Klarinet Archive - Posting 000451.txt from 2003/01

From: Dan Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] book on Mozart's clarinet concerto
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 14:14:48 -0500

Joseph H. Fasel wrote:

[snip]

> To return to the topic again briefly, this sounds like a book I'll
> have to get. Does it go much into divining Mozart's use of the
> basset notes?

I think that a responsible answer to your question is to ask another
question: is anyone capable of divining Mozart's use of the basset notes
for the concerto (and the quintet). It is a problem that is going more
and more out of focus as more people forget what the issue is (not that
I am suggesting that Joe Fasel is one of those).

As a starting point, it is very possible to advance the idea that not
one note of the solo part in 622 is really authentic. That's a strech,
of course, but it is a defensible posture.

Exactly what Mozart wrote is unknown. The manuscript disappeared under
the most unclear circumstances ca. 1801 and only a handwritten set of
performance parts existed from which Stadler occasionally played the
work. When B&H decided to print the first edition of the work in 1803,
they had a serious marketing problem. Namely this: who was going to buy
a solo work for clarinet that could only be played accurately by one
man, Stadler, and couldn't be played at all by anyone else. As far as
we know, he was the only man who owned an A clarinet that descended to
low C, now called a basset clarinet.

So what B&H did was to hire an editor to change the solo part so as to
permit the work to be played by a traditional clarinet. Exactly what
that editor did is not known. He did not keep a record of what he did
and that is wha allows one to casts a doubt on everything in the concerto.

You and I have always presumed that ONLY the basset notes were changed,
and that's probably a good assumption. But since we have no source to
check, one could argue that he changed everything. Not likely, but one
could argue it. There is also the matter of articulations, phrasings and
even high notes, but let's not complicate the problem.

Now when that editor got done with his work, which came from a secondary
source, the changes he made were absolutely irreversible. By that I
mean that you can only reverse something if you know for certain what it
was before it was changed. In the absence of that knowledge, it is
impossible for anyone to say what the concerto looked like (particularly
in the low notes) when Mozart wrote it down.

Now some pretty smart people have devoted a lot of time and thought to
reconstructing what people believe is a version closer to the original.
But there are probably six technical papers saying that a particular
effort if full of ca-ca for every such effort.

There was a clarinet player in Boston who examined every one of those
attempts (Geigling's was published by Barenreiter, and I don't remember
where the other three or four were published), and said they were all
wrong. It shouldn't go down to C there and it should use a low D here,
etc. I have no idea if he is right or wrong, and neither does he or
anyone else.

It's all guesswork. Good guesswork in many cases, to be sure, but
guesswork nevertheless.

That also goes for Lawson's book. He is an extremely smart guy and a
good scholar and player too, but neither he nor I nor anyone else KNOWS
what the original solo part of the concerto said, basset notes and all
others things, too.

A typical "other" is the question of the use of the high G in the first
movement. Where did that puppy come from? It doesn't matter that it is
logical to put it at the place where many players do. It is that there
is no precedent for that note on a clarinet in any other work for which
Mozart's manuscript exists.

Good question Joe. I sure wish I knew the answer.
--
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**Dan Leeson **
**leeson0@-----.net **
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