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Summary
A challenge has long been due to the accepted view of the anomalous
form of the first movement of the classical concerto: that it evolved
from the Baroque ritornello concerto, typified by Vivaldi; that
it was, in consequence, conservative, burdened by its Baroque inheritance,
slow to absorb sonata style; and that it has to be segregated from
the sonata forms of 'pure' instrumental music and classed, with
aria, as primarily a ritornello form, tainted moreover by its extra-musical
purpose of display.
The Classical Concerto : Form and Principle argues that,
while countless run-of-the-mill concertos do conform to this stereotype,
the classical concertos that really matter enjoyed a very different
formal heritage: the alternative Corellian tradition which stemmed
from the Baroque sonata and produced Tartini's 'rounded binary'concerto
form. Adopted by, among others, J.C. Bach, this developed as naturally
into a mature sonata form as did the parallel forms of other instrumental
genres. In the hands of Mozart, it became, not the most conservative,
but the most advanced instrumental form of the eighteenth century,
articulating music unsurpassed in its value to humanity.
This publication renews the force of Tovey's profound 'concerto
principle' and restores the true classical concerto to its rightful
place in the mainstream of the history of sonata form.
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The author comments...
This essay originated in correspondence during the late 1980s with
Stanley Sadie, creator of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians. I tried to explain why I thought writers on classical
concerto form had gone increasingly off the rails during the previous
30 years. He eventually agreed that the current received opinion
was deficient and that it was chiefly a 'confusion between a "principle"
and a "form" ' that was 'at the root of the trouble'.
He found my points ' clear and strongly argued' and encouraged me
to marshall my arguments into 'a proper publishable form'.
I tackled this in 1991, but became reluctant to go to print without
seeing the full spectrum of contemporary thinking in Mozart's
Piano Concertos : Text, Context, Interpretation which Neal Zaslaw
was editing from talks given at the 1989 Michigan MozartFest.
This was finally published in 1996. While it was packed with interest,
and many points demanded comment, nothing in it affected my argument.
I kept my text unaltered and added comment, disagreement and appreciation
in a separate section: Is Mozart being smothered? The result was
published in 1997 and copies were sent to all concerned. H.C. Robbins
Landon and Edwin J. Simon were appreciative - generously, I thought,
as I had held them responsible for setting off the previous 40 years'
avalanche of erroneous commentary I hoped to clear away.
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Turnabout by New Grove
Also among those responding was Cliff Eisen, who had undertaken
to revise the section of the concerto entry in The New Grove
dealing with the classical period. I aimed to change its viewpoint;
in 1980, it had stated categorically that Mozart's first movements
'baffle analysis in terms of "sonata form" ', but 'use
the traditional concerto or ritornello form, as inherited through
J.C. Bach and others, with a full-scale application of the sonata
principle'- falling into line with the prevailing orthodoxy which
I was refuting.
This prevailing view - ubiquitous since Robbins Landon's contribution
to the 1956 Mozart Companion - requires the existence of
a 'recapitulatory tutti' in the tonic at the opening of the recapitulation.
This made it possible to raise the number of tuttis in Mozart from
the previously recognised 'three' to 'four' and thus to establish
a theoretical line of descent from Vivaldi, as begun by Edwin J.
Simon in 1957.
Denying this, my core section 'The myth of the "recapitulatory
tutti" ' points out that:
Eighteenth century descriptions of concerto form fall into two
distinct camps: those based on 'ritornello' structure and those
which see it as a three-tutti sonata form. The best-known writer,
H.C. Koch, began with a compromise in 1793 based on C.P.E. Bach
but moved into the second camp after discovering Mozart. There
is no such thing in Mozart as a 'recapitulatory tutti' in the
tonic, except perhaps in K.467 which does have an extended orchestral
passage at this point, without however disturbing the normal overall
proportions and functioning of the two parts with central tutti.
Mozart's habitual practice at the return after the development
is to share the material between soloist and orchestra, as a significant
part of the continuing process of their coming to terms.
Thankfully, this argument has been accepted and incorporated by
Cliff Eisen in his account of Mozart's concerto form in the Second
Edition (published in 2001) of The New Grove. Like me, he
emphasises elsewhere the binary concerto tradition in Italy, taken
up by J.C.Bach, and other forerunners of the sonata-based concerto
in Austria. He also points out that the operatic arias recently
linked to Mozart's early concerto procedures have the same basis
in sonata form. Most importantly, he restores Tovey's classic 1903
description of the classical concerto as the realization of the
concerto principle in sonata form to its rightful pre-eminence.
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New Grove self-contradiction
Cliff Eisen has thus endorsed my position and gone a long way towards
correcting the accumulated errors of 45 years. Unfortunately, this
radical revision is contradicted completely by the previous section,
'The instrumental concerto: origins to 1750'. Michael Talbot's conclusion
there is that 'unlike the symphony, the concerto did not adopt sonata
form but instead continued in the second half of the century to
rely on its tried and tested ritornello form'. What a pity he does
not carry through his initial distinction between the Roman (sonata
based) and North Italian (Vivaldian) concertos! It is precisely
this distinction between the 'binary' and 'ritornello' baroque concerto
forms that illuminates the classical period. Nothing is clearer
than that, while most composers struggled to reconcile the sectional
ritornello form with the dynamic sonata style, J.C. Bach, Boccherini,
Viotti, Mozart and others made the easy and natural transition from
Baroque binary to sonata form concerto, alongside symphony and sonata.
View
Diagram 1 View
Diagram 2
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