Bis repetita placent: C. P. E. Bach, W. A. Mozart, and the Practice of Varied Repeats. - Beghin, Tom (Mons, Belgium Arts2 - Conservatoire Royal de Mons, 2023)
Keynote lecture
When in 1775 Leopold Mozart inquired with Breitkopf in Leipzig whether he might like to print an opus of keyboard sonatas “in the same manner as those of H: Philipp Carl Emanuel Bach mit veränderten Reprisen,” he may have had a double motive. Not only was he pitching W. A. Mozart’s recently completed Sonatas K 279–284 (1774–75), which in the Mozart household were known as “the difficult sonatas,” but he may also have had in mind a clever way for his brilliant nineteen-year-old son to tap into a potentially lucrative amateur market. The publication did not happen, but the question is intriguing: what might such Mozart Sonatas with Varied Reprises have looked like? To produce such an edition makes for a challenging counterfactual exercise. It also provokes more questions. When performing classical keyboard sonatas, what happens when we submit ourselves to the expectation of continuous variation? How do we navigate the materiality of a printed score? What are the limits to incorporating our variants and at what point do we feel like starting over, and re-composing altogether? How do we tap into the 18th-century ideal of a keyboardist as composer-performer, while becoming sensitive to a musical culture that harbored a more fluent use of a musical work, tailored to the needs of a performer? This lecture balances these questions against an exploration of rhetorical intent behind repetition and variation, Bach’s published thoughts on the matter, and the presenter’s own experiments of teaching and performing Mozart’s sonatas on a Stein fortepiano—as the instrument that in 1777 became crucial in the professional life of a maturing improviser and composer.
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Keywords: Declassifying the Classics: Rhetoric, Technology, and Performance, 1750-1850