Embellishment, Ornamentation and the Role of the Performer in the Late Eighteenth Century: Reanimating the Adagio from Mozart's Sonata K. 570

Abstract

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music is integral to today’s performance repertoire. Prior to the twentieth century, improvised embellishments remained a fundamental part of the performance of this music. Yet, today, Mozart’s music is typically performed without any ornamentation. Many performing musicians today seem to be aware that improvised ornamentation is stylistically appropriate when performing Mozart’s keyboard music, but it remains absent from most performances. In short, we are performing Mozart’s – and really all galant – music wrong. This study seeks to help fix this problem through the examination of the historical context in which improvised embellishments occurred during the eighteenth-century century and with the presentation of a method to help today’s pianists integrate un-notated embellishments into performances of the Adagio from Mozart’s Sonata K. 570 in B-flat major. The transition from the aesthetic of musical rhetoric to the strong-work concept, the broad spectrum of late-eighteenth-century improvisatory practices, and the Neapolitan partimento method’s approach to training professional musicians, are all examined to contextualize the late-eighteenth-century practice of improvising embellishments. In addition, Mozart’s practice as a performer-composer who improvised cadenzas, preludes, variations and ornamentation is detailed using notated exemplars and eyewitness accounts. The method is comprised of three parts, an alternative score that creates space for pianists to add ornamentation to the principal theme, a library of embellishments provides pianists with examples to draw from, and two complete sets of varied reprises as exemplars for inspiration. All three components draw from eighteenth-century sources, including Mozart’s autograph manuscripts, Johann Joachim Quantz’s On Playing the Transverse Flute (1752), Daniel Gottlob Türk’s Klavierschule (1789), Leopold Mozart’s Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing (1756), and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Playing (1759). By bridging the gap between historical performance practice and music-making on concert pianos today, this research empowers musicians to experiment with their own embellishments and reanimate ornamentation in the performance of Mozart’s music.