(The following article first appeared in The Clarinet magazine, Fall 1984, Vol. 12, No. 1. Although it is written from a clarinetist's point of view, its information is of great value to oboists and bassoonists alike. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editors and the author. Ed.)
Introduction: Music disappears from the repertoire faster than one thinks. And, once begun, the forces which cause works to fall from grace are inexorable. Tastes change; styles of music are subject to the whims of fashion; performance materials become unobtainable. Works cease to be played because their authenticity is challenged. Perhaps the most famous example of music so eclipsed is the "Jena" Symphony, a work thought to have been written by Beethoven. But when it was shown to be a work of Friedrich Witt, it swiftly disappeared from the orchestral repertoire. A work previously praised for its Beethovenesque nobility and stature suddenly became harsh, coarse, and ugly. Another example, closer to the hearts of clarinet players, has to do with the work formerly known as "Wagner's Adagio" for clarinet and strings. Do you sense lessened interest in the composition since Newhill clearly identified the work as being by Heinrich Baermann?1
For clarinetists, the loss of any repertoire is undesirable because we don't have a surfeit of good solo works to begin with. But how does one calculate the tragedy of the loss of a Mozart concerto?! For that is precisely what has happened to the work we have called "Mozart's Sinfonie Concertante for clarinet, oboe, horn, bassoon, and orchestra, K. 297b." Two recent events have negatively affected the presence of this composition in the clarinetist's repertoire: (1) the publication of the work in that section of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe devoted to "Works of Doubtful Authenticity"; (2) the publication and recording of an extraordinary new version of the work, one which supplies a remarkably different and highly imaginative orchestral accompaniment, eliminates the clarinet, and restores the solo music to Mozart's original instrumentation: flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon.
While The Clarinet is not necessarily an organ which reports musicological controversy, an article in it on the most popular multipleinstrument concerto (containing clarinet, of course) and why it is going out of the repertoire seems appropriate. It is not a simple situation and it's certainly not without an emotionally charged and highly polarized constituency. But it is important for clarinetists to know what is going on here. Therefore, the question to be addressed is the title of this essay: "Whatever happened to the Sinfonie Concertante?"
Only seven pieces of documentary evidence exist - five letters from Mozart to his father and two letters from the father to Wolfgang - which deal with his wind Sinfonie Concertante. (The term "wind" Sinfonie Concertante is used to distinguish this work from Mozart's "string" Sinfonie Concertante for violin and viola, K. 364/320d.) Of these seven letters, three are particularly noteworthy. The first, sent from Paris and dated April 5, states Mozart's intention to write such a work, and explicitly names the solo instruments as well as the very players for whom he was writing the composition. There is no solo clarinet in the work, Mozart's composition being scored for flute, oboe, horn, bassoon, and orchestra. The second letter, also from Paris and dated May 1, speaks to plots and cabals which prevented performance of the work, a situation which Mozart maintained occurred frequently and a subject on which he was almost paranoid. In the same letter, he also mentions the critically important fact that performance parts were never copied out of the autograph (critically important because it eliminates the possibility of a later rediscovery of these same parts). Instead - and he relates this story to demonstrate to his father that he is not imagining all these plots and cabals - he found the autograph stuck in a pile of music in the office of the work's commissioner, Joseph Legros, the administrative and artistic manager of the Parisian concert series which was to have presented the composition's premiere. The third letter, sent from Nancy, France and dated October 3, is full of the bravado of the humiliated. Unceremoniously ejected from Paris and told to go home by his host, Mozart's letter says that he has kept every note of the wind Sinfonie Concertante in his head and is capable of writing it out again when he gets back to Salzburg (the classic "I'll show those guys!" attitude of the badly embarrassed). The other four letters which reference the Sinfonie Concertante, but which have neither been quoted nor described, are dated July 9 and July 18/20 (Wolfgang to Leopold) and May 12/20 and June I I (Leopold to Wolfgang.) Beyond these seven letters, there is no other known documentary evidence relating to this work. Neither the autograph score nor any shred of music positively identified as Mozart's wind Sinfonie Concertante has ever been found (and it's still being looked for, too). Knowledge of the work's existence - and thus its presence in the appendix of the 1862 Köchel catalog where it is listed as "lost" - derives solely from these seven letters. Obviously, however, the story is not over even if presentation of the hard evidence is.
After the 1862 publication of the Köchel catalog, a particular manuscript score came into the hands of the Mozart scholar, Otto Jahn. Found to be part of his estate after his death in 1869, this score - which has no attribution of any kind in it - is in the handwriting of a professional copyist, a person who prepared over 100 Mozart scores for Jahn (as well as scores of music of other composers, too). This work is a Sinfonie Concertante and is scored for clarinet, oboe, horn, bassoon, and orchestra. Jahn never publicly revealed anything about the origin of this score or who he thought its composer to be, though the fact that he went to the expense of having it copied out allows one to assume that he thought it was by Mozart. In any case, Jahn complicated the situation by perversely dying, leaving the question of the origin of this work unresolved to this day. It is the music of this Jahn score which has become synonymous with the Mozart Sinfonie Concertante. This conclusion was at first based on the fact that the cataloger of Jahn's estate listed Mozart as the work's composer. Later, supporting public statements from musicologists, performers, and critics were based on the work's style and emotional content.
Before continuing with this strange story let me pause for a moment to dwell on the form of Mozart's work. What is a Sinfonie Concertante and why would Mozart have written one for Paris, of all places? The answer to these questions is a long one but it can be simply summarized: a Sinfonie Concertante is a concerto for multiple instruments and, in Paris of 1778, the form was all the rage.2 Mozart had an uncanny knack for exploiting the fashionable tastes in music. Whether he suggested to LeGros that he write such a work (most probable, though not obvious) or LeGros suggested it to him, the fact that he composed a Sinfonie Concertante - when one considers the various forms available to him - shows how remarkably practical Mozart was and how sensitively he judged the public's taste.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the music of this Jahn score had won general acceptance by the musicological community - and the performing community, too - as an unexplainable variant of Mozart's lost wind Sinfonie Concertante. And for the next 40 or so years one could read an ever-mounting crescendo of views on how this work had to be the one composed by Mozart. But the opinions put forth were just those: opinions. There was almost no objectivity in these statements, only emotion. (I'm not being critical here, just reportorial.) In the case of this interesting musical work, one reads of how "every note of the music breathes Mozart's divine spirit," or "there cannot be the slightest doubt that this is the music Mozart composed for Paris in 17 78, " or "clearly, Mozart had to have written this music since it is too good to be by anyone else. " The problem with these statements is that they don't mean anything. It's the kind of double talk used by someone who has little objective data and cannot rationally defend a position. So - but with no desire to deliberately deceive - the conclusion is wrapped in the mantle of unassailable opinion. But the message that is really being transmitted is: "I'm an expert. As a consequence, my taste is refined and this allows me to conclude correctly on things of this nature."
After the Second World War, the tide began to go against Mozart's authorship of this wind Sinfonie Concertante. There are a number of objective and measurable things about the work which cannot be explained if one accepts as fact that Mozart wrote it. For example, in this composition the first solo exposition begins twice; that is, the soloists begin their exposition, play for a while, and then start this exposition all over again. Not only is this without precedent in all of Mozart's music, it is without precedent in all of classic form. Many other objective examples exist of things about this work which are measurably uncharacteristic of Mozart's composition practices. Despite the attack on the work's authenticity a number of the older musicologists retained their early views (perhaps out of unwillingness to change, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps out of sincere belief in the validity of their position), but the young Turks went after the composition as a vulture goes after carrion. Suddenly what had been "Mozartean" (whatever that means) became "common" (whatever that means). You don't have to be for a work's authenticity to spout double talk. You can be against a work's authenticity and also speak fluent double talk. Several scholarly papers argued opposite points of view, some saying that the work was not by Mozart, others saying that it was. A paper jointly authored by Robert Levin and myself3 argued on statistical and structural grounds that the solo parts derived from a Mozart original while the orchestral accompaniment was by someone else and from a later period. A musicological conference held in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts devoted itself in part to the question of this work's authenticity. The subject was studied at a 1971 conference in Salzburg. It was - and still is - a hot topic.
The most recent event having to do with this question - and perhaps the most influential to date - came with its publication in that section of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe which deals with "Works of Doubtful Authenticity."4 In the volume containing this work, the editor summarizes the history of the debate and, without additional evidence, offers his own opinion (which is that the work is not genuine). This pronouncement, coming as it does in the most authoritative publication on Mozart since the Breitkopf & Härtel complete edition of 1877 (and perhaps the most authoritative such publication ever undertaken) gives an awesome importance to the utterance. Therefore, one could believe that there is now a sort of universal agreement in the scholarly community to reject the work from the body of Mozart's music. Not so! Report of the demise of the Sinfonie Concertante as a Mozart composition is premature (though I know of no contemporary Mozart scholar who accepts the work in its current state as being from Mozart's hand). Before beginning the final section of this narrative, I mention that an interesting description of the work's ascendence and descendence may be found in Chapter VI ("The Rise and Fall of the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b") of Spitzer's dissertation.5 What is especially interesting about this chapter is Spitzer's analysis of the various comments about the work's authenticity. What he demonstrates is that those who are convinced that the composition springs from Mozart's hand think the music to be magnificent. On the other hand, those who do not believe the work to be by Mozart are of the opinion that the music is dreadful. As to this phenomenon (the like or dislike of a work based on a presumption of authorship), Spitzer quotes musicologist Oliver Strunk who said, "It puts us in the position of the man who says, 'I smoke only Camel cigarettes,' but who cannot tell a Camel from a Chesterfield unless he looks at the label on the package."
Approximately two years ago, Robert D. Levin - the same individual who effected such a remarkable completion of Mozart's fragmentary Quintet for clarinet in B-flat and string quartet, K. 516c, as published by Nagel's Musik-Archiv (and if you don't know it, then shame on you) - began a task which he calls "a reconstruction." The problem is that there really is no good word for the act of taking a work which is itself an arrangement and, as a tailor alters a suit, producing another work from it which can be described as a better approximation to the original than what one started with. Levin's objective was to recreate the original Mozart composition - the archetype of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear - by using the existing clarinet version to rebuild the original solo quartet of flute, oboe, horn, and bassoon. The task is far more complex than one might think at first blush and involves much more than a mere transposition of the clarinet part. For one thing, the clarinet occupies a different place than that of the flute in the solo instrumental choir. For another, to effectively accomplish such a transcription requires a radical redistribution of all four voices of the solo quartet. The effort can be contrasted with taking a house apart and reassembling it differently while using the same building materials, having neither too much nor too little left over, and producing a building recognizable as having been derived from its predecessor. It must be noted here that Joseph Bopp's transcription of the solo parts (Kneusslin, Basle) was an earlier attempt to recreate the original instrumentation. Bopp's effort is of a much smaller scale than Levin's in that it maps only the clarinet and oboe lines of the source into the flute and oboe parts of the target transcription, and it does not address the complex question of the orchestral accompaniment. Levin, however, rewrote much of the orchestral material using the existing one as a guide. There are many who object to such an act on the fundamental principle that Mozart is best when left alone. But, in this case, such a view would ignore the fact that what we now have is a version which, in part at least, is almost certainly not by Mozart. Besides, failure to accept the workings of others within Mozart's music would eliminate many of the master's works from the general repertoire, not the least of which would be the Requiem, K. 626, a work completed after Mozart's death by Süssmayer and others.
How successful Levin has been remains to be determined by the listening public and the performing community. (The publisher of Levin's edition is Bärenreiter and the material is currently available only on rental.) However, one will not have to wait any longer before getting an opportunity to put his reconstruction to a test of the ear. It is now recorded on the Philips (Phonogram) label by The Academy of St. Martin's-in-the- Fields, Neville Mariner, conductor (record number 411 134-1, tape cartridge version 4511 134-4, laser disc version 411134-2,) with a splendid array of soloists: Aurele Nicolet, flute; Heinz Holliger, oboe; Hermann Baumann, horn; and Klaus Thunemann, bassoon. Furthermore the work was given its first public performance in Salzburg, of all places, on January 26, 1984. Levin will also produce a monograph for Pendragon Press on the nature of his reconstruction. The tentative title is "Mozart's Sinfonie Concertante for winds: History, Authenticity, and Reconstruction. " I have seen a preliminary copy of it and advise interested readers that they are in for a tour de force of analysis, history, musicology, detective work, intuition, music theory, and hard-nosed presentation of objective data.
Well, that's the story. Or, perhaps I should say, that's the story thus far. Who knows what will happen? There are a number of alternatives which could arise. The work could remain in the repertoire in the form with the clarinet, this despite my earlier comments about how discredited works disappear. After all, I am not an astrologer! Alternatively, the work could remain in the repertoire in two different versions: that of the traditional one and Levin's new version. That would be interesting. In fact, Levin told me that there is to be a tour in Europe where, on one night, the orchestra and soloists will play the clarinet version, and, on the next night, the flute version. That's an innovative way to get the same audience to come for both nights!! Or, Levin's remarkable new version could become so popular that the older version is completely eclipsed. Finally, there is the possibility that the work will go away altogether as did the "Jena " Symphony.
The summary of the Sinfonie Concertante's checkered history has value for quite another reason: it sheds light on a broader issue, one which goes far beyond the question of this composition's authenticity. Using this 120-year example of how subjectivity has established nothing conclusive, one can easily make the transition from the specific to the general. The events behind the strange journey of this work - from appearance, ca. 1870, to acceptance as a genuine Mozart composition, ca. 1870-1950, to fall from grace, ca. 1950-1980 - illuminate a serious problem within the discipline of music itself. As the enigmatic history of this one work illustrates, subjective opinion is an unreliable and inconclusive musical tool, one which can be used to support any view, even completely contradictory ones. Its employment to justify any musical conclusion extends far beyond questions of authenticity. In all branches of music today - and we performers are the biggest contributions to the perpetuation of the problem -the use of this agent as the only determinant has become wildly unrestrained. For today's performer, subjective opinion is the principal - indeed the only - tool in the bag of musical tricks. Works are played in certain ways because to do so is said "to feel right." Conclusions are swiftly reached on complex questions of performance practice with nothing more substantive to support these views than the subjective statement, "It sounds better that way." We play as we do not so much from a base of knowledge, as from the vastly inferior position of belief, opinion, conjecture, doctrine, guesswork, conviction, dogma, fashion, and ego.
The perception that intuition is the only key with which one opens the door to artistic playing is so firmly a part of today's performing milieu that the point which I raise may appear to be a clarion call to anarchy. It's not. The anarchy began when the intellect was abandoned for emotionalism as the principal motivator behind the interpretive process. So that the issue is clearly drawn, I would like to give a single but detailed example of this phenomenon. While your own experiences are probably similar, the issue is whether or not you perceive the situation to be a problem.
In the mid-1970s, I was contracted to play a Mozart wind serenade with a group of New York's finest free-lance players. Each was an artist and I was honored to be part of such a distinguished group of performers. During the rehearsal there was a certain passage in the second clarinet part which I played non-legato as the edition indicated. By happenstance, I was quite familiar with what Mozart himself had written at that very point: I had seen and studied the autograph and I owned a clear facsimile of that very document. The edition from which I was playing was accurate in that it correctly reflected what Mozart said about the articulation of the passage: it was to be tongued. (One may argue about what Mozart meant but not what he wrote.) Immediately the rehearsal was stopped by the principal bassoonist, a player of incomparable artistry. He said, "Don't tongue that passage - slur it. " I replied, probably undiplomatically, "But the part says to tongue it." My distinguished colleague then said, "It sounds better slurred. " I should have shut up. He was the leader, the contractor, the coach, and the boss. His experience as a performer far exceeded mine. He is one of the world's best bassoonists. His sensi tivity as a performer is legendary and he was coaching players in the performance traditions of the work we were playing when I was learning "The Clarinet Polka." But I didn't shut up. I said, "But the autograph in Mozart's own hand has the passage the way I played it. " My colleague replied, "That does not matter. I have played this piece for 30 years and I know how it is supposed to go." That ended the conversation. But it bothered me. I didn't think that it sounded better his way (not as contrasted with my way but with Mozart's way). Furthermore I did not believe that this was an issue which could be decided by taste, sensitivity, and experience: in short, all the qualities which my colleague/friend had in greater abundance than anyone present. Finally, I simply could not understand his non sequitur: why did his playing the work that way for 30 years entitle him to reject Mozart's clear, explicit, and unambiguous performance specifications? While it is clear that playing a work for 30 years has value, I could not be precise in describing that value. And I also wanted to be able to be precise in describing what long-standing experience with a work did not give to a player.
To be fair, there are a few things about this example which need to be clarified: a rehearsal is not a debating society. Often the only way one can complete the rehearsal of a work in the time alloted for it is to do a traditional performance which all the players know well by virtue of their past performance experiences. In the music professional's world, practical needs are often far more important than subtle nuances of performance practice. But the end result of such constant acceptance of habit over the intellect is a gradual loss of any character which relates the music to the period in which it was written; that is to say, the same notes come out but the performance may not accurately represent the era in which it was composed, a sort of Venus de Milo anachronistically wearing a hoop skirt.
There are few disciplines which tolerate such excesses in the practice of their craft. In the sciences, for example, acceptance of only subjective, intuitive opinion as the principal vehicle to capture truth is absurd because such a notion is antithetical to the nature of science itself. In the world of the professional business person, anyone who continually proposed the investment of venture capital or the use of development resources on the basis of personal opinion unsustained by objective data would soon be walking the streets without pants. Even the allied art forms - painting, the dance, drama, etc. - seem to be more objective about stylistic elements in their creative processes than we in music. But, even if the reverse were true, it would make no difference; what we do as players should be based on our knowledge of the performance traditions of music and not on how an allied art form behaves. One of the glorious things about music is that it is so very emotional. We are moved to higher planes of human existence and enjoyment of life by our participation in the act of music performance. It would be absurd to attempt to legislate emotion out of music. It is a central attribute of it. But emotion is neither music's sole underpinning nor, necessarily, the most important one. And we performing musicians seem to have forgotten that. Perhaps the lesson of "Whatever Happened to the Sinfonie Concertante?" will serve as a reminder to us how far afield one can travel with subjective opinion as one's only companion and how unrewarding and inconclusive that voyage can be.
ENDNOTES
1. John Newhill, "The Adagio for Clarinet and Strings by Wagner/Baermann, " Music &Letters, April 1974, p. 167.
2. See Barry S. Brook, "The Symphonie Concertante: An Interim Report," The Musical Quarterly, October 1961, p. 493.
3. See Daniel N. Leeson and Robert D. Levin, "On the Authenticity of K. Anh. C. 14.01 (297b), a Symphonia Concertante for Four Winds and Orchestra," Mozart Jahrbuch, 1976/77, p. 70.
4. "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke," Serie X, Werkgruppe 29: Werke Zweifelhafer Echtheit, Band 1, Vorgelegt von Christoph-Hellmut Mahling und Wolfgang Plath, Bärenreiter, Kassel, BA 4587, 1980.
5. John Spitzer, "Authorship and Attribution in Western Art Music," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1983.
Epilog: a recent American
performance of the new Levin edition: A new era?
(On Saturday, November 17,
1984, the new Levin edition of the Mozart[?] Symphonic Concertante
for Four Winds was performed by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra,
David Crosby, conductor, at the First Congregational Church in
Madison, Wisconsin. Soloists for the performance were: Georgianne
Geinopolos, flute,- Marc Fink, oboe,- Richard Lottridge, Bassoon,and
Linda Kimball, horn. The following Program notes provide an interesting
epilog to Mr. Leeson's article. Ed.)
The music world thrives on Mozart intrigues these days. Hardly has the dust settled in Madison from the stir created by "Amadeus", when we are presented here with yet another set of Mozartiana questions. The solution to the puzzle of the Symphonie Concertante is achieved not through biographical digging, but through systematic, computer-assisted analysis of a set of parts which appear to be an altered version of an original Mozart work.
We learn about the origin of the work in Mozart's letter to his father from Paris on April 5, 1778:
I am now about to compose a Symphonie Concertante for flute - Wendling, oboe Ramm French horn - Punto, and bassoon Ritter Punto plays magnifique. I have this moment returned from the Concert Spirituel.
But on May 1, 1778 he reported to his father:
As to the Symphonie Concertante there is again some shillyshallying. But I think there is again something else behind it. For here again I have my enemies, but where have I not had them? But that is a good sign. I had to write the Symphonic in the greatest haste, I worked diligently, and the four performers were and are still quite enamoured of it. Le Gros had it four days for copying, but I found it always lying in the same place. At last, the day before yesterday I could not see it - but searched under all the music - and found it hidden. Did nothing, just the same. Asked Le Gros, apropos, have you given the Symph. Concertante to be copied yet? - no - I forgot. Since I naturally cannot order him to have it copied and performed, I said nothing... If there were any place here where people had ears and feeling hearts, and understood something of music, however little, and had taste, I would laugh heartily at all these things. But so far as concern music, I am among brute beasts.
Robert D. Levin, the sleuth of Symphonie Concertante, claims that
Mozart's work was replaced by an identically scored concertante
by Giovanni Maria Cambini. Mozart suspected Cambini of intriguing
against him. Evidently Cambini was selling his symphonies concertantes
by subscription in sets of twenty, and feared the comparison of
his work with Mozart's work.
In a letter dated October 3, 1778 Mozart mentions that he intended to write down the work again, since the original was no longer in his possession. It is doubtful that he did; in accordance with his custom, he would have gone to that effort only if four equally accomplished players were at his disposal. The autograph of the work was lost and remains untraced. The first edition of Köchel's catalog of Mozart's works (1862) and the first three editions of Otto Jahn's biography of Mozart make no mention of the work. In H. C. Deiter's revision of Jahn's biography (1905), the work is mentioned for the first time. The "copy" Jahn consulted was deposited in the former Prussian State Library in Berlin and is the only "copy" known. Instrumentation in the "copy" was altered to include clarinet instead of flute in the solo group.
Three reconstructed versions of Symphony Concertante have appeared in the last 125 years. The second version, prepared by Friedrich Blume in 1928, is the one most familiar to listeners. Recently Robert Levin with the aid of Daniel Leeson completed a computer study of the extant "copied" parts. They believe that a set of solo parts to Mozart's work somehow survived, and that someone else later transcribed them for the new instrumentation, supplying the missing orchestra accompaniment. Through a study of the thematic content, they have determined what could be found only in authentic Mozart concertos. Levin's reconstructed version has been published by Bärenreiter and is offered here in its Midwest premiere.