Embellishing Mozart’s C-major Quintet

By Dorian Bandy: For many of us who play music by canonical composers like Mozart, the notated score is sacred. Our job as performers, we might think, is to realize the notation as faithfully as possible--and this means in particular that we can't just change things without Mozart's permission. But this isn't how musical scores were treated during Mozart's lifetime. It's now clear that Mozart and virtually all his contemporaries expected performers to make many changes to the music they played, especially through the insertion of elaborate cadenzas, lead-ins ("Eingänge") and embellishments. Research into these topics has been carried out most thoroughly in studies of Mozart's keyboard works. And the practice of improvisation and embellishment in modern-day performing culture are most closely associated with pianists, especially Robert Levin, who has recorded highly embellished readings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and piano concertos. (There are very few exceptions; one of them is Nils-Erik Sparf's lively, totally uninhibited, and daringly unconventional recording of Mozart's violin concertos.) One reason for this keyboard-centrism is the historical fact that Mozart identified primarily as a virtuoso pianist for much of his career, and studies of his performing practices therefore inevitably lead back to his activities as a keyboardist. In my own recent book on Mozart, which devotes a chapter each to improvisation and embellishment, keyboard music features more centrally than string music for this reason. In addition, there's more direct evidence for Mozart's stylistic embellishment preferences, in the form of manuscript models, published variants, and pedagogical samples, in his keyboard output than in his output for other instruments -- though in my book I try to show that this needn’t be an impediment to transferring those precepts into his non-keyboard works. But I wonder whether there's another, perhaps more interesting, reason that most Mozartean embellishers are keyboardists. Much of Mozart's keyboard music is written not just for a soloist playing alongside accompanying forces, but rather for an individual player, as in the piano sonatas or in so many concerto passages where the orchestra drops out completely and the soloist forges on alone. In such context, embellishment presents the fewest possible practical obstacles. The performer who plays entirely alone can do all sorts of things to mess with the score, never once worrying about the effect this might have on collaborators. Thus, Levin's hilarious reading of the last movement of the Sonata K.283 features madcap textural changes and transpositions, and Andreas Staier's brilliant recording of the last movement of the Sonata K.331 introduces some unexpected contrapuntal tricks during repeated passages: interventions that would be impossible in a work for multiple performers. For us string players, however, everything we play by Mozart is a work for multiple performers. What are we to do? I started asking such questions in earnest last year, when I recorded Mozart's violin-viola duos (and I blogged back then about many of my performance decisions, including the embellishments and cadenzas). One of the reasons I selected those pieces as my entry-point into embellishing Mozart's string music is that the players are comparatively unconstrained. Although there are many instances of real textural complexity, there are also plenty of phrases where the violinist plays the tune and the violist accompanies. (This did not stop me from inserting a surprise viola Eingang in the first movement of the B-flat duo!) The practice of writing and performing embellishments for the duos was highly instructive -- but at no point did it challenge my fundamental understanding of the topic. This month, however, I'm performing the great String Quintet in C major, K.515, perhaps the most daring and ambitious instrumental piece Mozart wrote. Part of the pleasure of doing K.515 is, of course, simply to spend 40 astonishing minutes inside Mozart's mind at this high point of his compositional life. A nice add-on, however, is that I get to try to embellish using the piece as a limit-case: a piece where embellishments are always stylistically appropriate but extremely difficult to pull off in a way that seems musically appropriate. One of the hardest things about embellishing in K.515 is that counterpoint features centrally throughout the work -- and this means that very few melodies can be tweaked without wreaking havoc among the other parts. For instance, the final theme in the first movement exposition might look like a perfect candidate for embellishment:

However, following those first four bars, the theme is immediately played in octaves between the first and second violins, and imitated contrapuntally by the first viola and cello. The first violinist can embellish mm.132-35, but short of pre-coordinating some embellishments with the other players (an obvious no-go, since it would shatter any semblance of improvisatory freedom) this would mean that the embellished theme is followed by a necessarily unembellished restatement. But that, in turn, undermines the very purpose of embellishment, which is meant to ratchet up the intricacy and intensity of a melody, not disappear and let the intensity wane. Then there are passages like this:

Here, it's entirely possible to insert embellishments! First off, the violinist spends four bars sitting on a D dominant 7th chord. It’s trivial to turn those bars into a stylistically-appropriate Eingang of some kind. I jotted this down, but the possibilities are endless:

However, problems pile up in the following phrase. Beginning in m.86, we get another melody that looks like it should be eminently embellishable. There's no immediate contrapuntal imitation until the following phrase, and the first violinist is just as free as any concerto soloist might be, with all four other players holding long notes beneath the tune. But look closer, and once again constraints lurk. The voice-leading is such that, when we move from tonic to dominant in m.87 and m.89, the first violinist still needs to hover somewhere around the fifth scale degree, as in the unembellished original. Move anywhere else and we'd hear parallel octaves, since the second violinist controls the third scale degree and the two violists control the first scale degree. How to get around this? One possibility would be some sort of chromatic wiggle that hews closely to the original shape of the phrase:

As far as embellishments go, I like that one -- though it hardly draws attention to itself as a florid embellishment. This previous example points to the most pervasive difficulty in embellishing Mozart's chamber music. Mozart favored an embellishment style full of chromatic sinews and twisty gestures that circle around the notes they embellish rather than connecting them in a direct scale. But introducing such winding, circuitous embellishments often brings problems of voice-leading in music so densely notated as these string quintets. This is not to say that embellishment is impossible; but the performer who wants to embellish is certainly on a leash. In the slow movement, these challenges are slightly diminished. The recurring theme calls out for embellishments, as do all repeated themes in Mozart, and here the soloistic nature of the first violin part makes intervention easier than it was in the previous movement. One of the interesting questions here is how to treat the many short rests (an eighth note, a quarter note) in the first violin part -- whether florid embellishments can just cross over those silences, as Mozart's own written-out embellishments often do in his keyboard music, or whether the silences need to be observed in order to clear aural space for interjections from other players. My solution has generally been to cross over the rests; thus, this cadential figure returns twice and can be treated with various embellishments--perhaps a diatonic arpeggio on its first recurrence and a twisting, chromatic scale on its second:

Then there are passages where playful imitation occurs between the players, and embellishments in the first violin part will be a spur to creative invention for the first violist:

So far, I've composed embellishments for the first violin part in the first two movements. The minuet, like the first movement, offers very few possibilities (though I'll certainly come up with some chromatic variants for the cadence gesture in m.9 (and m.23 of the Trio section). But it's the last movement I'm most excited to do, where the rondo theme repeats a few times across the movement and feels very much like the soloistic rondos elsewhere in Mozart. It should offer plenty of opportunities for embellishment--and, as with the previous movements, I'm sure I'll learn a lot in the process of writing them! Of course, it’s worth remembering that embellishments are not simply about "adding notes" but rather about enhancing the expressive nature of each phrase. Embellishment, when carried out well, reveals something of the content of the music. Those melodies with the seeds of comedy become funnier through the addition of wacky grace notes; those that are heartfelt or singing become more so through the addition of melting, chromatic sighs; those that lean more to the tragic can be infused with dissonances that tug and release. Embellishment is an interpretive, expressive act -- and, as such, the challenge is to do it carefully and do it well. We know that Mozart expected performers to embellish his music, including his violin works; my goal, in this project and others, is to use performance as an opportunity to find out just what is possible, in practical terms. Last year’s string duos were one point of entry, and I’m excited to see what I learn from the process of adding notes to K.515. ------ Here's a messy draft of my embellishments for the slow movement of K.515, in case others are interested in seeing them or even trying them--or perhaps simply taking inspiration from these ideas and trying their own hands at writing different embellishments. These generally follow Mozart's melodic style as closely as possible. Of course, they’re still under construction. I’m sure they’ll change once rehearsals start in two weeks!

You might also like:

• Baroque-n Record: Playing Mozart on Period Instruments
• Diary of a Recording: Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola
• By Special Arrangement: the Merit in Transcriptions

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