The Classical Music Lover's Companion to Orchestral Music by Robert Philip
Author:Robert Philip
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: XXXXXXXXXXXXX
Publisher: Yale University Press
Concertos
CLARINET CONCERTO IN A MAJOR, K. 622
Duration: approx. 29 minutes
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro
Apart from his famous series of piano concertos and his violin concertos, Mozart also wrote various concertos for wind instruments, all commissioned by (or for) particular players. There are fine concertos for horn, oboe, flute, flute and harp together, and a Sinfonia Concertante for four wind instruments. But the supreme wind concerto is the Clarinet Concerto, written in the final months of Mozart’s life.
The premiere of The Magic Flute took place in Vienna on 30 September 1791, with Mozart directing from the keyboard. A week later, he wrote to his wife, Constanze, who was once again undergoing treatment at the spa of Baden, ‘I’ve just come back from the opera; – it was full as ever. – The Duetto Man and Wife and the Glockenspiel in the first act had to be repeated as usual – the same was true of the boys’ trio in the 2nd act, but what really makes me happy is the Silent applause! – one can feel how this opera is rising and rising.’ Then, after a light-hearted account of playing billiards ‘with Herr von Mozart … the fellow who wrote the opera’, of drinking coffee and smoking a pipe, he adds, ‘Then I orchestrated almost the entire Rondo of the Stadler concerto.’3 This is a reference to the Clarinet Concerto, composed for the clarinettist Anton Stadler.
The clarinet was a relatively recent instrument in Mozart’s day, having been developed around 1700, and Stadler was one of those who was continually trying out various improvements. He played several forms of clarinet and basset horn (a closely related instrument at lower pitch), and the only autograph manuscript of this concerto by Mozart, which consists of most of the first movement, is written in G major for basset horn. Mozart then rewrote and completed that movement, transposed up a tone into A major for clarinet, and added two more. But it is not as straightforward as that. Scholars have established that Stadler played (and possibly co-devised) a clarinet in A with an extension, enabling it to play notes a major third lower than the standard instrument. They have also deduced that certain passages of Mozart’s concerto would originally have included these lower notes, and that these passages were transposed up an octave for the published score, so that it was playable on the clarinet in A. Nowadays, many clarinettists use such an extended clarinet in A – known as a ‘basset clarinet’ – to play the concerto in what is thought to be its original form, complete with the low notes that are transposed in the original published score.4
Like Mozart’s last piano concerto, in B flat, K. 595, the Clarinet Concerto inhabits that extraordinary world that sounds as if it has come from the mind of an old and wise man, even though Mozart was in his mid-thirties when he composed both works. This impression is created, as in the piano concerto, by a sense that the music has been distilled down to its essence.
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