Mozart by Lili Kraus - Piano Variations, Sonatas, Fantasy, Adagio .. (Century's record.: Lili Kraus)

Claudio Arrau : "The piano sonatas, from the six (K. 279-284) of 1775 to the last (K. 576) of 1789, tell the history of Mozart's life. Almost from the first he begins to fill out the conventional patterns of his time with his life's blood. They are the internal evidence of his total being. The first six are clearly youthful works. Mozart wrote them in Munich on his last grand tour, which took him also to Mannheim and Paris in still another attempt to find a post commensurate with his gifts. The

gallant style pervades them all, but how Mozart shines through! Almost every slow movement is a foreshadowing of all the sublime, tragic slow movements to come. Nowhere is the merely gallant left unredeemed by the personal message of his genius. In particular the wonderfully expansive first movement of the Sonata in E flat, K. 282, and the Sonata in D, K. 284, a big work, already foretell the great things to come when the wealth of new musical impressions and emotional experiences hit him with t

he force of an explosion in Mannheim. Out of this fateful trip came his next seven piano sonatas, (K. 309, 310 and 311 belonging to Mannheim and Paris and K. 330, 331, 332 and 333 belonging to the return) as well as the fulfilment of his first great opera, "Idomeneo." All seven were published in Vienna in 1784 when his great period of success began to open up. Six years were to elapse before he felt the need to write another piano sonata, precisely at another major critical point in his life. Th

e Sonata in A minor, K. 310, composed in Paris in 1778, is the most startling of all the seven, and one of his greatest piano works. It is not only unique for the period, but is unique in all of Mozart. It is a grand tragic sonata, tragic as the G minor Symphony is tragic and as "Don Giovanni" is tragic. But it is also something more. Here tragedy is face to face with youthful rebellion against fate, and as if in a crisis of turbulence and fever, Mozart throws all to the winds, galanterie and le

arned alike, and comes up with something new and amazing even for him — the height of human passion caught in art. It is a grand, romantic sonata in every sense, the very musical counterpart of "Sturm und Drang," years before the "Appassionata" and "Waldstein" Sonatas. Suffering is heard at the very beginning of the first movement and for the first time there is no real second theme, only a sort of side figuration, as if the stream of wild passion cannot be halted for the expected demands of for

m. In the development section this flaming upsurge is expressed in the sudden changes of fortissimos and pianissimos, which Abert refers to as "sudden flashes of lightning illuminating for a moment the blackness of night." In the middle section of the slow movement, with its panting, breathless phrasing, there are rougher dissonances than almost anywhere else in Mozart, and the concluding Presto, with its dramatic leaps and use of thirds low in the bass, and its wild outcries of pain, is almost

daemonic. After the great A minor Sonata, the C major, K. 330, comes not as an anti-climax, but as a necessary reaction. The intensity and passion were all spent in the former. The same may be said about the famous A major Sonata, K. 331. Inspired by the Turkish fashion of the time, it sets out to please. But even in this ostensibly "light" sonata, there is never anything merely light; the gallant is always elevated by the personal and in the third variation, in the minor, the personal becomes d

ark. The whole work has a melancholy vein running through it, and no greater mistake can be made than to play it off as a mere lark at great speed. In Mozart, it is disarming works like this that especially cry out for discernment of the inner core which almost never fails to be present. In the Sonata in F, K. 332, Mozart gives us a work which, if not as turbulent as K. 310, is as personal, affecting and original. To St. Foix, the first movement is Beethovenesque and to Einstein not Beethovenia

n at all. t is simply Mozart, Mozart with gallantry transformed by dramatic flashes in the first movement, with its strange Beethoven-like threatening in "Don Giovanni" accents; its sublime slow movement is like a great aria of one of his suffering heroines, and the magnificent closing movement is full of incomparable modulations of extraordinary power. The Sonata in B flat, K. 333, rounding out the great seven, shows us quite definitely a new repose, a new plane of maturity as can only come to

pass after a great experience and spiritual stocktaking. The next five or six years between K. 333 and the Fantaisie and Sonata in C minor were the years of Mozart's greatest success in Vienna as a composer and pianist. These were the years of his "academies" (his own subscription concerts) to which the Viennese aristocracy and public flocked for a time because it was the thing to do, and in these years he wrote most of his great piano concertos. When he came to another emotional upheaval in his

life, he once more turned to the solo piano. To me, the Fantaisie and Sonata in C minor, K. 475 and K. 457 (the former dated Vienna, 20 May 1785, and the latter, 14 October 1784) represent a crisis in Mozart' s life similar to the one undergone at the writing of K. 310 in Paris. Mozart himself ordered the printing of the two works together. They form one tremendous whole, and it is hard to understand why these two works are still so frequently separated in performance. To play the sonata alone

is like presenting a great play without its prologue. Mozart's own inscription for the first edition reads, "Fantaisie et Sonate pour le Forte-Piano composées Pour Madame Therese de Trattnern par le Maitre de Chapelle W.A. Mozart. Oeuvre Xl." We do not know exactly what relationship Mozart had with his gifted, married pupil Therese von Trattner, but we do know that he sent her a letter with instructions for the work's performance. Unfortunately it was lost or destroyed (as were all her letters

to Mozart). The Fantaisie may actually have been composed on the day he dated the manuscript, so great is the depth of feeling and intensity of its rich improvisational flow. It is like a fantastic little opera, a whole world concentrated in five tiny scenes. The Fantaisie forms "a gigantic entrance arch" to the sonata, as St. Foix puts it. And as we can see from all three movements, links have been bridged from it to make one the bone of the other. In the last movement, Mozart has the melodic l

ine in the left hand go right down to the end of the bass four times. It is mysterious, even grotesque, as if in a descent to the abyss. He does the same thing four times in the first movement, twice in the second and he repeats it three times in the Fantaisie. It cannot be otherwise than symbolic. The symbolism of this work turns into grim reality in the last years of his solo writing for the piano. The sense of tragedy and suffering in life turns to resignation and the premonition of death. Al

most all his last great solo works for the piano are pervaded by this last strange phase of his creative evolution. There is still the tremendous Sonata in F, K. 533 and K. 494, to consider. The Rondo K. 494 dates from June 1786, a little over a year after the C minor Fantaisie, and the Allegro and Andante date from January 1788. As with the Fantaisie and Sonata, Mozart himself attached the earlier Rondo to the newly composed Allegro and Andante and made of it one work. The Allegro and Andante h

ave the grandeur of polyphonic breadth and harmonic boldness so characteristic of this zenith of his creative life. The Andante reaches perceptive heights touching on the incredible even for Mozart. The Rondo, with its F minor three-part trio, concludes this whole majestic, ineffable work with a new cadenza that ties all together to make it, in its very special way, one of his greatest works in any category. The Sonata in C, K. 545, which precedes K. 570 and K. 576, is commonly known as an "easy

" sonata or "kleine" sonata, as so many of the editions call it. Mozart himself wrote down "for the use of beginners." However, nothing could be more misleading, because although it is easy enough to play, it is far from easy to interpret. Composed in June 1788, it is full of the feeling of the end, especially in the slow movement, and the whole is as if written for the soul of a child. It is late Mozart, at once simple and deep and to be taken seriously and not lightly. Seen in this manner, it

becomes a different sonata and a revelation as well. The last two piano sonatas, the B flat, K. 570, and the D major, K. 576, are a spiritual summing up as it were. In the B flat particularly (the D major is more of a gallant sonata) Mozart strips his pianistic fabric to almost bare, naked outlines, and with their tone of abstract remoteness and lonely farewell, makes a last plunge into the aching roots of being in this world." END