Klarinet Archive - Posting 000012.txt from 1995/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Edgar Pearlstein's inquiry about a G clarinet
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 13:03:05 -0500

Actually this is more to compliment Jonathan Cohler on his
excellent note about Mozart's use of basset horn in G
for the concerto and then, later, basset clarinet in A. I
had written to Adam Smith privately and mentioned the extant
fragment for basset horn in G, mentioning also that the
autograph for the clarinet version has been lost since at
least 1799.

But Johnathan's response was much more thorough and complete
and Adam would do well to find out the accurate history of
this most important clarinet work. The information that was
originally given Adam was not correct but Jonathan straightened
out most of it.

There is one item in Jonathan's letter that I would like to
expand on and it has to do with the final disposition of two
of the greatest works of the clarinet repertoires, the
autographs of both the concerto and the quintet.

Jonathan mentioned both Konstanze Mozart as being responsible
for the loss of the autograph of the concerto and Nissen
as a musicologist who boarded at her home, stumbled on the
manuscripts and began to get them published.

It did not happen this way.

Konstanze knew exactly what she had after her husband died.
She kept very careful control over all the manuscripts, but
never had access to either the concerto or the quintet. Both
were given to Stadler by Mozart himself. It is quite possible
that Stadler had paid for them and thus owned them, but this
wrinkle will never be known. In any case Stadler had both
autographs at Mozart's death. He then kept them in a picnic
basket which, according to one rumor, he pawned in 1799 with
the autographs inside the basket. They were never seen again.
The fragmentary autograph of the concerto - the one for basset
horn in G - was kept by Konstanze and that is how we have it
to this day. A facsimile of this autograph is in the Barenreiter
edition of the concerto, an edition that presents the work in
two forms: standard clarinet and basset clarinet. I reviewed
that volume for The Clarinet when it came out around 1978.

Now, as for the disposition of the entire body of Mozart autographs,
that is a well-known story. But it does not involve Nissen.

Nissen was the Danish ambassador to the court of Vienna and he
met and married Konstanze Mozart in the late 1790s. He eventually,
under her direction, wrote the first Mozart biography which is
nothing more than a collection of letters and, for several of the
letters, he actually forged text. One of those forgeries led to
the belief that the Gran Partitta was written for Konstanze
and Mozart's wedding supper feast. You see this rediculous statement
even in today's literature and I saw a recording of the Grand Partitta
coupled with Wagner's Siefried Idyl as two examples of music written
by composers for their wives only a few weeks ago. What total
nonsense!

In 1798, Franz Joseph Haydn put Konstanze in touch with the German
publisher Johann Anton Andre. Haydn knew that Konstanze had the
autographs, was willing to sell them, and needed the money.

It was Andre who purchased something
like 400 autographs from her including the complete autographs for
the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, the Jupiter symphony, etc. He paid
her a good price too, roughly the equivalent of Mozart's fee for
writing two operas for the imperial court.

He personally supervised the packing of the autographs,made a
catalog of them (of which I have a copy), shipped the whole thing
to his publishing house near Frankfurt, and began to publish them.
However there is no evidence that he lost any or destroyed any.

The story of those 400 autographs and what happened to them was
the subject of an article I wrote for Musical America during the
Mozart bicentennial. What is left of the collection now resides
in Poland and was hidden by the Polish government from WW2 all
the way up to 1976. It is a hell of a story. The autograph
collection wound up in Berlin, was dispersed during the war,
and its rediscovery is one of the best mystery stories of the
last 50 years. You may have seen in the newspapers that the
lost treasures of Troy as discovered by Schliemann were being
held by the Russians since WW2. Well the Mozart autographs were
hidden in Poland.

I visited the collection in Krakow and personally inspected the
autographs of the the fragmentary clarinet/basset horn compositions
that Mozart wrote for his Masonic brethren. It was one of the
works that I edited for Barenreiter and I had to have access to
the originals, not copies, since watermark investigation was
necessary. These works include the magnificent Adagio for 5
clarinets (actually 2 clarinet and 3 basset horns) which, if you
have never heard it is a great loss.

In 1978, and in order to open diplomatic relations between Poland
and East Germany, the Polish ambassador returned three of the
several hundred autographs to what was then East Germany. The
rest they retained. The ones they returned were Magic Flute,
Jupiter Symphony, and C minor mass (fragment). How's that for
a gift!!!

====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
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