ABSTRACT
As players of Mozart’s sonatas, we may choose to embellish his notated texts. Indeed, some of us have already chosen – not just on the level of the individual performance, but as a defining characteristic of our professional practice when we play Mozart–to intervene creatively (to varying degrees) when we engage with his texts. Our practice expresses a belief that to play Mozart’s notated texts ‘straight’, as if they were anything other than provisional, is not (for us) a historically defensible or sustainable position to adopt. 1 Wherever we may be along that particular path of intervening within Mozart’s texts, we do need benchmarks for questioning our own practice (and it is much to be hoped that we ask some questions, rather than none). We may begin to approach the issue of whether, where and to what extent to introduce embellishments into our performances of Mozart’s sonatas by considering these few contexts:
Quantz retains the Italianate view that florid embellishment should be the norm in repetitions of phrases and sections, starting from the presumption that generally speaking, wider intervals need to be artfully filled-in and structural melodic notes rendered more expressive by the judicious addition of dissonant grace notes. Thus the performer must always pay attention to the harmonic underpinning of a melody, not just to the melodic shape in itself. Quantz makes the point that the embellishment should improve the original; that it should respect the Affekt of the original (no lively embellishments in a melancholy piece, for instance); and that it should only really be added where an absence of embellishment would result in a boring piece. Effectively, Quantz is discussing the application of diminutions to existing notation. 2
C. P. E. Bach 3 and Leopold Mozart take a stricter view on the application of embellishments. C. P. E. Bach felt that these were not infrequently excessive and inappropriate and considered them to be matters of taste in the application of commonly understood grace-note patterns, rather than grammatical necessity. In his father’s music, embellishments were generally already written out into the score. In C. P. E. Bach, one gets the sense that the art of diminutions was regarded as something no longer current or appropriate. Varied repeats were something else. In his Sechs Sonaten für Klavier mit veränderten Reprisen (Berlin, 1760) he offers extended examples of the art of recomposing an original upon the repeat. The patterns found are generally not formulaic fragmentations of the original melody into smaller note-values, but a significant reshaping of the original melodic contour with respect to the underlying harmonic scheme.
Leopold Mozart is notably frugal in his discussion of embellishment. Diminutions are hardly discussed, and those few rising and falling grace-note formulae that he does include in his chapter 9, sections 18–22, 4 are recommended only for use in solo playing. For Leopold, the performer’s duty is to be able to read the notated score for its coded messages, knowing where the composer intends ornamentation (and applying it judiciously in such places) and where not (and in such places leaving well alone). For example, it is incorrect to add upper-note appoggiaturas in places where the main harmony note is already preceded by an appoggiatura, thus detracting from the dissonant effect already crafted by the composer. Leopold’s stricture that the player should introduce no embellishments except those that do not spoil the melody or the harmony perhaps represents an extreme a case for the performance of Wolfgang’s sonatas, but offers a useful check to the player.
