Sabine Meyer plays Mozart

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Johann Mattheson, the great, stunningly eloquent peacock of Baroque musical literature, was in no doubt that the chalumeau the forerunner of the clarinet – with its “rather howling sound”, was not an appropriate instrument to be heard in sophisticated entertainments. Its imperfections could all too easily offend good musical taste.

Yet, the instrument’s potential had clearly been recognised and, several decades later, the clarinet, already greatly improved, had established itself in various European orchestras and the composers of the Mannheim School had demonstrated to the world the considerable soloistic capabilities of this newcomer to the family of reed instruments.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, on his journey to Paris (1777-78), stopped in Manheim, where he fell in love with the inimitable sound of the clarinet. During the Viennese years he had ample opportunity to explore the distinctive characteristics of the instrument. At the same time, he did not restrict himself to the register familiar to us today. With the same enthusiasm, he also experiment with the instrument’s lower-pitched siblings, the basset clarinet and the basset horn.

The basset clarinet was invented in 1788 by Lodz, the court instrument maker. Clarinettist Anton Stadler improved the instrument’s technical possibilities and was the recipient of two extremely advantageous works from Mozart: first the Clarinet Quintet K.581, premiered on 22 December 1789, and then – a few weeks before the composer’s death – the Concerto in A major, K.622.

In early nineteenth-century, both works appeared in print, but by then the basset clarinet had gone out of fashion, and in the scores of both the Quintet and the Concerto the clarinet is the one we recognise today – with the musical result that several characteristic figures in the low register had been transposed upwards, so losing their original effect.

When Sabine Meyer recorded the Concerto with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Hans Vonk, in anticipation to Mozart Year 1991, she abandoned the modern tradition and used an instrument that corresponded to the original. Of course, she had to use a reconstruction of the original part. The suspicion that Mozart did not write the Concerto for the ordinary instrument, but rather for the low basset clarinet had already become certainly in 1967, when musicologist Ernst Hess discovered excerpts from Mozart’s own version in the Allhemeine Musikalische Zeitung from March 1802, which allowed no further doubt.

Meyer’s “re-transcription” of this popular work offered a variant that had not been heard since Mozart’s time, but it is a version that in every respect does justice to the composer’s sympathy for the special sounds of the basset register, and it is musically so persuasive that it requires no further justification.

The Sinfonia concertante for four winds and orchestra probably dates from the time of Mozart’s disastrous stay in Paris. It is a work about which scholars occasionally argue even today, because its exact genesis and its authenticity remain uncertain. The composer himself was partly to blame for this. Through his masterful ability to fall between all stools, he managed, to such a degree, to provoke the animosity of the “king” of Parisian Sinfonia concertante, Giuseppe Maria Cambini, that Cambini apparently had nothing better to do than to hinder the performance of Mozart’s rival piece.

The circunstances were that Mozart had played from memory a quartet by Cambini for the publisher Legros and – encouraged by the instrumentalists, Ramm (oboe), Ritter (bassoon) and Punto (horn) – had interpolated many of his own ideas. Cambini was present and had no choice but to praise the brilliance of Mozart’s improvisation. “Now, he surely did not relish that at all”, wrote Mozart afterwards to his father. But Cambini was apparently able to influence Legros to such an extent that the copying of the parts of Mozart’s “work” was “forgotten” with the result that Ramm, Ritter, Punto and the flautist Wendling waited in vain to receive the material and no performance took place.

The score of the Sinfonia concertante remained in Paris after Mozart’s departure. And it disappeared. We know that the composer intended to write it out again from memory, but we do not know whether he ever did. It is possible that he reworked the score, replacing the flute with a clarinet. It just as likely, however, that he created an entirely new work. As if that were enough, it is conceivable that the score originates from an anonymous composer who managed to copy Mozart’s style “to a T”. [...]

Eckhardt van den Hoogen

Translation: Howard Weiner