Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics by Rumph Stephen;

Author:Rumph, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

Example 23. K. 450, Allegro, closing theme, mm. 53–59.

And, with this quiet passage, Mozart has finally reunited the instruments with their idiomatic material. The winds reclaim their fanfare, the strings their lyrical melody. As Daniel Leeson and Robert Levin have documented, such passages regularly follow the final structural cadence in Mozart’s orchestral ritornellos.43 They provide a respite from the forward momentum, a calm space amid the drama. Appropriately, the orchestral actors achieve integration in this reflective moment.

The keyboard soloist, ironically, has the least individuated material in the Allegro. From the first entrance, the soloist displays a noticeable poverty of thematic material. In the adjacent concertos, K. 449 and 451, the keyboard enters with the first theme immediately after the ritornello. In K. 450, the soloist slips in on the tail of the closing theme, prolonging the tonic cadence with twelve measures of decorative passagework. This non-thematic material is tonally superfluous, since it neither resolves the end of the ritornello nor prepares the first theme with a half cadence.

Even the soloist’s new theme lacks substance. After two measures of a jaunty martial idea, the soloist leaps an octave for a sequence of ornamental flourishes. The antecedent phrase fills in this registral gap with equally vapid scalar passages. After eight bars, the soloist turns the melody over to the orchestra and spins out arpeggios for the remainder of the theme. In K. 449, by contrast, the soloist plays the entire thematic sentence, engaging the orchestra in a lively dialogue. In K. 450, the soloist eschews thematic statements, reverting continually to decorative passagework.

The beginning of the development confirms this pattern. The soloist again slips in on the final orchestral phrase, the lyrical violin melody that concluded the ritornello. Rather than develop the theme, however, the keyboard takes advantage of the scalar melody for another bravura passage. For the first twelve measures, the two hands toss the chromatic scales back and forth in invertible counterpoint. The remainder of the development consists of free passagework in the keyboard, accompanied unobtrusively by the orchestra. There is no hint of that stormy confrontation between soloist and orchestra that distinguishes K. 449. The keyboard remains absorbed in its virtuosic play.

Example 24. K. 450, Allegro (finale), first theme, mm. 11–13.

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