Klarinet Archive - Posting 000406.txt from 1997/06

From: rteitelbaum@-----.com (Rob Teitelbaum)
Subj: More on Mozartian improvisation
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 1997 02:02:02 -0400

Thanks to Gary Young's excellent suggestions as to places to improv in
the K. 622, I now have a much better idea of what to look for. (Thanks,
Gary!) I've even formed a few rough ideas of places to improv in the K.
581. (Whether or not I do this is another question, since at the moment I
am improvisationally-challenged, but I'm interested nonetheless.)
However, there is one great clarinet work in which I am unable to find
suitable places for improvisation, despite the fact that Mozartian-era
performers probably added many embellishments. I'm speaking of the
Kegelstatt Trio, K. 498. I've looked over the score several times, and I
frankly can't see this working anywhere. Am I just blind, or am I correct
in my gut feeling that the difficulty of integrating the clarinet with
the viola militates against spontaneity?

Incidentally, one thing I'm surprised no one mentioned in this thread is
that "little" details like articulation, crescendos/decrescendos, and
even dynamics were usually omitted from the manuscripts and left to the
discretion of the performer. (Or so I've been told, please correct me if
I'm wrong.) Thus, even those notes which were written by the composer
were of a basically spontaneous nature, which explains the wide variance
between editions of Mozart and even of Weber. This alone would seem to
debunk the argument for playing music "as the composer wrote it", since
such an argument really calls for playing it "as the editor edited it",
which is a very different matter indeed...

Rob Teitelbaum
rteitelbaum@-----.com