Mozart harpsichord concertos

CD liner note

Cliff Eisen writes:

On 29 November 1766 the Mozart family returned home to Salzburg after a lengthy expedition to Germany, the Low Countries, England and France. Although it was not Wolfgang’s first tour — he had travelled to Munich in 1762 and Vienna in 1763 — it was unquestionably the most important of his childhood: during these three and a half years Mozart had established himself as a child prodigy of international repute; he had composed and published his first substantial works (among them the symphonies K16, 19, 22 and Anh. 214; the sonatas for keyboard and violin, K6–7, 8–9, 10–15 and 26–31; the variations K24 and 25; and the aria ‘Va, dal furor portata’, K21); and he had come to know many of the most important composers and musical styles ofthe time. He heard the violinist Nardini at Ludwigsburg in July 1763 (Leopold wrote that ‘it would be impossible to hear a finer player for beauty, purity, evenness of tone and singing quality’) and met J. C. Bach, Karl Friedrich Abel and the singer Giovanni Manzuoli while in London. From Paris, which the Mozarts visited in 1764 and again in 1766, Leopold wrote to Salzburg:

There is a perpetual war here between Italian and French music. French music is not worth a damn. Now, however, things are starting to change: the French are beginning to waver very much and in ten to fifteen years the present French taste, I hope, will have completely disappeared. The Germans are taking the lead in their publication. Among these Mr Schobert, Mr Eckard and Mr Hannauer for the keyboard, and Mr Hochbrucker and Mr Mayr for the harp are very popular.

The three keyboard composers mentioned by Leopold left their mark not ooly on Mozart’s rapidly developing style, but also provided models for the series of concertos, K37, 39, 40 and 41, that ehr arranged in 1767from sonata movements by them. The youngest, Johann Gottfried Eckhart (1735–1809), a native of Augsburg and a promising painter as well as musician, had accompanied the piano maker Johann Andreas Stein to Paris in 1758, establishing himself there as an outstanding performer (the connection with Stein is not without interest; many years later, in a letter of 17 October 1777 Mozart spoke highly of Stein’s pianos). Burney had high praise for both Eckard and the Silesian-born Johann Schobert (c.1740–1767), who emigrated to Paris in about 1760 or 1761 where he was employed by the Prince de Conti. Yet it seems there was bad blood between the two and Nannerl Mozart’s performances of Eckard’s sonatas, only added fuel to the flames. According to Leopold’s letter of 1 February 1764:

My little girl plays the most difficult works which we have of Schobert and Eckard and others ... with incredible precision, and so excellently that this mean Schobert cannot conceal his envy and jealousy and is making himself a laughing-stock to Eckard, who is an honest man, and to many others.

But Leopold was biased to begin with, writing in the same letter:

Mr Schobert is not at all the man he is said to be. He flatters to one’s face and is the falsest of men; his religion however is the religion in fashion. May God convert him!

Leontzi Honauer (c.1730–c.1790), who in 1761 joined the service of Prince Louis de Rohan, does not figure in this feud, possibly because he was the least highly regarded of the expatriate German keyboard composers in Paris. Burney, for example, does not mention him. Finally, the Stralsund-bom Hermann Friedrich Raupach (1728–78) — whom the Mozarts apparently did not meet but whose sonatas figure in the genesis of Wolfgang’s pasticcio concertos — spent only part of his working life in Paris, later taking a position in St Petersburg (another popular destination for German composers). Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the Mozarts’ most important patron in Paris, described Raupach as an outstanding improviser.

Although it is not clear why Paris should have been a magnet for some German composers, Burney’s implication of a long-standing cultural divide between England and France, on the one hand, and Germany on the other, is probably close to the mark — individual styles appealed more in certain parts of Europe than others. And what is most germane to Mozart is Burney’s statement that ‘the novelty and merit of Schobert’s compositions seem to consist in the introduction of the symphonic, or modern overture style, upon the harpsichord, and by light and shade, alternate agitation and tranquillity, imitating the effects of an orchestra.

Possibly it was this quality of Schobert’s sonatas, and the sonatas of his contemporaries, that convinced the Mozarts to dress them up as fully-fledged concertos.

The four pasticcio concertos date from April, June and July 1767. With the exception of one movement based on a work by C. P. E. Bach (K40/III) and another (K37/II) based on an as-yet unknown source, they derive entirely from sonata movements by Raupach, Honauer, Schobert and Eckard. It is likely that these were Mozart’s first attempts at a concerto, a chaming anecdote reported by the Salzburg court trumpeter and family friend Johann Andreas Schachtner notwithstanding:

I once went with your father [Schachtner is writing to Nannerl Mozart] to the house, after Thursday service; we found the four-year-old Wolfgang busy with his pen. Papa: What are you writing? Wolfgang: A keyboard concerto, the first part is nearly finished. Papa: Show me. Wolfg: It’s not ready yet. Papa: Show me, it’s sure to be interesting. His father took it from him and showed me a smudge of notes, most of which were written over ink blots which he had rubbed out ... At first we laughed at what seemed such a galimatias, but his father then began to observe the most important matter, the notes and music; he stared long at the sheet, and then tears, tears ofjoy and wonder, fell from his eyes. Look, Herr Schachtner, [he] said, see how correctly and properly it is all written, only it can’t be used, for it is so very difficult that no one could play it. Wolfgang said: That’s why it’s a concerto, you must practise it till you can get it right.

Some anecdotes from Mozart’s childhood are believable — and made the more so by contemporaneous reports on his performances and improvisations — but Schachtner’s story of the precocious four-year-old stretches credibility. At this point Mozart had barely learned to put pen to paper for a simple minuet. Indeed, even as an eleven-year-old in 1767 the idea ofa concerto may have presented a thorny problem for him; a striking feature ofthe autographs of K37, 39, 40 and 41 is that they are largely in Leopold Mozart’s hand. It is fair to say that these are not Mozart’s concertos exclusively but, rather, a joint effort by father and son. The fact that Wolfgang and his father arranged concerto movements from pre-existing sonata movements has given rise to senous debate on the nature and origin of Mozart’s notions of concerto form, that unique miracle of his mature Viennese years. To judge by K37, 39, 40 and 41, it is merely sonata form.

And yet, the later concertos are so strikingly different Iron, these early essays, and in some respects closer to the model of the opera seria aria, that it is also possible to think of them as based more on a ritornello design, with specific functions assigned to either the soloist or enscmble and articulated by a wealth of instantly recognisable thematic material. Ultimately, neither of these accounts is entirely satisfactory, for even a quick glance at the originals of Paupach, Honauer, Schobert, Eckard and C. P. E. Bach shows that Mozart and his father did not merely take over the original sonata movements lock, stock and barrel; nor did,they simply add orchestral ritornelli at the beginning, middle and end. On the contrary, they cut, rearranged, extended and condensed the material to achieve specific dramatic aims. The relatively long development in the first movement of K37, for example, is a mere six bars in the Raupach original; here the Mozarts indulged in significant and wide ranging recomposition. Put another way, sonata, aria and concerto sometimes share generic family resemblances, without sacrificing their individuality. A concerto is just that, no matter how much it may at times sound like some other kind of work.

The influence of the German-Parisian composers was not limited to Mozart’s early years. Writing to his sister from Munich in December 1774, Wolfgang reminded her to bring Eckard’s variations on the Menuet d’Exaudet; and in Paris in 1778 he bought a collection of Schobert sonatas for a pupil. It may even be that Wolfgang or Nannerl performed the pasticcio concertos at a time when we are tempted to believe he had left his adolescent works far behind: during that same Munich visit in late 1774 Mozart wrote down on a single leaf a minuet for string quartet (K168a), a cadenza for a concerto by Ignaz von Beecke, with whom he had recently played a piano duet and, surprisingly perhaps, a cadenza for the first movement of K40. Although Mozart had already composed an original piano concerto (K175 of 1773), the pasticci of 1767 were still, apparently, part of the family’s performing arsenal.

© Copyright Cliff Eisen 2001,
and reproduced by his kind permission.