CD // W. A. Mozart’s “Sonatas with Varied Reprises”, K 279–284

On October 6, 1775, Leopold Mozart inquired of publisher Breitkopf in Leipzig whether the latter might like to print keyboard sonatas by his son “in the same manner as those of H: Philipp Carl Emanuel Bach mit veränderten Reprisen.” Scholars have proposed a link between Leopold’s offered works and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s recently completed “Munich” Sonatas, K. 279–84 (1774–75). What might Mozart’s Six Sonatas with Varied Reprises have looked like? Reversely, what in Mozart’s score made Leopold think of a possible publication à la Bach?

Using Bach’s Wq. 50 as a guide, this recording extends a widely documented mid-eighteenth-century practice of embellishing repeats to the actual rewriting of Mozart’s reprises. Reprise here applies to either of the two sections of a sonata-form movement that are to be repeated. The expectation of such a repeat is crucial for our performing and listening to a “varied [repeat of a] reprise” in a rhetorical or pre-organicist paradigm.

That Bach’s printed opus was meant to demonstrate how “one tends to vary the allegros with 2 reprises the second time around” (Bach, 1753) raises the stakes for our engagement with Mozart, who left us with fine examples of embellishing slow movements but whose fast movements in particular leave us guessing as to how he would have handled such an exercise. The idea here is to build on previous studies of Mozart as improviser, but also to commit to a fully written-out, entirely publishable text. While Bach claimed to have invented a new genre “for the use and benefit” of the amateur, our challenge is to apply similar principles to what in Mozart’s household were known as “the difficult sonatas,” removing all repeat signs and replacing these with varied reprises.

Tom Beghin plays a replica of Andreas Stein built by Chris Maene in 2016 from the Orpheus Instituut collection. Mozart famously first tried out Stein’s instruments in October 1777, while performing his Sonatas K. 279–84 at various occasions, both formal and informal. “The last [sonata] ex D [K. 284] works incomparably [well] on Stein’s pianofortes,” Mozart reported to his father.

The recording took place at the beautiful Chapel of Sint-Lodewijkscollege in Bruges (Belgium).

Interview

Watch Arabella Pare in conversation with Tom Beghin.

The scores

Download the score of Mozart’s Sonatas K. 279–84 with varied reprises, as performed by Tom Beghin and produced by Anastasios Zafeiropoulos.