Review

Reviewed Work(s): Perspectives on Mozart Performance by R. Larry Todd and Peter

Williams;
Musikalische Aufführungspraxis und Edition: Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven
by Günther Weiß
Review by: Cliff Eisen
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Mar., 1993), pp. 988-990
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/898941
Accessed: 21-02-2018 09:16 UTC

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988 NOTES, March 1993

Perspectives on Mozart Performance. models and styles for cadenzas to Mozart's

Edited by R. Larry Todd and Peter violin concertos (none of Mozart's cadenzas
Williams. (Cambridge Studies in Per- survives); and Stowell's thoughtful and
broad-ranging coverage of contemporane-
formance Practice, 1.) Cambridge:
ous sources and their potential meanings
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
and interrelationships. Jean-Pierre Marty
[xiv, 246 p. ISBN 0-521-40072-4. forcefully makes the important point that
$49.50.] for the Mozarts, tempo and meter were not
separate considerations, but interrelated,
Musikalische Auffiihrungspraxis und and he cites several passages from the let-
Edition: Johann Sebastian Bach, ters to show this. One especially clear ex-
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig ample should be added to his account, a
van Beethoven. Edited by Gunther passage from a letter by Leopold Mozart
WeiB et al. (Schriftenreihe der Hoch- describing a private concert in Salzburg in
schule fur Musik in Munchen, 6.) Re- April 1778: "Count Altham played a hor-
rible trio, no one being able to say whether
gensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1990. [173 p. it was scraped or fiddled-whether it was
ISBN 3-7649-2280-X. DM39.00.]
in a or common time, or perhaps even in
some newly invented and hitherto un-
Perspectives on Mozart Performance known is the tempo" (my emphasis; see Emily
first volume of a newly-inaugurated Anderson,series, The Letters of Mozart and His Fam-
Cambridge Studies in Performance Prac- ily [3rd ed., London: Macmillan, 1985]:
tice, edited by Peter Williams. Appropri- 527). There is entertainment in the vol-
ately published in 1991, it includes essays ume, too: Neumann's attack on Will
by leading scholars and performers, essays Crutchfield opens another front in the on-
touching on virtually every aspect of going War of the Prosodic Apoggiaturas.
Mozart performance: ornamentation (Paul This is a stimulating volume. Yet at the
Badura-Skoda and Frederick Neumann), same time, there is also something stale
improvisation (Katalin Komlo6s), cadenzasabout it. Not only are the interpretations
(Eduard Melkus and Christoph Wolff), not new (several of the authors having dealt
tempo (Jean-Pierre Marty), the nature of with similar, often identical, problems else-
Mozart's string writing (Jaap Schr6der), where) but our sources of Mozartean un-
and the influence of Leopold Mozart's derstanding remain the same as always:
Violinschule (Robin Stowell). Two essays the composers' autographs, selected well-
go beyond the "traditional" boundaries of known passages from the family letters,
performance practice: Peter Williams's and a pan-European context of contem-
essay on Mozart's use of the chromatic porary performance treatises and docu-
fourth and its contemporaneous meaning ments.
broaches contextual-aesthetic issues, while The "pan-European perspective" has po-
R. Larry Todd's article on Mendelssohn tential dangers: what may merely be local
and Mozart is subtitled "A Contribution to events or traditions are often cast in a
Rezeptionsgeschichte." The inclusion of these global-and consequently homogenized-
articles is justified by Williams's under- light. Recent research into the history of
standing of performance practice: "Perfor- late eighteenth-century genres, as well as
mance Practice is not merely about per- the practice of music at many contempo-
forming.... In studying all that we can rary secular and sacred institutions, shows,
about the practical realization of a piece of however, that local variations in scoring,
music we are studying not so much how it performance venues, notation, and so on
was played but how it was heard, both lit- may be relevant to our understanding of
erally and on a deeper level" (p. xii). musical meaning and performance, even
There are some excellent things in this within relatively circumscribed cultural ar-
book: Komlo6s's convincing and insightful eas, such as that to which south Germany,
description of Mozart's variations and their Salzburg, and Upper and Lower Austria
relationship to improvisation; Melkus's are usually presumed to belong. What rea-
very useful suggestions concerning possibleson is there to assume, for example, that

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Book Reviews 989

Salzburg's musical culture is reflective of traditional bias of Mozart studies to the

Mozart's Viennese years or that Viennese composer's autographs and the misguided
practice dominated Salzburg of the 1760s but pervasive concept, Urtext-simply been
and 1770s? shunted aside on the assumption that, as
It is even more tenuous to argue for the copies, they are only pale reflections of
commonality of performing traditionsMozart's be- "intentions?" And what of the
tween, say, Italy and Vienna, as Badura- family correspondence? Have these been
Skoda does in his essay on trills, suggestingmined for all they are worth? Here are
that Muzio Clementi's Pianoforte School of three passages from the letters, concerning
1801 "gives us valuable clues to Mozart's trills (of relevance to Badura-Skoda),
practice with trills" (p. 3). Mozart's well- tempo (Marty), and bowing (Stowell), none
known antipathy to Clementi is dismissed of which is mentioned in this book: W. A.
by Badura-Skoda as "ill-humour." But per- Mozart to his father, Munich, 2 October
haps we should take Mozart seriously: 1777:
"Clementi plays well, so far as execution
with the right hand goes. His greatest When she [Mlle. Kaiser, prima donna in
strength lies in his passages in thirds. Apart Munich] sustains her voice for a few bars,
from this, he has not a kreuzer's worth of I have been astonished at the beauty of
her crescendo and decrescendo. She still
taste or feeling-in short he is simply a
mechanicus" (Anderson, p. 793). For the late takes her trills slowly and I am very glad.
eighteenth century, "taste" was the final ar- They will be all the truer and clearer
biter of good performance, and if Mozart when at some time she wants to trill more
thought that Clementi lacked this essential rapidly; it is easier to do them quickly in
quality, then it surely says something about any case. (Anderson, pp. 290-91)
the worth of any testimony that derives
L. Mozart to his son, Salzburg, 29 January
from the Italian keyboard player. (Badura- 1778:
Skoda's implicit argument, that Mozart's
borrowing of a theme from a Clementi so- Both [Reicha and Janitsch] ... have
nata for Die Zauberflite legitimizes the con- Beecke's fault of dragging the time, of
nection, hardly constitutes evidence that holding back the whole orchestra by a
Mozart would have performed trills the nod and then returning to the original
way Clementi did.) Even more surprising tempo. (Anderson, p. 455)
is Badura-Skoda's citation of a French trea-
L. Mozart to his son, Salzburg, 29 January
tise from ca. 1720 to explain a trill in mea-
sure 65 of the first movement of the Piano 1778:
Sonata, K. 330.
Reicha is a first rate fellow. Janitsch plays
There is another problem-one that un-
in the style of Lolli, but his adagio play-
fortunately has been too little recognized-ing is infinitely better. Indeed, I am no
with the attempt to reduce performance
lover of excessively rapid passages,
practice problems to "universally" valid where you have to produce the notes
principles: because most of the sources, with the half tone of the violin and, so
both musical and documentary, are appar- to speak, only touch the fiddle with the
ently already well known, the pan- bow and almost play in the air. On the
European context has inhibited attempts to
other hand, his cantabile playing is very
uncover new evidence. Yet surely there are
poor, for he is inclined to make sharp
several types of sources that need to be
jerks and to indulge in allegro fireworks
examined more thoroughly. Throughout which to an understanding listener are
this volume, for example, there is not a
really most offensive. (Anderson, p. 455)
single mention of any authentic copy of
Mozart's works, even though such manu- Nicely produced as this volume is (and
scripts are abundant for both Salzburg and it generously includes a great many music
Vienna. Are these copies, many of them examples), the editing could have been
used by Mozart himself to perform his mu- more conscientious. For example, Melkus's
sic, really of no value for performance- claim that "[Mozart's piano concerto caden-
practice studies? Or have they-given the zas] were designed primarily for pupils,

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990 NOTES, March 1993

that is, young amateurs" (p. 74) stands in study of only local interest, without any
sharp contrast to Wolff's assertion that "the larger resonances for our understanding of
often expressed view that Mozart's piano Bach performance, while Hubert Meister's
concerto cadenzas were primarily written "Zur musikalischen Rhetorik in J. S. Bachs
for students incapable of improvising can- Orgelwerken" is a not-very-detailed intro-
not be supported by evidence" (p. 230). duction to some aspects of Baroque rhet-
Surely this difference of opinion merits oric and affect. Franz Beyer's "Zur Neuin-
some editorial comment, if only a cross- strumentation des Mozart-Requiems: Eine
reference. And some important citations Werkstattbetrachtung" could surely have
have been inexplicably overlooked: R. delivered more; but after a short, self-
Larry Todd's claim that the finale of the congratulatory introduction, the article
"Jupiter" Symphony is based on four con- amounts to an elaborate critical report with
trapuntal subjects, for example, stands only at a few of the editorial decisions ex-
odds with recent and not-so-recent litera- plained or justified.
ture on the work, including Neal Zaslaw's Two articles concern Beethoven. Unfor-
Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance tunately, however, Utejung-Kaiser's "Beet-
Practice, Reception (Oxford: Clarendon hovens Freiheitsideal-oder die Frage nach
Press, 1989: 539-41). Indeed, Todd's own den ktinstlerischen Darstellungsm6glich-
article has several inconsistencies and er- keiten humanitarer und freiheitlicher Sym-
rors: the "Jupiter" Symphony, K. 551 is not bolik in der Schauspielmusik zu Goethes
"No. 40" but "No. 41" (p. 178); the Violin Egmont (1810), in der Ballettmusik Die Ge-
Sonata, K. 454 is not in A-major but in schopfe des Prometheus (1801) und in der
Bb-major, hence it cannot possibly have Sinfonia Eroica (1803/05)" is a misguided
been the work performed at Leipzig in Jan- exercise in aesthetics and analysis. Not only
uary 1840 (also p. 178); and The New Grove is little direct connection actually made be-
Dictionary of Music and Musicians was pub- tween the pieces in question and contem-
lished by Macmillan in 1980, not 1979 (p. poraneous philosophical and aesthetic
185). Finally, in several of the articles, the questions, but the analyses are stunningly
music examples are not taken from reliable off-base. To cite only one example: the fi-
texts (this is a failing of both the editor and nale of the "Eroica" Symphony is uncon-
the authors), and inaccurate texts are par- vincingly explained as a possible sonata
ticularly embarrassing in a performance- form with a "functionless" (!) bass ostinato
practice book. In his example from the in the introduction, a forty-one-measure
opening of the "Prague" Symphony, Martyexposition with no "second group," and a
omits a piano on the second half of the recapitulation of only seventeen measures!
opening bar; surely the dynamics have a Finally, Johannes Fischer's "Textkritik und
bearing on the affect of the piece and, con- Intepretation (II): Das Staccato in Ludwig
sequently, the choice of tempo. And the van Beethoven's Klaviersonaten" is the only
articulation in at least two of Schrbder's article to address directly the implications
examples from the string quartets (ex.of3 the book's title; but valiant as his effort
and 10) does not correspond to any au- is to bring some clarity to this difficult and
thentic source with respect to slurring, dots often perplexing topic, the result remains
and strokes-this is especially unfortunateunsatisfactory. The article is short on ci-
in an article that gives prescriptions fortations of contemporaneous theoretical de-
bowing. scriptions of articulation and their possible
The title of another recent book, relevance to Beethoven, there are some
Musikalische Auffuihrungspraxis undquestionable
Edition, transcriptions from Beethov-
en's letters
promises a direct confrontation with the and music autographs, and no
sources. But here, too, the editor's view is consideration is given to the use of these
extraordinarily broad as to what constitutes symbols as signs of accent or to articulate
"performance practice." As a result, few phrase endings. All in all, Musikalische Auf-
of the articles directly address issues that fiihrungspraxis und Edition is a disappointing
are of immediate concern to performers. volume.
Diethard Hellmann's "Die Leipziger Bach-
Tradition in der 1. Halfte des 20. Jahr- CLIFF EISEN
hunderts (Dei Ara Strabe/Ramin)" is a New York University

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