Documentary: Mit veränderten Reprisen

In 1759, C. P. E. Bach wrote a remarkable preface for a new opus of sonatas, Six Sonatas with Varied Reprises, Wq 50. Acknowledging (not without sarcasm) a fashion for the keyboardist-performer to add embellishments or variations (Veränderungen) to the repeat, Bach offers a model of good practice. Writing out every repeat, Bach provides his buyer with printed scores that indulge in embellishment and variation. “When producing these sonatas,” he had in mind “beginners and amateurs” who no longer would have “to invent such variations themselves or have them prescribed by others and then memorize them with lots of effort.”

What happens when we submit ourselves to such an expectation of continuous variation? And how far can we go, writing our own variants in existing scores? At what point do we feel like starting over, creating a new edition altogether? These questions were at the heart of a ten-day workshop at Orpheus Instituut in July 2023.

The assignment for each workshop participant was twofold: first, to engage in a practice of embellishment and variation, and second, to prepare “their” Mozart sonata for a video recording at the end of the workshop.

Featuring Tom Beghin, Juliane Brandes, Benjamin Steens, Joris Potvlieghe, Andrei Hadap, Wei Lee, Otto Popescu, Christophe Alvarez, Olha Dotsenko, and Tomasz Ritter.