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otherwise qualified as “violin sonata,” “cello sonata,” or the like, we usually as- sume that “sonata” refers to a three-movement work for piano.
Who played this flood of new sonatas for the piano? Amateur musicians, mostly women, who practiced and performed for polite society in the comfort of their own homes. (Oddly, men in this period usually played not the piano but string instruments such as the violin or cello.) In Mozart’s time, the ability to play the piano, to do fancy needlework, and to utter a few selected words of French were thought by male-dominated society all that was necessary to be a cultured young lady.
To teach the musical handicraft, instructors were needed. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all served as piano teachers in fashionable circles early in their careers. Their piano sonatas were not intended to be played in public concert halls. Instead, they served two functions: The easier ones provided students with material they might practice at home to develop technique; and the more difficult ones were to be showpieces for the composers themselves, with which they could impress in the homes of wealthy patrons. Among the thirty-two splendid piano sonatas that Beethoven composed, for example, only one was ever performed at a public concert in Vienna during his lifetime.
(A discussion of a Classical piano sonata by Beethoven, his “Pathétique” Sonata, is found in Chapter 10, along with its Listening Cue.)
The Concerto
With the genre of the concerto, we leave the salon or private chamber
and return to the public concert hall. The Classical concerto, like the symphony, was a large-scale, multi movement work for instrumental so-
loist and orchestra intended for a public audience. While the symphony
might have provided the greatest musical substance at a concert, audi-
ences were often lured to the hall by the prospect of hearing a virtuoso
play a concerto. Then, as now, listeners were fascinated with the virtuos-
ity and derring-do that a stunning technical display might bring. Gone
was the Baroque tradition of the concerto grosso, in which a group of soloists (concertino) stepped forward from the full orchestra (tutti) and
then receded back into it. From this point forward, the concerto was a solo con- certo, usually for piano but sometimes for violin, cello, French horn, trumpet, or woodwind. In the new concerto, a single soloist commanded all the audience’s attention: It was show time!
Mozart composed twenty-three piano concertos, many among the best ever written, securing his reputation as the inventor of the modern piano concerto. Mozart’s motivation, however, was not enduring fame, but money. At each of the public concerts he produced, Mozart offered one or two of his latest concertos. But he had to do more: he was responsible for renting the hall, hiring the orches- tra, leading rehearsals, attracting an audience, transporting his piano to the hall (Figure 9.7), and even selling tickets from his apartment (Figure 9.8)—all this in addition to composing the music and appearing as solo virtuoso. But when all
FiguRe 9.7
Mozart’s own piano, preserved in the house of his birth in Salzburg, Austria. The keyboard spans only five octaves, and the black-and- white color scheme of the keys is reversed, both typical features of the late-eighteenth-century piano. Mozart purchased the instrument in 1784 and on it he premiered his C major piano con- certo, K. 467, in March, 1785 This is a small instrument, weighing only 187 pounds, with two fewer octaves than the modern piano.
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Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
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