Klarinet Archive - Posting 000127.txt from 2009/10

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Lorenzo Coppola plays K. 622
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:49:41 -0400

The obvious reason for revising the basset clarinet part presumably copied
out by Stadler so that he could play K. 622, was that the publisher would
have no market for a concerto requiring an instrument owned by only one
person. When the first edition of K. 622 came out, I believe that there
were three publishers with B&H being the first. All three presented the
revised clarinet part.

As far as I am aware, there was never a printed version of K. 622 for basset
clarinet in A until the Barenreiter edition came out as part of the Neue
Mozart Ausgabe. And the editor of that edition change the registers of some
passages based entirely on taste because he had no source for what Mozart
wrote (with the exception of the fragmentary and very incomplete manuscript
in Mozart's hand of the concerto for basset horn in G).

As for the existence of a real live basset clarinet in B-flat, I know of no
such thing before contemporary times. According to the Groves Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, Stadler had three basset clarinets, one in C, one in
B-lat, and one in A.

As an interesting vignette about the 18th century interest (really lack of
interest) in autograph scores, when a portion of the manuscript of the
Mozart Requiem was found in a gardener's cottage in a small town in Austria,
the finder took the score to Vienna and offered it to the Austrian National
Library for a fee. At first, they turned him down flat with the argument
that the manuscript was not needed since there already existed two printings
of the Requiem music, one for the orchestral parts, the other for the
singers. They begrudgingly agreed to pay for the manuscript as a service to
Mozart's memory, but they had no intentions of ever using it for anything.
The idea of going back to the source document to see what was originally
written is a late 19th and early 20th century notion.

Dan Leeson

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