Author: brycon
Date: 2016-02-11 22:32
Quote:
When i studied with Thomas Friedli, who you knew well, he told me in a lesson exactly this. He said that it was different from the Quintet because the harmony in the second bar of the Quintet moves on. I argued that the dominant chord in bar 2 of the Concerto should have more tension than the tonic, and that there is an appoggiatura on the first beat which calls for emphasis. He was obviously having a bad day, because his response was to ask me how many operas and piano concertos I have studied by Mozart, implying that I didn't know what I was talking about and that I should just accept his superior opinion. So I just let it be and sadly never got to discuss the issue further with him.
It's now 20 years later and if you could shed some light on this different view I'd be most appreciative.
I think I've always placed the emphasis on the first bar. But it was more of an intuitive decision (or maybe a teacher once told me to play it that way, or it's just hard for me not to hear hypermetric accents beginning on the first bar--I don't really know).
So I played through the first few phrases of the concerto's second movement at the piano to see if there was some reason for "hearing" the piece this way. The concerto phrase is more of a 2+2+4 structure (what Schoenberg called a sentence), and the quintet is more periodic--4+4 (to which Mozart adds a 5th bar). The quintet phrase, then, does continue through the second bar, which is a predominant chord, toward a cadence in m. 4.
The concerto, however, is more harmonically static; I hear the first four bars as all tonic, in fact. The dominants are on a strong beat position resolving to a weak beat tonic, which we phrase rather differently than the usual weak beat V to strong beat I. And although you could hear the dominant in m. 2 as a hypermetric weak beat, creating something like m. 1) S tonic / 2) w dominant / 3) S tonic / 4) w dominant (which would probably lead you to increase the tension in bar 2), I think the returns to the tonic on beat 2 of m. 2 and 4 frustrate that interpretation. So for me, the first four bars are a tonic prolongation (pardon the theory jargon), and the next four are dominant.
Maybe your teacher's reaction to those phrase structures was responsible for his interpretation?
|
|
The Clarinet BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
