Tradition without Convention: The Impossible Nineteenth ...

Tradition without Convention: The Impossible Nineteenth-Century Project

CHARLES ROSEN

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Delivered at University of Utah

April 11, 2000

Charles Rosen is professor emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought and in music at the University of Chicago. He studied piano and general music at Juilliard School and was educated at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951. He made his New York debut at Town Hall in 1951, the same year that he made the Srst complete recording of the Debussy ?tudes. He has concertized throughout the United States and Europe and in South Africa, New Zealand, Brazil, and Israel. His diverse discography of more than Sfty recordings includes "The Last Keyboard Works of Johann Sebastian Bach" and "The Last Six Beethoven Sonatas"; his recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations was nominated for a Grammy Award. Igor Stravinsky invited him to record his Movements for Piano and Orchestra, and Elliott Carter his Double Concerto. His many books include The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1971), which won the National Book Award; Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen (1999), awarded the Truman Capote Prize for literary criticism; and Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New (2000).

1. Some years ago, when I was practicing a difScult passage in the Concerto in B-sat Major, K. 450 by Mozart (Example 1), I found that I had absentmindedly strayed into a similar virtuoso phrase from another B-sat Concerto, the last one, K. 595 (Example 2).

Example 1. K. 450, I bars 65?68

Example 2. K. 595, I bars 97?102

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Both these phrases represent typical Mozartean virtuosity in B-sat major. We can Snd other examples in the Snale of the Sonata in B-sat Major, K. 333 (this movement, indeed, is written like a concerto rondo arranged for solo piano and mimics the relation of orchestra to soloist throughout) (Example 3):

Example 3.

and in the Sonata for Piano and Violin K. 454, also in B-sat major (Snale, bars 259ff.) (Example 4):

Example 4.

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These passages are formed out of the basic elements of tonality: placing them well requires a certain mastery, but the invention of material here may be said to be almost at the zero degree. It is easy to see how any one of these passages may conveniently be replaced by a similar one from another work. The kind of mistake I made, however, is unlikely to happen with a later concerto. During the nineteenth century an important change took place in the history of musical style in the West--a progressive change, and we are still living with it.

Late eighteenth century music depended on a repertoire of conventional formulaic phrases that might be transferred at will from one work to another. Of course, almost all musical styles depend on some sort of conventional repertoire of motifs: in most periods the main body of this repertoire generally consists of cadence formulas, ways of ending or rounding off individual phrases or complete works. These cadence formulas, in fact, may often be said to deSne the style.

What is striking, however, about the second half of the eighteenth century is the grand dimension of these formulas, their imposing length--how long they last and what a large role they play temporally in the structure. They are not simply, as in other periods, motifs or short sequential sets of harmonies, but elaborate phrases lasting several bars, sometimes, indeed, a succession of several phrases. They act within large forms as a kind of stufSng. They Sll out the work.

They also articulate the form, occurring most often at cadences. In concertos (and sometimes in sonatas), these formulas are virtuoso arabesques woven out of scales and arpeggios: for the most part they are derived from the coloratura passage-work developed at that time for the operatic stage, and the technique is transferred to the keyboard concerto and sonata or, less often, to the violin concerto. It is essential to the tradition that these conventional passages of virtuosity be executed with grace and ease. In symphonies and quartets, the conventional phrases tend to be elaborate and lengthy sourishes or fanfares. They mark the spaces between the end of one melody and the beginning of another, or between two playings of the same theme. We may take an example from one of the more symphonic of Mozart's piano sonatas, the A minor, K. 310. The rounding-off of the main theme is marked by a lengthy but conventional half cadence (Example 5). Later, the end of the exposition is articulated by an equally conventional phrase. Here there is standard virtuoso Sguration in the left hand and a military fanfare in the right (Example 6).

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