Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Complete Keyboard Sonatas Vol.1

Mozart: Complete Keyboard Sonatas, Vol.1

Album notes by Edmondo Filippini. Translation by Luisa Antonelli.

For nearly two centuries Mozart’s sonatas have been one of the principal touchstones by which pianists have measured themselves, whether approached as exercises, études or concert pieces, explored in depth or played superficially, adapted or transcribed for different ensembles. They remain a fundamental starting point for understanding Mozart’s keyboard writing and provide an intimate insight into his work as a composer, much as Haydn’s sonatas of the same period do. Many scholars have suggested that they were a way of setting down on paper material that Mozart would later use as the basis of his celebrated improvisations to astonish his audiences. While there may be some historical truth in this, most of these sonatas form such precise musical microcosms, with structures so finely chiselled, that it is difficult to imagine how virtuosic elaboration could improve the expressive poetry of each page. Each sonata seems to reveal a continuing stylistic maturation, almost parallel to that of the concertos, proceeding towards the final Sonata K.576 and creating an eighteenth-century body of work of exceptional richness and beauty. Here the clavichord can be particularly revealing: at times one can almost sense the composer’s physical presence. Mozart used the instrument both for composing and during his journeys; it was a friend and confidant. Its sound allows the listener to imagine a world removed from public salons and audiences, connected instead to the composer’s home and inner life, and to hear his more intimate voice.

Between 1777 and 1778 Mozart travelled through Munich, Augsburg and Mannheim, arriving in the latter city on 30 October 1777 and leaving for Paris in March 1778. The first sonata on this recording belongs to his Mannheim stay. Mentioned in a celebrated letter to the cousin he had met a month earlier in Augsburg, K.311 was written in November 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one. Together with K.309 it forms a pair displaying ‘some of the refinements of the Mannheim school’, in Paumgartner’s words. Mozart had recently arrived in the city and was a guest of the Cannabich family, distinguished musicians who had enthusiastically welcomed the visitor from Salzburg. In these pages he transforms the style he sought to emulate, without avoiding its pitfalls and difficulties, while keeping in mind Josepha Freysinger, the daughter of a Munich court councillor and a talented musician. Alfredo Casella described its rondo in particular as ‘sparkling and brilliant’. Its continual interweaving of different styles gives Mozart the opportunity to explore the possibilities offered by the instrument.

The Sonata in A minor K.310 is of an entirely different character and belongs to another moment in Mozart’s life. Written in Paris in 1778, it is his first truly tragic keyboard sonata in the fullest sense of the word, and perhaps one of the most powerful and immediately communicative. It is difficult not to hear echoes of a dark and dramatic period that culminated in the death of his beloved mother. ‘The first bars […] chill one’s blood in the true sense of the word […]’, wrote Glenn Gould. They draw the listener into a new world of melancholy and anger expressed through resignation, as though accepting an unavoidable fate against which resistance is impossible. A sense of unrelenting force emerges in every movement, including the apparently reassuring Andante cantabile. To understand Mozart’s personality, it is illuminating to read the passage from the letter he wrote to his father on 3 July 1778, shortly before his mother’s death, to prepare him for the worst. It bears witness both to his moving sensitivity towards his father and to the courage and strength he maintained in such circumstances:

My dearest mother is very ill. At first we had recourse to our home remedies, to the anti-spasmodic powder; we would have liked to use black powder as well, but we did not have any and we could not find it, nor do they know it under the name of Pulvis epilecticus. She is very weak, has fever and delirium. They give me some hope, but I do not have much. For a long time I have been living day and night between fear and hope. But I have completely put my trust in God’s will and hope that you and my dear sister will do the same. For I believe, and no one will be able to convince me otherwise, that no doctor, no one, no adversity and no event can give or take the life of a human being: only God can do that. By this I do not mean that my mother will die or must die, or that there is no more hope. Let us hope, but not too much; let us put our trust in God and console ourselves with the thought that everything that happens according to the will of the Almighty is right, for He knows better than we do what is useful and beneficial for our happiness and our well-being, both on Earth and in Heaven.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, letter to Leopold Mozart, 3 July 1778

The programme is completed by the Sonata in F major K.332. Its former association with the Parisian sonatas of 1778 has been superseded: the current Köchel catalogue places its composition in Salzburg between 1779 and September 1783. Among the most beloved sonatas in the repertoire, it is striking above all for its treatment of F major, a key often associated with lightness and gallantry. Despite the beautiful opening theme, whose character seems to promise that direction, the sonata’s many darker moments continually lead elsewhere. Restlessness and recurring contrasts govern every page: the music presses towards an increasingly uncertain horizon, exploring the boundaries of Mozart’s own style and seeking to move beyond them. That tension is not unlike the impulse that would soon animate the Romantic composers, for whom continual questioning and challenge became central to their expressive language.

Instrument

Giovanni De Cecco plays an unfretted clavichord made in 2015 by Michele Chiaramida, after the instrument attributed to Johann Heinrich Silbermann and dated 1775, preserved in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (inventory MIR 1061). Keyboard compass: FF–f³, 61 keys; pitch: A = 415 Hz. Dedicated to Francesca.

Recording credits

Recorded in May 2017 by Gianluca Zanin at Artigian Studio, Preganziol (Treviso). Production, design and art direction: OMK-Da Vinci. Printed with the support of S.P.L.M. ℗ and © OMK-Da Vinci Classics. DDD; manufactured in Japan.