You recall what Mozart replied to Salieri’s remark? “Well! Rightly? Well, perhaps… But my divinity is hungry now.” In this unison of the “sacred and profane” – it was not by chance that these words became the title of a popular novel about the composer’s life – we have all of Mozart himself! Mozart turned to keyboard sonatas relatively late – at the age of nineteen – though by that time he was already famous as a virtuoso. While still a wunderkind he had stunned listeners with his gift for improvisation and it was not by chance that the genre of variations that he loved so much appears in many of his sonatas. Mozart himself revealed in letters to his father that in one concerto he played “… that way immediately, the magnificent Sonata in C Major with the rondo at the end just flowing from my mind.”
Mozart the pianist was unlike other virtuosos that, half a century later, Mendelssohn would refer to as “acrobats of the piano.” In the performances of the renowned Clementi, against whom Mozart once had to compete at the command of Emperor Joseph II, he found “neither a pennyworth of taste or of feeling, it was pure mechanics.” For the composer, the frequently used word gusto (Italian for “taste”) was the yardstick of brilliance. Here is his brief precept to pianists: “Play the piece at the correct tempo, as it should be played. All of the notes, embellishments and so on with the additional befitting expression of gusto, as written, are so that it appears that the person playing it was also the one who composed it.” And here is Mozart’s remark about the Andante in one of his sonatas: “… it is full of expression and must be performed precisely – con gusto and forte and piano where those words appear.”
Written over the course of some fifteen years, it is common practice to refer to Mozart’s cycles of keyboard sonatas by the name of the place they were composed or published, such as “Munich,” “Mannheim,” Paris” or “Vienna.” At that time sonatas were not considered to be a truly concert genre: at academies (as open concerts were called), more frequently Mozart would perform variations and fantasias. Sonatas were written first and foremost to be performed at home and for numerous pupils, although today, of course, they are played far from exclusively in the teaching repertoire.
Mozart himself, it is true, often referred to his sonatas as difficult (one of them in particular was given the secondary title of a Short Keyboard Sonata for Beginners, KV 545). But we have already noted that he saw the main performing difficulty to be not playing technique but rather expressiveness. The sonatas that everyone who has studied music as a child knows well are a hard nut to crack for performers onstage. It is the combination of attractiveness and the apparent ease of exposition (while Mozart intensified the musical fabric not just through galante embellishments but also with polyphonic “patterns”) that make the sonatas a test of supreme mastery for the performer (virtus, meaning manly or heroic, is the Latin root of the word “virtuoso”).
The composer gives us minutes of the “sublime” as in his Sonata in A Minor KV 310, imbued with the illness and death of his beloved mother or, as in the Sonata in C Minor KV 475, which prophesied Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata. To the Sonata in C Minor Mozart subsequently added his Fantasia in C Minor KV 475, which is normally performed as an overture to the sonata.
Mozart appears in a completely different and “earthly” light in his Sonata in A Major KV 331 with its magical variations set to a French song and its final Rondo alla turca(Turkish March) which essentially became a “hit.”
Iosif Raiskin
| user_name | | Exit |
