Interpreting Mozart: Fantasy in D minor (tutorial) 

Thanks Norman. Your comments are much appreciated.

Such great analysis and instruction!!!

This is Sandra Parrish White. Thank you so much.

Glad it helped, Beth!

Same here, Beth. Played this about 40 years ago, and just picked it up again.

Best of luck with the piece!

Thanks, Nathan.

Glad it was helpful!

did u pull it off?

@@carteralita5377 nope😂 I don't get time to learn my own pieces of preference alongside school and my exam pieces. I Just ended up neglecting the piece now I don't want to play it anymore, sadly

@@Dominique632 Maybe you’ll come back to it in the future. I let it go for decades and am now giving it another go.

Thanks, Lucas.

Even though I haven't used the pedal in the scale passages, I think it would work fine in the higher registers, but would need to release on the way down to avoid muddiness.

@@pianoinsights6092 Thank you!

We must always remember that composers of that period wrote for and on an instrument that was different from what we take for granted today. The respective instruments of the different periods differed in their capabilities in the sense that what would work on one instrument would not on the other, and vice versa.

Hi Alger, I am not a scholar in these matters, but can add my two cents... The Fantasy seems to me to have been released unfinished with a view to adding may a fugal sequel, but it seems odd that it would have ever appeared that way, just as it is mysterious why the K 330 codas were missing from the autograph - they add so much beauty. Uchida misses the point in my mind by giving the obvious toccata-like warmup music of the opening measures special structural status by bringing it back at the end. I much prefer the original added measures except for the rather bland A-F#-A finish to the first phrase where a final appearance of the A-B-G-F# figure is better and more charming. Regarding the Requiem I have always felt the second half to be largely anticlimactic, but who in their thirst for authenticity would ever want to hear a performance without the glorious Lachrymosa, which I still fervently hope will be rediscovered to have been written by Mozart - how could it possibly not have been?? Ah, the mysteries never end.

Hi, Clive; You say that you are not a scholar on these matters; nevertheless it does appear to me that you can discuss them intelligently. I happen to be a professional musician but still enjoy discussing these things with you. I for one would never argue with the idea of that variant you propose at the end of that first phrase of the last ten bars - it would work fine for me, unless I wanted to start the crescendo to the end a bit earlier - with the published version which ends on A which anticipates the start of the second phrase - all a matter of dynamics and thus interpretation. However, I would strenuously argue against the idea of returning to the opening of the piece, and for me it goes against the genus of it, what it is all about. I don't know how many of these demonstrations you have posted on RU-vid, or whether you present them live, but here is something else you might care to comment on. I will assume that you are quite familiar with the Pathetique Sonata of Beethoven. Many musicologists have proposed in years past that the first movement exposition repeat should be taken, not from the beginning of the allegro as marked, but rather from the very beginning, including the opening introduction. What would seem to lend this some legitimacy is the fact that there are interruptions on passing into the development section and also just before the end, so that on paper at least it seems to tie everything in place. In fact, Rudolf Serkin in his recording so presents it. But I came to realize that one has to look beyond what may tie together neatly intellectually and to rather look at the music itself, to really listen to it. And this is one rare case for me where I did a complete about face and have come to oppose the idea of it, and feel that the repeat should be taken from the opening of the allegro as actually marked. Listening to this original introduction, that appears at the very outset of the work, I heard for myself that it is anticipatory in manner, introducing the drama that lies ahead, so to repeat this would be dramatically false, and I found that I could no longer accept such an idea. It is a lesson when one regards a piece of music, the musical factors must take absolute priority. One must treat every case in a completely pragmatic manner and judge each individual case on its merits. There is no hard and fast rule that can be universally applied. It is no different when judging the situation with the Mozart D minor Fantasie.

Yes Alger, I have tutorials and performances of all the movements of the Pathetique sonata up on the channel. The whole idea of repeating the slow introduction seems daft to me. The first edition has enormous repeat marks at the start of the allegro, and all arguments for starting from the beginning are weak (Haydn refers back to his slow introduction in Symphony 103, and as far as I know, nobody has a ever suggested that the repeat should therefore start at the beginning of that first movement). I wonder why some of the best pianists have been led astray - maybe to do something differently just for the sake of it, to get some attention? Don't get me started on the theory that Beethoven intended his Moonlight sonata first movement to be played with the pedal down all the way through. If we don't do it this way, says the great and admirable pianist Andras Schiff, we are not only ignorant, but completely miss the 'revolutionary' character of this idea! Charles Rosen does however present very strong evidence for starting Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor at the very beginning rather than at the allegro. He did a lot more thinking and research though, which makes a difference.

Hi, Clive;Thanks for you response. We do appear to be in total agreement regarding the first movement of the Pathetique Sonata, but you have raised an interesting point in your mention of what occurs in the first movement of Haydn's Drum Roll Symphony, which is a rare occurrence in a sonata allegro movement to begin with. What comes to mind with your reference would be the Orchestral Suites of Bach, in particular the opening movements. The structure of each is a slow stately introduction with ends on a half cadence dominant with a view of falling directly forward into a fast quasi fugal section which takes up most of the movement. After this latter is all worked out, it moves naturally into a reprise of the opening section, modified to present the same material in the tonic and thus end the movement. But there are repeat marks as follows: The very opening section is marked to be repeated before going ahead into the faster section. This I can tolerate but feel that it is altogether unnecessary. The remainder is also marked for repeat, meaning that after arriving at the end of the movement, we first play a first ending and then repeat all the way back to the opening of the long fast fugal section. This is as dis proportionate as you can imagine; I have heard one of the suites done in this manner, and find such a thing totally unacceptable. If this is what the old masters of the period specified, it is entirely beyond me what they could have been thinking to conceive of such an absurd structure. Repeat marks I feel have to be looked at on an individual basis. Most of those in Beethoven's symphonies, for example, I would observe, but in No. 7 I make an exception and would only take two in the entire work (in the scherzo movement). The exposition repeat in the finale of No. 5 I would also hesitate to take. Brahms indicates these in the first movements of his first three symphonies; those in Nos. 2 and 3 are fine but I would bypass the one in No. 1 is being uncomfortably abrupt and not properly worked out. On the other hand, I know of a conductor who inserts a repeat in the first movement of Mozart's Haffner Symphony and a pianist who adds one in her rendition of the Rondo in D Major, K. 485. Both of these latter seem to me to be well conceived and even though not by Mozart, I would not object to them. As for running the pedal throughout the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, that seems a bit extreme, but with the more familiar case of the main theme in the last movement of the Waldstein Sonata (and anywhere else one might encounter such in Beethoven's sonatas), we must remember the instrument that Beethoven composed at was quite different from what we have today (the same with that "bebung" effect that he introduces in his late sonatas), that effect can be made to work, depending on both the artist and the instrument being used, but I feel that in most cases it is perhaps best to ignore such to avoid excessive muddying of the harmonic movement and texture. We cannot always be blindly literal when attempting to follow a composer's markings, and often someone will come up with something that proves to be far more effective.

I do find the Bach Suite repeats a little much, and I never perform his French overture movements with repeated fugues (Partit 4 and Overture in B minor). Likewise, even with the extraordinary first ending of its first movement, do I find Schubert's glorious Sonata in B flat to be made more glorious by observing the first movement repeat. But it's good to read of Schubert's laissez faire attitudes to repeats and cuts. A friend once asked him if was okay to cut parts out of the E flat piano trio, and Schubert told him, yes go ahead! I have a feeling composers were much less dogmatic than they seemed to be.I Iiked a quote from Brahms I encountered recently, where he said that he believed that every composer who had placed metronome markings on their music had subsequently abandoned them. Beethoven's enthusiasm for the machine for tempo indications was certainly short-lived. Yes, the markings in the Waldstein are unique, like those at the opening of the slow movement of the Third concerto. If you will indulge me, I'll add below a passage of my book-in-progress and in draft, about the pedaling issue. It's amazing that professional pianists still teach an urtext approach to pedaling. ie. no pedaling in Mozart, hardly any in Beethoven, etc. A recent performance of the Hammerklavier on an admittedly intriguing, thoughtful and high-quality RU-vid channel, Authentic Sound, boasts with great pride of his adherence to not using pedal wherever it is not marked. Anyway, here goes, and please forgive typographical inexactitutes: Pitfalls of literalism - the Moonlight Sonata controversy There are times when such adherence can become absurd. Beethoven gives at the start of his Moonlight Sonata an indication that the piece should be pedaled throughout (semper senza sordino). This has for a long time caused considerable debate, which continues to this day, one side believing that Beethoven meant the dampers (sordino but more correctly sordini) should literally be raised all the way to the end of the piece and never allowed to damp the strings; in modern terminology, that the player should hold the pedal down and never change it. It has been argued (by Tovey and others) that this music was written for an instrument much different from our own and that such pedaling worked well on those smaller and weaker instruments. Such pedalings had been used before for atmospheric effects, which, it is true, work better on the older pianos than on our modern ones. A passage from the first movement of Haydn’s Sonata in C (“English”) is one of the more famous examples. Beethoven used them also, notably in the last movement of his Waldstein sonata, where the simple and innocent theme sings quietly amid a fairy-tale halo of sonority of mixed tonic and dominant harmonies. But the sustained use of this effect over the whole of the Moonlight’s first movement creates a tangle of conflicting harmonies with no relief, and without creating any atmosphere except maybe that of thick black fog. But opinions differ, in this as in everything under the sun. The pianist Andras Schiff takes the full-immersion approach in his performances and recordings and describes the effect as “magical, the harmonies are washed together, creating sonorities that are truly revolutionary”, especially on the early pianos, but on modern ones also. He claims that ninety-nine percent of all pianists have simply ignored Beethoven’s instructions. Derek Melville, in his very interesting article on Beethoven’s pianos in The Beethoven Companion (Faber, 1971), takes the opposite view; “I myself have played this work on two of Beethoven’s pianos and also on other pianos of this period, and it is possible to state quite categorically that (Beethoven) would never have tolerated the frightful dissonances which result if the sustaining pedal were held down and not moved throughout the piece”. This shows that the argument may never be decided one way or the other on purely subjective grounds. One man’s cup of tea is another man’s poison. So maybe it would be better to look at the problem through the perspective of the composer and his options, and seek an answer based more on logic. To do this, let us put ourselves in Beethoven’s shoes for a moment, and first suppose that he wanted the whole piece to be traditionally pedaled throughout, changing at the harmony changes, without any drier, unpedaled sections along the way. Beethoven rarely gave pedal indications except for special effects. The pianist was essentially left to use pedal as he saw fit. He almost never includes them in his earlier music. This may partly have been because until around 1803 (when Beethoven adopted the simpler ‘Ped’ markings for the new foot pedals), direct indications for the knee lever mechanisms of the earlier pianos were so cumbersome, requiring the words senza sordino and con sordino for each pedal change. In the first movement of the Moonlight these indications would have had to appear every measure. This was clearly impossible. Even if there were room, it would have looked ridiculous. So what were his other options? Leaving no instructions at all would have left the music open to being played with varieties of pedaling at the whim of the performer, rather than the consistent pedaling that he obviously wanted. He had never been in this situation before. The piece really is revolutionary and unique in the sonata repertory, in its consistency of mood and texture, without the contrasts one expects in a sonata movement (he also instructs that it should be played pianissimo throughout and with the greatest delicacy). In its exclusive focus on a single emotional state it presages the piano music of Romantics such as Mendelssohn and Schumann of decades later. So this new, revolutionary kind of music needed a special kind of pedaling. Schumann himself was fond of simply writing ‘with pedal’ at the opening of his pieces and leaving it at that. No one has ever suggested leaving the pedal down all the way through. Beethoven’s instruction is not so very different from Schumann’s, except in his use of the word ‘semper’ (always). Unfortunately, that one word is the real cause of the problem. We can’t know whether he even considered adding a clause counseling us to change pedal wherever the harmonies change. Even if he did think of it (which presupposes he even anticipated being totally misunderstood), he probably dismissed it as unnecessary and even insulting to his piano-educated public, who would never have imagined he was suggesting leaving the pedal down all the way through - why would they. It is likely that he never even thought of it, or of the tumult his little word ‘semper’ might cause. So, based on what we know of the limitations of Western musical notation, and Beethoven’s particular situation with regard to this piece, we can recognize that there lurked a potential for misunderstanding which Beethoven probably never recognized. Let’s now suppose, on the other hand, that he really did want the dampers raised all the way through with no pedal changes. This was a much more radical idea altogether, so he would surely have made it absolutely clear that it was what he wanted, leaving no room for doubt or ambiguity. It would have been a very simple matter for him to include such an instruction, just as the composer Kozeluh had done for the London edition of his Three Caprices, op.44. That Beethoven would have mistakenly omitted such a crucially important detail is impossible to imagine. (Despite my belief that Beethoven wanted a traditional method of pedaling in this movement, I do however think it is effective to make pedal changes later than usual so that the harmonies overlap and melt into each other, the new chords emerging from their predecessors rather than appearing in immediate focus. It’s a subtle detail but adds poignancy, and it particularly effective in the ‘cry of pain’ moment, where the right hand holds a minor ninth (C on top) over a rising and falling bass line, where blending the B major and E minor harmonies by not changing pedal is very effective as long as the balance is right.) Looking at the controversy from this logical perspective I have found a way of clearing the matter up in my mind for good. I don’t claim to have won the debate, and do not expect it to disappear. Logic tends to play a minor role in modern discourse. But the Schiff interpretation is nonetheless a rarity, and will, for all his zeal in what he believes to be the truth of the matter, probably remain so. There is after all a reason we still don’t often hear this music played with pedal down all the way. For most of us it just doesn’t sound good.