Books, Arts & Manners: Mozart at the Piano, Plus

It was once the musicological wisdom that Mozart’s piano sonatas were, as one critic condescendingly described them, “work undertaken sometimes merely to point the lesson for an interesting pupil.” Mozart himself contributed to this notion by marking the C Major “a small sonata for beginners” —a whimsy that led to its slaughter by generations of students. (It is forgotten that this sonata was completed on the same day as the Symphony No. 39 in E Flat, when he was at the height of his powers.)

The piano was Mozart’s favorite instrument, and he employed it for some of his most personal and introspective expression. When the boy Mozart broke in on the London musical scene in 1765, plucked keyboard instruments were slowly being phased out—replaced by the fortepiano, with its wide percussive, dynamic, and tonal possibilities. He grew, and grew up with the piano, which in a sense became a part of him. Not, of course, that he had a monopoly on the instrument. “Papa” Haydn reached deeper down its throat, as Paul Badura-Skoda has shown us. But in a special way, Mozart was the master, the technician, the acolyte of its every device.

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Ralph de Toledano

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It was once the musicological wisdom that Mozart’s piano sonatas were, as one critic condescendingly described them, “work undertaken sometimes merely to point the lesson for an interesting pupil.” Mozart himself contributed to this notion by marking the C Major “a small sonata for beginners” —a whimsy that led to its slaughter by generations of students. (It is forgotten that this sonata was completed on the same day as the Symphony No. 39 in E Flat, when he was at the height of his powers.)

The piano was Mozart’s favorite instrument, and he employed it for some of his most personal and introspective expression. When the boy Mozart broke in on the London musical scene in 1765, plucked keyboard instruments were slowly being phased out—replaced by the fortepiano, with its wide percussive, dynamic, and tonal possibilities. He grew, and grew up with the piano, which in a sense became a part of him. Not, of course, that he had a monopoly on the instrument. “Papa” Haydn reached deeper down its throat, as Paul Badura-Skoda has shown us. But in a special way, Mozart was the master, the technician, the acolyte of its every device.