Piano Arrangements Of Mozart Concertos And Cadenzas By Hummel

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PIANO ARRANGEMENTS OF MOZART PIANO CONCERTOS AND CADENZAS BY HUMMEL WITH THEIR MODELS: STYLE, PERFORMANCE ISSUES, AND AESTHETICS
Student Name: Grace Qin
Date: 25/10/2017
Abstract
Johann Nepumik Hummel’s linkage with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart started in the year 1786 at a time when the very young Hummel was living with the family of Mozart in their home for 2 years. While there, Hummel (1778-1837) took part in both Mozart’s private and public life, and he came into direct contact with every work that came out in those years which were without doubt amongst the most fertile of Mozart’s whole career. Mozart's piano concerto is one large body of work which always has a greater concern in relation to the style, aesthetics and instruments used. It is for this reason a doctoral programme concerned with a performance-led and comparison study of the Hummel’s arrangement of Mozart’s works would be a valuable contribution to the field of piano study. It is of note that Johann Nepumik Hummel was a witness to the creation of many of these works and he without doubt saw Mozart perform them. As such, his arrangements of these works provide a unique insight into Mozart as a performer of his works as well as how Hummel approached them about 4 years later in a musical world that was radically different than that of his youth. In addition to that, here in this study, the aim of this paper is to discover and develop a method for understanding well the differences between the different editions through practice. The study will investigate the sources of Mozart’s concertos that Hummel had at his disposal in the 1820s and the relationship of those editions/copies to Mozart’s originals. From this philological base, it would be possible to examine the works through practice. The proposed study will look into how performance styles have changed over the course of a generation both as a result of the development of the instrument and changing fashions. In this investigation, the paper will examine Hummel’s arrangement of Mozart’s concerto and cadenzas to find out how these relate to the originals.
Research Question
The main research question for the proposed research is:
How were Hummel’s arrangements of Mozart’s works related to the original works?
Sub-questions
The sub-questions that underpin/inform the main research are:
What sources of Mozart’s concertos did Hummel have at his disposal in the 1820s and how do those editions/copies relate to Mozart’s originals?
How did the editions of Mozart’s works evolve over a given period as both instruments and performance aesthetics changed? Exploring how the approach to performing these works changed?
How did Hummel his own style of playing had clearly moved far beyond the Mozartian ideal of the 1780s?
Hummel’s arrangement writing for very different instruments from Mozart’s. What kind of revelation may through on the evolution of performance practice?
What are the differences between Mozart's and other cadenzas from different composers or different editions of Mozart’s piano concertos as a gauge of changing attitudes to the works?
Context
The context within which the proposed research study is placed is eighteenth and nineteenth-century period music. The paper will focus on Mozart’s concerto and Hummel’s arrangements of Mozart’s works during the time in question. The key relevant literature comprises a variety of journal articles and academic books related to the subject matter under investigation. Scores and parts of the editions would also be used. In Mozart’s case, XXX would be used whereas in Hummel’s case, autographs or first editions would be utilized.
Given that the soloist and the composer were often the same individuals during the classical age, the requirement to provide the former with a chance of showing off was no great imposition on the latter. Largely considered as peerless in this type of composition, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart improvised his own cadenzas at concerts.  Johannes Brahms composed cadenzas to some Ludwig van Beethoven and Mozart concerto, although they were virtually never played. In addition, Mendelssohn wrote cadenzas for several of Mozart concerti, including the one for 2 pianos in which Mozart’s fine and impressive specimen surely did not demand the replacement.
The most well-known cadenza that one composer ever wrote for a concerto by a different composer is certainly the one that Beethoven wrote for the 1st movement of Mozart’s 20 K.466 piano concerto. Beethoven played this concerto at a concert for the purpose of benefiting the widow of Mozart, named Constanze, roughly at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Beethoven followed Mozart’s example in most of his piano concertos and left the cadenzas unwritten. Later in his career, however, Beethoven thought better of the practice and chose to publish cadenzas for his initial 4 piano concerti, writing various alternate versions in some cases, giving him a choice of which to play. There is also the cadenza to Mozart’s 22nd piano concerto written by Benjamin Britten, an English composer, for the Russian Sviatoslav Richter in the 1960s. This cadenza begins relatively normally, but as it proceeds it grows more and more unbalanced and uneven.
Of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos, only fifteen of them have cadenzas. The remaining ones were either never written down or have been lost over time. At Mozart’s time, performers were expected to create their own cadenzas. His piano concerto no. 20 K.466 is Mozart’s work that has been admired by many other composers who wrote cadenzas. These composers are Feruccio Busoni, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Franz Xavier Mozart, and Beethoven whose cadenza is recorded extensively. Beethoven’s cadenza for the 1st movement of Mozart’s K.466 was published in 1836. It is likely that some of the abovementioned composers wrote cadenzas to Mozart’s piano concerto no. 20 K.466 merely because Beethoven had done so and this provided an interesting precedent.
In the 1830s, when Hummel made his arrangements of piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in his mind, he must have gone back to a time roughly 4 decades earlier. It was during the year 1786 and the year 1787 that Hummel was installed and treated as a member of Mozart’s family in the Austrian city of Vienna. The 7-year-old youngster, whose playing had impressed Mozart, therefore, had the chance of studying the master at close quarters, collecting privileged information with regard to the composer’s compositional method and his performance practice. In part for this reason, in his memorable career as a piano virtuoso, Hummel was usually equated to Mozart and common attributes in each of their musical temperaments indicated, for instance the modest, gallant, and relaxed manner wherein they made the music speak to the audience.
As such, the arrangements of Hummel are important as pleasant works in their own right, and are also valuable for the insights that they bring into the way that Mozart and his contemporaries might have performed these works. This is particularly applicable to those concertos that were never published in the lifetime of Mozart, and where the autographs in general provide only rather vague directions for a lot of solo passages such as the cadenzas, as well as for the ornamentation. The present concertos both belong to this group, namely concertos that were never published in the lifetime of Mozart , making the fact that Johann Nepumik Hummel perhaps was in attendance at the 1789 original performance of the D major ‘Coronation Concerto’ with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart especially interesting.
Hummel’s admiration of his master was such that he did not want to make any cuts or to alter any single harmony. How Hummel accommodates Mozart’s orchestration is brilliant and often includes very surprising things. In essence, they are re-imaginings of the works as much as they are arrangements. The piano concertos go to some extent further as they seem to be founded upon solo versions that Johann Nepumik Hummel made for the purpose of suiting his own formidable technique and, whilst not changing the architecture of the works, Hummel instead beefed up Mozart’s part. Throughout, it is the piano which receives the lion’s share, with the flute and strings mainly providing accompaniment. By necessity, Hummel excluded the trumpet and horn parts. Hummel’s ornamentations and cadenzas clearly offer an insight into the state of the practice during the early nineteenth century. One of the most interesting aspects of arranging these works for chamber group is that to some degree, it restores the performance conventions of the concerto during the mid-18th century when it was almost the invariable practice to perform them as chamber works with one player per part.
Musical arrangement was of great importance all through the career of Hummel, whose output consists of an estimated 50 transcriptions of masterpieces in various musical genres, from chamber music to symphonies and opera overtures. Of special importance are Hummel’s adaptations of 7 of Mozart’s piano concertos – K365, 537, 503, 466, 491, 482, and 456 – for piano quartet comprising fortepiano, cello, violin and flute, not just for their historical significance in terms of Mozart reception, but also for the valuable information they offer as regards the performance practice of that time. The arrangements were made later in Hummel’s career and were commissioned. However, he invested great amount of time and effort into ensuring that these arrangements did justice to the works of a man he still admired above all others.
Although Hummel was in part looking to the contemporary aesthetic values, he strived to remain faithful to original classical structure, principles, as well as musical language. The instruments that Hummel chose to use enabled him to preserve an acceptable and suitable balance between the basso continuo, which are shared by the piano and cello, and the melody, which is shared by the violin and the piano. The flute’s role was largely to represent the characteristic tone of the woodwinds. Regarding performance practice, most noteworthy are efforts made by Hummel aimed at completing Mozart’s text in line with the standard convention of the eighteenth century, in passages in which the original notation is not fully comprehensive or is sparse. For instance, his realizations illuminated such problematic questions as the treatment of Eingдnge (lead-ins) and improvised embellishment. Hummel’s arrangement of the Piano Concerto in B flat major K456 was the final one in the series to appear, precisely the 7th one.
However, it was not the final concerto which he arranged because the sources of the manuscript indicate that his work on it was already finished by 1830 January.  Although Mozart had offered his concerto with a complete set of cadenzas, the ones that Hummel composed alone, and also his added lead-ins, appear to be inspired by models that Mozart provided, presenting crucial evidence for the performance practice pertaining to this repertory. 
Piano Concertos No. 20 in D minor, 466 and No. 18 in B flat major, K456 are arrangements of 2 piano concertos by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for 4 instruments: Cello, Violin, Flute and Piano/Fortepiano. The deep knowledge that Hummel had of Mozart’s works for orchestra and fortepiano is documented by several accounts: aside from observing the beginning of a number of masterpieces from these years, Levin pointed out that Hummel himself must have studied these masterpieces on several occasions with his teacher Mozart, giving public appearances of the pieces also in the presence of Hummel. It is worth mentioning that this recognized authority, in addition to the extensive approval, he enjoyed personally as a composer, served to create a context wherein Hummel created his own transcriptions, about 50 of them, which are chiefly scored in fortepiano, cello, violin and flute. The specific historical value of these transcriptions, as Zaslow pointed out, is highlighted by the opportunities that Hummel offered for the playing of embellishments, cadenzas, and improvisations of these masterpieces. The transcription of Mozart’s Romanza KV 466 by Hummel is not usually heard. It has numerous fascinating ornaments.
The contemporaries of Hummel considered him the last legitimate representative of the classical style and thus with these arrangements, he effectively provides people today with new insights into the performance practice of his age, without a doubt into that of Mozart himself. This is particularly evident and palpable in the arrangement of the G minor symphony KV550 in which Hummel gives metronome markings which are a lot faster compared to what would usually be expected these days.  This may be a reflection of the dissimilarity in perceived effect through the smaller ensemble, and would without doubt appear to have something to do with the eighteenth and nineteenth century Viennese taste – admiring of technical capability and virtuosity. Miucci mentioned that Mozart himself took exception to Hummel’s fondness for fast tempi, hating speed for its own sake, although nevertheless stating that the outer movements of his Haffner Symphony in D major KV385 should be performed as fast as possible, describing it as fiery. It is worth mentioning that Hummel always stated that: ‘Mozart did it that way, and so do I’ which demonstrates that his defense was in fact respectful of Mozart his teacher.
It is important to mention that while Mozart used various instruments including flute, piano/fortepiano, cello, and violin. Hummel mainly used only the piano. During...