Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Complete Keyboard Sonatas Vol.2

Mozart: Complete Keyboard Sonatas, Vol.2

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.

The recording opens with one of Mozart’s most beloved keyboard sonatas, K.333. Older scholarship placed it among the so-called Parisian sonatas of 1778; the current Köchel catalogue instead dates it to November 1783, associating it with Linz and Vienna. Its music has an unusually spiritual and reflective character. It is difficult not to sense the many shadows that rise almost to the surface before being pushed back down. If the Allegro is a small microcosm of lightness, the long Andante cantabile has a dreamy quality, imbued with memories that seem to resurface from the past and mingle with a present overshadowed by dramatic feeling. The final rondo, almost symphonic in breadth, is marked by what Abert called “good-natured joviality”, and is perhaps one of the most structurally accomplished and richly varied movements in Mozart’s entire output.

The Sonata K.331, also formerly associated with Paris, is placed by the current Köchel catalogue in Salzburg and Vienna between 1779 and December 1783. It is certainly one of Mozart’s best-known works, above all for its celebrated final rondo. Yet there is much more to it. The music displays a wealth of shifts between major and minor, of a kind rarely encountered in his earlier works. This is particularly evident in the first movement, an Andante with variations that has always posed a formidable technical and interpretative challenge and gives a clear measure of Mozart’s mature virtuosity. As Abert observed, the three movements centred on the same tonic suggest a suite rather than a conventional sonata; each variation of the opening movement likewise has its own distinctive character. The second movement is decidedly Gluckian, with its tonal transitions and echoes of the German composer’s opera Les Pèlerins de la Mecque. These features find a further reflection in the familiar closing Allegretto, Alla turca, suggesting Mozart’s response to the fashions of his time, particularly the opéra comique with its Turkish and exotic subjects.

Mozart’s earlier Parisian experience offers a revealing perspective on his complicated response to French taste. In a discouraged letter to his father, he wrote: “I thank Almighty God if I can leave with my taste unspoilt. But I beg you, dearest father, to do everything possible so that I may soon see Italy again and return to life after all that I have endured.” This wish was never fulfilled. In July 1778 the frustration of being misunderstood was compounded by the loss of his mother. In one of his last letters before leaving Paris to return to Salzburg, he wrote again: “For payment in cash I will give the publisher three concertos, the one for Jeunehomme, the one for Lützow and the one in B flat, and, if possible, I will do the same with my six difficult sonatas. Even if it is not much, it will still be better than nothing. Travelling requires money.” These words convey both the bitter resignation of a man whose expectations had been disappointed and whose spirits were weakened, and the practical difficulties of his months in the French capital, with an income far below his initial hopes.

The small Sonata K.545 was composed in Vienna in 1788 for teaching purposes. A work of Mozart’s full maturity, it has nevertheless fascinated generations of listeners and players through its immediacy and simplicity, despite its purpose as a piece for study and practice. Here too Mozart never relinquishes the pleasure of listening. He adapts his writing to needs far removed from concert academies and large-scale operatic works, fulfilling his duties as a teacher with the utmost care.

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.

Recording credits

Recorded in December 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. The sound recording and artwork are owned by OMK-Da Vinci. ℗ and © OMK-Da Vinci Classics. DDD; designed in Japan, printed in the EU.