Personnel
Pengye Song – Fortepiano with improvisation
W. A. Mozart – Composer
Track List
- Piano Sonata in D Major K. 311: I. Allegro con spirito
- Piano Sonata in D Major K. 311: II. Andante con espressione
- Piano Sonata in D Major K. 311: III. Rondeau: Allegro
- Piano Sonata in C Major K. 330: I. Allegro moderato
- Piano Sonata in C Major K. 330: II. Andante cantabile
- Piano Sonata in C Major K. 330: III. Allegretto
- Piano Sonata in F Major K. 332: I. Allegro
- Piano Sonata in F Major K. 332: II. Adagio
- Piano Sonata in F Major K. 332: III. Allegro assai
Liner Notes by Andrew Stewart
Much has been written about ‘Mozart’s own piano’, housed today at the composer’s Birthplace Museum in Salzburg. Mozart acquired the instrument, most likely made by Anton Walter, at some point between settling in Vienna in the spring of 1781 and March 1785, when it is first mentioned in a letter sent home by his father during a visit to the imperial Habsburg capital. While the modern restoration of Mozart’s fortepiano raised questions about authenticity, thanks not least to its use of steel strings, it sparked interest in eighteenth-century pianos, long neglected relics that, when studied closely, revealed a teeming diversity of touch, tone colours and shadings. The young Mozart was familiar with an almost equally diverse range of keyboard instruments. Whether in Salzburg or on the road as a travelling wunderkind, he enchanted listeners with performances given on harpsichord, clavichord, organ or pantalon, a sophisticated form of hammered dulcimer popular in the German-speaking world.
Mozart’s interest in the German fortepiano took hold in October 1777 in Augsburg, his father’s hometown, while en route to Paris. Here he visited the organ and keyboard instrument builder Johann Andreas Stein at his Ulrichsplatz workshop. Stein persuaded him to prolong his stay by organising a concert, at which Mozart played on three of Stein’s recently finished fortepianos. ‘In whatever way I touch the keys,’ Mozart wrote to his father, ‘the tone is always even. It is true that he does not sell a pianoforte of this kind for less than three hundred gulden, but the trouble and the labour which Stein puts into the making of it cannot be paid for. His instruments have this special advantage over others that they are made with escape action. Only one maker in a hundred bothers about this.’
The keyboard sonatas Mozart composed during his childhood years were conceived for harpsichord and later reworked for publication, to suit the prevailing fashion, with optional violin (or flute) parts. A handful of sonatas for solo keyboard from this period were documented but have been lost; he probably wrote others of which no trace has survived. His earliest surviving keyboard sonatas, K.279 to K.284, six fascinating works clearly created with the fortepiano in mind, were composed in Munich between mid-January and early March 1775. During Mozart’s months in Munich, the innkeeper and vintner Franz Jospeh Albert arranged for the 19-year-old musician to take part in a keyboard competition at the Black Eagle Inn with Franz Ignaz von Beecke, Musikintendant to Prince Karl Kraft von Oettingen-Wallerstein. The duel was conducted on Albert’s own fortepiano, an instrument of considerable quality; it is possible, perhaps likely, that Mozart used Albert’s piano to compose his first solo sonatas.
Mozart returned to the solo sonata in the closing months of 1777. Having left Augsburg, he and his mother arrived at Mannheim in late October. He began by composing a piano sonata for the keyboard-playing teenaged daughter of Christian Cannabich, director of the Elector of Bavaria’s celebrated court orchestra. Its immediate successor, the Piano Sonata in D major K.311, was finished by mid-December; most scholars now agree that it was not, as was once believed, written in September, before the Mozarts left Munich, where Wolfgang had promised to compose a sonata for the daughter of one of his father’s friends. The work opens with a jubilant Allegro con spirito, cast in sonata form. The movement’s two thematic subjects are organically linked by the transformation of the first theme’s upward staccato scale into a descending legato scale in the second. Mozart caps the exposition with an apparently throwaway falling motif which grows in stature when it is recalled and extensively reworked in the development section. The repetition of the development and recapitulation amplify the vitality of the movement’s dashing right-hand scales and delightfully robust figuration in the left hand.
The Andante con espressione brings out the fortepiano’s lyrical voice. Its main theme is built from two interdependent phrases followed by what the musicologist William Kinderman aptly calls a ‘serene postlude’. While the regular recurrence of the theme (and a secondary idea, preceded by three repeated chords) suggest that the movement is cast in rondo form, Mozart complicates matters by wrapping his themes with elaborate ornamentation. The rondo proper follows in the form of an ebullient Allegro finale in 6/8 time, albeit one with ample room for relaxed episodes between statements of the main theme and a short, concerto-like cadenza. The latter prefaces an ingenious development of the main theme, in which the keyboard evokes the dialogue between a concerto soloist and full orchestral ensemble.
Mozart rarely performed his piano sonatas at public concerts. The genre was conceived for domestic consumption, to be played by wealthy, often accomplished amateurs in their private drawing-rooms or used as teaching pieces. The Piano Sonatas K.330 and K.332 belong to a group of three that Mozart composed during his final visit to Salzburg, made in company with his wife Constanze from July to November 1783. That they may have been created for didactic purposes is suggested by the composer’s use of the soprano clef in their right-hand parts, rather than his customary treble clef; in addition, the works’ autograph manuscripts contain precious few of the dynamic and articulation markings that were added to their first editions, published by Artaria in Vienna in 1784, leaving open the possibility that Mozart’s pupils were encouraged to create their own interpretations when working from his hand-written scores. Whatever their intended function, each of the three sonatas reflects their composer’s boundless inventive brilliance.
Improvisation at the keyboard was an essential part of Mozart’s creative toolkit. He was not confined by plain notes on a handwritten or printed page; indeed, he and his contemporaries were expected to enhance the given text of a piece with a wide range of additional rhetorical details, from melodic ornaments and embellishments to dynamic contrasts and personal responses to the music’s emotional temper. Pengye Song’s sonata interpretations strike a finely calibrated balance between respect for the score and the need to cultivate what Mozart himself referred to, in a letter to his sister Nannerl, as galanterie, a performance style rich in subtle nuances, feeling, imagination and tasteful decoration. We have an idea of the composer’s manner of melodic improvisation from the ornamented version of a passage from the Andante of his Piano Concerto No.16 in D major K.451 that he notated for Nannerl and which surely reflects his own performance practice.
The Piano Sonata in C major K.330 stands as the very model of Classical poise and balance. The demeanour of the first movement, with prominent upward-sweeping figures in its first theme and an utterly charming, songful second theme, remains relentlessly cheerful. Even the reflective minor-key modulations and dynamic contrasts of its development section feel like the welcome shade of passing clouds on a hot summer’s afternoon; Mozart’s subtle variations to both themes in the recapitulation underline the movement’s gravity-defying lightness. The emotional register becomes more complex in the sonata’s central Andante cantabile, growing in intensity with each of its repeated sections until the curtain parts to reveal a scene overcast with sadness, delivered in the key of F minor. A four-bar prelude, added late in the composition process, precedes the return of the main theme in its original F major, reinforcing the expressive contrast between the two modes. Mozart added a major-key version of his four-bar idea to the work’s published version, gracing the movement with a tender epilogue.
Any residual trace of darkness is dispelled with the Allegretto’s restoration of the irresistible force of optimism. The finale begins by presenting two lively themes; rather than developing them, as he did in the opening Allegro, Mozart provides the aural equivalent of a jump-cut with a diversion to a central interlude infused with the flavour of folksong. A short sequence of repeated two-note figures, each punctuated by brief rests, heralds the elegant transition back to the main theme. The movement is crowned by three majestic chords, rounding off the somewhat inconclusive phrase from the close of the exposition with a decisive ending.
Within the bounds of a simple sonata form, Mozart packs a breathtaking array of thematic ideas and contrasts into the first movement of his Piano Sonata in F major K.332. Its main theme is built from at least three ideas, each of which would be at home on the opera stage: the first flows like a lyrical aria; the bright-and-breezy second carries comic connotations; the third, spun in the key of D minor, sounds like it belongs to an orchestral overture. Complexity likewise runs through the elements of the second thematic group, the eloquent lightness of which is offset by a striking detour into C-minor territory. Mozart appears to be experimenting here, an impression confirmed by the arrival of a completely new theme at the start of the development.
While the early 1780s proved lean times for Mozart in his work for the stage, he evidently transferred the concept of dramatic characterisation to his F-major piano sonata. Shades of opera pass over its Adagio, an exemplar of refined expression in which profound emotions are conveyed without a single rough edge troubling the movement’s lyricism. In his autograph score, Mozart indicated a straightforward repeat of the first half; the published composition, however, contains extensive ornaments and embellishments, most probably supplied by the composer himself. These surely offer a model of what he would have expected his pupils to add to the repeat of an unadorned melody.
Beyond imparting pianistic showmanship to the sonata’s finale, Mozart reinstates the complexity that proved such a captivating presence throughout the first movement. The Allegro assai owns at least six independent thematic ideas; it also makes striking use of brief silences, which collectively play a distinct, if minor role in the movement’s dramatis personae. Mozart takes delight in the contrast of timbres between the fortepiano’s upper and lower registers, launching the finale with a sonorous left-hand chord followed by scampering figuration in the right hand. Contrasts between major and minor, dynamics, rhythmic accents and fine points of articulation further enliven and enrich the music, drawing the listener deep into a world teeming with life, in which themes come and go like fairground entertainers, some richly comic, others carrying heavy emotional baggage. These characters appear again in the recapitulation, albeit in modified to prepare the ground for a perfectly judged repeat of the rising chromatic figure from the first thematic group and the gentlest of codas, the reassuring signifier of a happy ending.