Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Mozart Englished

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/em/caab082

1741-7260

Mark Everist,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Mozart’s concertos for piano have always been subject to claims that they are being performed in circumstances that would have been familiar to the composer. ‘Conducting from the keyboard’ is a slogan rarely far from performances and recordings of this repertory, and the practice is occasionally claimed to reflect how Mozart would have performed his music himself. Although Murray Perahia was genuinely honest when he reported in 1987 that he wanted to conduct from the keyboard because he found aligning his performances with conductors difficult, most conductor-pianists do not even bother to repeat what they consider self-evident: that conducting Mozart concertos from the keyboard grants some kind of access to the composer’s aims that other modes of performance do not. This modern practice seems to have started with Edwin Fischer in Berlin in the 1930s, but was picked up systematically by his pupil Géza Anda’s complete set of recordings with the Camerata Academica des Mozarteums Salzburg in the 1960s; from then on—Daniel Barenboim was an important pioneer in the UK—it became part of the landscape of Mozart concerto performance. But of course, the practice was a modern mythology. Yes, composer-performers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries worked with their violinist colleagues to direct the performance, but they also contributed much more to the tutti and ritornello textures from the keyboard as well. This is a far cry from the mixture of performing the solo part and then indulging in interpretative conducting during the ritornellos and tuttis that modern ‘conducting from the keyboard’ involves. When Fischer developed the practice in the 1930s, he was inventing a modern technique—quite reasonably in response to the monumental performances he must have heard in his youth—but despite the claims of others he was not recovering a practice from the past.