Klarinet Archive - Posting 000917.txt from 1999/01

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Cadenzas and Eingange
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 00:29:48 -0500

David Glenn asked about the harmonic, technical, and performance
differences between a cadenza and an Eingang. I did not give it
in my original note because I have described it in the past, but
since new people come on all the time, it is worth a repeat and I
thank David for bringin it up.

I am speaking only about music up to around 1830, and specifically
I'm focusing on Mozart's clarinet solo music.

A cadenza is always introduced with a fermata and a sustained
tonic chord in the second inversion; i.e., the fifth is in the bass.
That is a very unstable chord and the purpose of the cadenza is to
resolve that instability by improvising an interesting musical
creation based on the major themes that have just been presented
in the movement that is about to be ended. The soloist not only
improvises on the melody, but on the harmony and rhythm and anything
else that s/he choses to do. But all the time, the soloist is heading
towards getting that tonic chord with the fifth in the bass to resolve
itself. Finally, having done that the soloist arrives at a dominant
seventh chord which is accompaniment to a trill and then, bang, it's
all over. Total time involved for a cadenza is anywhere from 3 to
5 minutes.

The purposeof the cadenza is to show the audience how much musical
imagination the soloist has, NOT HOW FAST S/HE CAN PLAY. It is not
easy to take the major themes that have just been presented and compose,
on the spot, a little fantasy based on those theme.

Now go listen to a Mozart piano concerto and see how he does it. Alternative,
listen with fresh ears to the piano quintet, K. 452, which DOES have a
wonderful written out cadenza in it. After all, 4 wind players and a
pianist would not be likely to create a cadenza in which all 4 were
improvising, so THERE Mozart writes it out.

Cadenzas are not for instruments that cannot harmonize with themselves.
There is not cadenza in the clarinet concerto, the horn concerti, the
oboe, bassoon, or flute concertos. Cadenzas are in piano and violin
concerti because there the soloist can show imagination by changing
the harmonies under the tunes.

An eingang (German: lead in, plural eingange) is introduced by a
dominant 7th chord and one player (generally the one who has the
tune after the eingang is over) plays a short, very short, lead in
to the tune. They come in all lengths but are generally less than
30 seconds. The clarinet concerto has them in both the first and
second movements. The quintet for clarinet and strings has one in
the slow movement. The wind octet in c minor has one in the last
movement (and it is played by the oboe) when the work changes to
the major key. The Gran Partitta has several movements with eingange
but the 5th movement is the most prominent.

The person who plays the eingang ends the dominant seventh harmony
(that is heading towards the logical resolution of the toni) by
playing the last note before the thing kicks in again on either
the 7th or the 2nd of the scale. Not a hard rule but most of them
are like that.

Its purpose is to go from the dominant 7th to the tonic, unlike the
cadenza whose purpose is to go from the tonic in the second inversion
to the tonic in the root position.

And if you do one when you should be doing the other, then God may
strike you in both elbows. It is a major error in performance
practice to do one under the assumption that it is just as good
as the other.

If you want to see how badly someone can screw it up, look at the
cadenza written by Jacques Ibert for K. 622. It is longer than the
whole first movement and you need 3 hands to execute it.

The main reason why clarinet players (and others) don't know about
these things is a serious criticism of the way we teach instrumental
music, even at the college level.

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

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