Getting reacquainted with Mozart

I recently had the pleasure of working on Mozart’s C major concerto, K. 467, and performing it in Roswell, New Mexico. The offer came on relatively short notice, some four months before the concert, and I had two major events coming up at the time the offer came—the seven-week Marlboro Festival and the Leeds Piano Competition. Hence, I ended up practicing the concerto in between other major pieces I was preparing. For most of the summer, I spent not more than half an hour per day on it, sometimes starting my practice sessions with tackling certain parts as a warm-up. As it happens, K. 467 isn’t a concerto I had been intimately familiar with prior to being asked to play it. Sure, I knew it, but even in comparison to other Mozart concerti I haven’t played, such as the early Jeunhomme, it was a new and somewhat “foreign” piece to me. There are many ways in which I familiarized myself with it, but I will focus on one in particular: writing cadenzas to the first and third movements. 

In Mozart’s time, cadenzas were often improvised, and until fairly recently, it was common for performers to write their own (indeed, Beethoven was said to refuse to give his cadenzas to his student Ferdinand Ries, insisting that he must have his own). It was their chance to “imprint” their own mark onto a template given to them by the composer, and therefore they were often extravagant and daring. However, in recent decades, with the gradual loss of spontaneity in performance (perhaps brought about by the era of recorded music), cadenzas have become somewhat ossified. As a result, cadenza writing has become something of a rarity. 

I have written cadenzas for all Mozart concerti I have played which do not have cadenzas by the composer. These include the C minor, K. 491, the C major, K. 503, and indeed the D minor, K. 466, too, for which I don’t play the commonly played ones by Beethoven. With a background in composition, it was quite natural for me to write cadenzas. Although I don’t necessarily stick entirely to the “style” of Mozart cadenzas, I do try to keep them in the same spirit. What I didn’t realize when I started writing them is how much the process of composing a cadenza familiarizes one with the concerto itself. Moreover, one’s relationship with the piece essentially changes after writing a cadenza. Why is that? 

Looking at the cadenzas Mozart wrote for certain concerti, we see that although they are all different from each other, the style and aesthetic in which they are written are more or less the same. Ergo, the relationship between the cadenza and the bulk of the movement is essentially the same (with a few exceptions, such as the expansive cadenza to the slow movement of the G major concerto, K. 453). The cadenza is essentially a prolongation of a cadence, beginning on a six-four chord and ending on a dominant seventh. What happens between the two chords is a detour, which takes us around the different themes introduced in the movement. The themes are mixed and matched, and presented in different expressive and rhetorical gestures, often ones not heard in the course of the movement (for example, we often hear recitativo-like passages in cadenzas). 

The process of mixing and matching these themes, and incorporating them into a harmonic and structural template, makes one fundamentally ponder and examine the nature of these themes. The questions that come to mind are of a different nature than the ones we ask ourselves when we learn the concerto. When learning the concerto, we think about the character of the themes as they appear on the page. But some of the questions we don’t necessarily ask ourselves are: Can a jaunty theme be introduced in a melancholy passage? Can a certain theme be rhythmically altered? And so on. There is, of course, a lot of experimentation involved. Certain themes can be presented in contexts other than those of the movement, but others do sound better if they remain only within the frameworks given by the composer. One is also confronted by the issue of brevity: Mozart’s cadenzas tend to be relatively short, as every bar has a clear rhetorical and structural function. There is no virtuosity for its own sake in Mozart’s cadenzas. One thing I could not help noticing is that however satisfying writing long and overtly virtuosic passages might be, it is a lot less satisfying to eventually find out that the passage is musically unnecessary. This idea also illuminates certain virtuosic passages within the movement: are they merely virtuosic, or is there actually something deeper hidden beneath the surface? 

Taking Mozart’s themes away from the keyboard and experimenting with them on paper gives us, inevitably, a sense of ownership over the themes. Sure, they were still written by Mozart, but as we rewrite and readapt them, they become, in a way, ours. And when we claim transient ownership of them, we realize their full potential. We realize how many possibilities certain themes give us, and in turn we can learn to appreciate why Mozart’s solution is better than anything we could ever come up with. 

Thus, not only is the process of writing original cadenzas a non-narcissistic endeavor, it actually brings us closer to the composer. First, because it is a tradition that was commonplace until not so long ago, and second, because it makes us reacquaint ourselves with the themes the composer put forth. I may even say that it gives us a glimpse of the composer’s perspective. Not that I mean to say that we can easily step into Mozart’s shoes (that would be foolhardily narcissistic). Rather, we have the opportunity to put ourselves through the humbling experience of facing the same, or at least similar, dilemmas. 

If you liked this blog, please click the buttons below to share it on your social media.