) are contextual. And that belief underpins the whole of this book. While some relevant theoretical models will from time to time be discussed in relation to particular cases, this is not a book on theory, and I shall promote no particular theoretical model for understanding Mozart’s sonatas. On the contrary, I take a quite empirical approach, drawing especially on performance perspectives as tools for understanding these works.

Performance, I believe, is a vital historical context for analysing Mozart’s piano sonatas. Mozart was born into the world of composer-performers, his earliest role-model in this respect being his father, who published a seminal treatise on violin playing in the very year of Wolfgang Mozart’s birth.5 Especially because Mozart was a composer-performer, the creative act of composing such a piece did not end with a notated text but extended yet further into a performance given (often) by the composer himself. Composing extended into performing; both were stages of a work’s ‘coming-into-being’. That may also be true of later cultural traditions within which Mozart’s sonatas have belonged at various times, of course, but the relation is a different one in which the subsequence of performance in relation to the text-cum-work is quite literally that: sub-sequent, lower in the hierarchy of values to the authorial intention that the notated text is thought to enshrine.6 Regarding any one of the sonatas as a definitive statement enshrined in a ‘fixed’ textual presentation that stabilizes the work, in a way allowing it to be measured (albeit in differing ways, reflecting different analytical systems), is an attitude that somehow diminishes, or even misses altogether, the vital ingredient of provisionality, within which performance as an element of the creative act is crucial. An analytical approach which treats Mozart’s sonatas as being hermetically sealed against historical forces that diversely illuminate them for different times and places risks constructing these pieces in narrowly materialistic terms. While such a materialistic approach might be more defensible in relation to works of the nineteenth century that appear to achieve a degree of stability in the course of historiographical narratives such as stylistic development, the tracing of influence, emergent cultures of virtuosity and concomitant hero-worship (placing music history firmly in the sociological sphere) or institutionalization (concert societies such as the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the establishment of professional orchestras at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig or the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the professionalization of the discipline of musicology in universities and conservatoires and so on),7 it is every bit as blunt an object for understanding Mozart’s sonatas as a modern concert grand piano is as a medium for their performance.

By contrast, I shall regard Mozart’s sonatas as works which celebrate the absence of separation between a creative act of composition and a creative act of performance. Both these qualities originally merged in the person of Mozart himself (his letters from the autumn of 1777 repeatedly refer to his own performances of the early sonatas K.279–84, for instance, and at least the rondo finale of the Sonata K.309 began life as an improvisation in one such performance). If modern-day ‘historically informed’ performances of these pieces on original or reproduction fortepianos by players such as Andreas Staier, Ronald Brautigam and Robert Levin (which refreshingly attempt to reflect that merging of creative forces) seem odd in daringly situating themselves in the mêlée of creativity, engaging with Mozart’s notes as something to be treated as starting-points rather than objects of reverential and passive worship, then that is because of an intervening culture that has little or nothing to do with Mozart’s likely expectations, but everything to do with constructing these pieces in the light of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attitudes towards art objects and representational practices.8 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can all too easily recognize the social contingency of those former attitudes, which, in their train, encouraged the formulation of certain analytical responses to music presuming a stable identity for the Work definitively represented by its notated score (indeed, overtly substituting the latter for the former). Moreover, we can nowadays recognize that Mozart’s sonatas epitomize an earlier and contrasting set of attitudes celebrating the fusion of compositional creation and representation in performance: a live, evolving and above all provisional activity that inhabits virtually every page of eighteenth-century manuals on performance. Given this scenario, performance emerges not as an adjunct, but as a vital historical context for the understanding of Mozart’s sonatas. Exploring performance considerations as strategies for the understanding can therefore help us to recover that vital ingredient of Mozart’s sonatas that so precisely defines them as products of the classical age, as opposed to the nineteenth century or later: namely that they are a space in which compositional creation and representation in performance are not separate spheres of activity,9 but contemporaneous fusions of the creative imagination.

Like analysis, performance relates to a text. We might say of their common characteristics that they each refer to an object. Analysis conceives of that object as something sufficiently fixed in nature as to allow systematic investigation of it according to the chosen methodology, leading to verifiable conclusions publicly demonstrated. The usual presumption of performance is also of a text that is studied and then exhibited to public scrutiny through the agency of the performer. The nature of the object is subtly different in each case, though. A historically-informed performance of a piano sonata by Mozart will pay particular attention to the means by which its vocabulary might be spoken through a creative application of relevant performance practices recorded in contemporary treatises taken alongside the sound world and sound production of – say – a Viennese fortepiano of the 1780s (or, more practically, a good modern copy). Necessarily, then, it will conceive of its object (the text) rather flexibly, incorporating an intellectual grasp and expression of sound as well as notation, viewing Mozart’s notation indeed as a basis for negotiation (rather than an end-point to be passively accepted). Its methods of engagement with that object are not by nature systematic, though the process still ultimately results in a public demonstration. It will accept Mozart’s notation as a challenge to be engaged with in order to achieve its completion, not as something ‘definitive’ in the sense that some interpreters have taken it to be, arguably applying a tradition of performance that grew up in the wake of a nineteenth-century construct that Lydia Goehr has so memorably characterized as the ‘Work Concept’.10 Works in this sense achieve the status of icons, objects of definitive generic identity, meaning, value – above all, individuality. According to Goehr, music around 1800 attained a status analogous to that of literature, the visual arts and sculpture in that one might now regard it as a finished embodiment of a musical thought. It changed from being an occupation or skill which was first and foremost a practic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Pretexts
• Part I: Reading Texts
• Part II: Playing Texts
• Bibliography
• Index