CLASSICAL MUSIC MAYHEM!!

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

I have noticed that several posters identify the date of a Mozart composition by the watermark type, as take from Tyson catlaog of Mozart's watermarks. I believe it is a mistake to treat watermarks as if they were atomic clocks.

In many cases, a particular composition may have been written on paper with several watermarks, which complicates the problem A large composition, such as Don Giovanni or Marriage of Figaro can have three, four, or even more watermark types in the paper involved.

But in the case I saw, which happened to be the Gran Partitta, an assertion wade made that the paper used was of two types, one of which was used only for compositions created in 1781, and from there the next step taken was to state that K. 361 was written in that year. That doesn't compute. The other watermark in the K. 361 paper was used for composiition dating from 1783 to 1787. And what is more, the preponderance of Mozart's music for basset horns used that paper. So if one argues that his paper type dates the work to 1781, I can counter-argue that the paper type dates the work to 1783-1787 based on basset horn usage. Neither argument is stable.

Tyson never said that K. 361 was written in 1781 because of the paper types alone. It was one of his arguments. He had others such as the dating of K. 285b which he believed was written first and later modified by Mozart to use in K. 361.

I cannot tell you in a brief sentence how wrong I believe Tyson to have been. And I told him that myself on several occasions.

Perhaps the biggest problem with 1781 is that K. 361 is Harmoniemusik, an instrumental type that did not exist until 1782, and for Mozart to write the most important Harmonie composition before the form was even invented, is, to say the least, questionable.

Dexter Edge, Robert Levin, and I were on a panel in Boston about two years ago and one of the discussions had to do with the date of K. 361. Dexter thinks it to be 1781 based on paper type. Levin and I hold to 1784 based on historical information.

And arguments asserting that the date of K. 361 must have been written before he began his catalog of composiitons in 1784 (which doesn't have K. 361 listed in it), are myopic. That a composition is not in his catalog means only that it is not in his catalog, nothing more.

Dan Leeson

Leporello87 · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 2:11 am Post subject:

*waits for Robert to jump in and pounce on a topic about KV 361*

Smile

Sorin Eushayson · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 2:20 am Post subject:

Leporello87 · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 3:55 am Post subject:

IIRC, Robert and I had a reasonably productive exchange about KV 361 and KV 46 over on that old Talk Classical forum, which I haven't visited in ages, because once Robert got banned, it became, quite honestly, intolerably boring. Still, I should go to try to find that and cross-link it to that other KV 361 thread Dan Leeson began (which I just noticed ten seconds ago for the first time), just so we don't reinvent the wheel on Mozart's so-called "exaggerated achievements" in the field of harmoniemusik.

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

In 1974, I was able to get the very set of handwritten performance parts for the work bearing the title K. 46. It had been in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde for a very long time, but under an incorrect filing number. In a piece I did for the Mozart Jahrbuch in 1976, I included a page of the first violin part.

Koechel referred to the handwiting on that set of performance parts as "in Mozart's youthful hand" which is how it got to have such a low Koechel number. But the handwriting has absolutely nothing to do with Mozart. Nor does that arrangement, either.

Then, to complicate matters, I wanted to understand how a published set of perfomance parts for K. 46 adhered to the manuscript parts I received from the Gessellschaft. The printed parts -- still available, too -- may be purchased in the volume of complete string quartets and quintets issued by Peters. So I got the parts and within 10 minutes I realized that the Peters parts represented an entirely different arrangement of the music of K. 361.

So before one can go very far with this genuinely pointless discussion of Mozart writing the work in his very early years, the first thing that has to be done to find out which set of parts are the right ones. And without clarifying this peculiar situation, K. 46 can only be classified as an arrangement done by some unknown party of four movements of K. 361 and done sometime before 1862 which is the year of the first edition of Koechel.

Dan Leeson

P.S. About to leave for Santa Fe and performances of Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff. Back in a week. But if there is computer in my hotel lobby, I'll check in every new and then.

Robert Newman · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 6:29 pm Post subject:

Dear Dan Leeson,

Yes, I have seen your article in the Mozart Yearbook on KV361 and KV46 and am glad to read here of this.

I certainly have no argument with you here and wish you every success in your work. We may have ideas/views that differ on Mozart as far as the east is from the west but this in no way obscures my respect for you as a musician and as a fellow researcher for what is worthy of our belief in this great field of music.

Yours sincerely

Robert Newman

Leporello87 · Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:04 am Post subject:

Beethoven's Sali · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 27 Jun 2008 Posts: 26

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

Sorry. I am in Santa Fe, New Mexico right now. I'll try and respond when I get home.

Dan Leeson

Robert Newman · Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject:

Leporello87 · Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 2:52 pm Post subject:

Robert: Koechel has made dozens of errors before, right? Very likely this is one of them.

Btw, if you recall, on TalkClassical I backed you in a corner in which you admitted that you didn't have any of the crucial evidence you needed to prove non-authorship of KV 361. So there's no need to repeat this again.

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

Suggesting that both Koechel and Jahn were experts in identifying Mozart's handwriting is quite incorrect. If anyone bases their view of the K. 46 arrangement as being by Mozart because Koechel said that the handwriting was Mozart's is living in a dream world..

The handwriting bears no relationship to anything Mozart wrote at any time of his life.

Serious studies of Mozart's handwriting did not occure until the 1950s with Wolfgang Plath being the leading exponent. The fact that one specializes on Mozart history does not mean that one is therefore an expert on his handwriting.

I restate: there is absolutely no evidence that K. 46 is arrangement by Mozart. It is my opinion that it is a piece of musical detritus that has been recognized as having nothing to do with Mozart by every Mozart specialist since 1900. And since there are two version of K. 361 for string quintet, one should not argue about authenticity (which neither arrangement has) without stating which of the two arrangements are being spoken about. This same conclusion about the authenticity of K. 46 also applies to the flute quartet K. 285b, one of whose movements is a set of variations broadly similar to the variations of the Gran Partitta. This is also true for the wind octet arrangement of K. 361 published two years before the first edition of K. 361.

Leporello's view about stylistic inconsistency is quite correct and I certainly do not find his logic circular. Instead I find Neumann's assertions about K. 361 entirely wrongheaded and without substance.

Dan Leeson

Robert Newman · Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 5:02 pm Post subject:

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

You reasoning is pathetic. To cite Constanze Mozart as an authority on her husband's handwriting is absurd.

Perhaps the other members of this board are attracted to you style, but I find it not even worth answering.

Dan Leeson

Robert Newman · Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 5:23 pm Post subject:

So Constanze Mozart did not know her own husband's musical handwriting ! ? And Koechel and Otto Jahn didn't either.

Gee, I never thought of that one Dan ! You've floored me on this for sure. I surrender !!! Take me to your leader.

Laughing

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

You have it exactly correct. The three you mentioned were quite unaware of the details of Mozart's musical caligraphy. At most, Constanze would have known his letter-writing caligraphy, but when it came to how he wrote a composition, and what the details of that musical caligraphy were, she was entirely unfamiliar with it.

When Jahn died, there were some one dozen manuscripts in his collection that were written in a hand utterly different from Mozart's music writing, but which Jahn thought were Mozart manuscripts, and this included a manuscript of what became the Sinfonie Concertante.

The problem that you are dealing with is that you presume these people to have known something about the details of Mozart music calligraphy, when in fact they did not. Are you aware of how he arrayed his instrumental resources, how he wrote eighth notes, sixteenths, etc., how he used musical abbreviations, and which dynamic markings he employed? I doubt it. And there are another 100 things that you need to know about Mozart's musical caligraphy. And just because Constanze was his wife and slept with him doesn't mean that she was aware of these things either.

I think you should buy a book called, "The Mozart Forgeries." I wrote it. You can buy it from Amazon.com. While the book is fiction, it explains in painstaking detail exacly how Mozart wrote his scores. That is what you have to know before you make statements about what you think Jahn, Koechel, and Constanze knew. Furthermore, you have offer no evidence to support your assetion about these people having knowledge of Mozart's musical calligraphy.

So until you learn something about this matter, you really ought not to make blanket assertions that are based entirely on your own imagination. And you use of sarcasm does not improve your arguments.

Dan Leeson

Robert Newman · Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 5:56 pm Post subject:

Dear Dan Leeson,

Thanks for your reply.

So, according to your goodself, neither Constanze Mozart nor Ludwig Koechel, nor Maximilian Stadler, nor Andre, nor others knew Mozart's musical handwriting ? May I ask whether Leopold Mozart knew Mozart's musical handwriting ? And whether you, Dan Leeson, know Mozart's musical handwriting ? I mean, without being flippant, this is becoming silly.

Mozart died in late 1791. Constanze Mozart was in negotiation on the sale of these manuscripts for almost a decade before they were finally sold to Andre, yes ? In this time she studied them closely (even if she never knew her husbands musical handwriting before his death). Are you seriously suggesting that by 1799 she, Constanze, still did not know Mozart's musical handwriting ?

For several more decades, these manuscripts were owned and studied in detail by Andre in Offenbach. Did HE know Mozart's musical handwriting ? How about Ludwig Kochel ? He too had them available for study for many years. But he didn't know Mozart's musical handwriting also - at least, not well enough to know if a document was in his hand or not ! Can you forgive me thinking this is rather silly ?

It is of course a well established fact that Mozart's handwriting appears to have changed suddenly. Plath tells us it was around 1778. The fact remains that KV46 was entered into the catalogue by Koechel as being by Mozart. And there it remained, for years. This many decades after Mozart's death. Now, let us assume it had been seen and studied before Kochel saw it. Indeed, we know that it was described by several others as authentic Mozart.

And yet it dates, actually, from the 1780's and is (in one form) riddled with musical errors.

Anyway, you have made your point and perhaps, just perhaps, you can post the image of this work which accompanied the article you made some years ago for the Mozart Yearbook ? That would be great.

I have been in touch with the Gesellschaft on this matter who offered me a microfiche at an extortionate price so I did not (finally) get to see this score. It is interesting you say that parts to one set (and there are two you know of ?) have recently been rediscovered which you have seen. I know of two handwritten copies in Berlin.

Regards

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

I think you may be under the misaprehension that the topic of the authority of the manuscript of the work with the Koechel lisitng of K. 46 is to be a continuing one in which you restate the same tired, ill-informed, and fundamentally worthless history related to this defunct topic. That is not the case, at least from my perspective.

You brought up the matter of the alleged authority of K. 46, I responded giving you the facts of the matter. It does not matter to me if you accept these facts or reject them. But my participation is over.

Fundamental to your collossolly ignorant ideas about the manuscript source of K. 46 is that Mozart, as a child, created s set of performance parts for this entirely discredited work.

This part of the discussion on K. 361 is, from my point of view, now over. I cannot continue to waste my time trying to bring rational thinking into a mind that is happiest when dealing in conspiracy theories.

Dan Leeson

Dan Leeson · LANCE CORPORAL Joined: 13 Jun 2008 Posts: 32

Now that I am retured from Santa Fe, New Mexico, I can devote the time to give Beethoven's Sali a respons to his question about why I hold the opinon that K. 361 dates from ca. 1784.

On at least two occasions, I wrote technical papers now in the Mozart Jahrbuch that address exactly this matter. They are (1) 1976/77, Mozart Jahrbuch, pp. 97-130, "Concerning Mozart's Serenade in B-flat for Thirteen Instruments, K. 361 (370a)" (with David Whitwell), and (2) 1997, Mozart Jahrbuch, pp. 181-223, "A Revisit: Mozart's Serenade for Thirteen Instruments, K. 361 (370a), The 'Gran Partitta'".

To sum up what must be 30 pages of argument about the Gran Partitta as a whole, I mention that central to the issue of dating (at least from my point of view) is the fact four movements of the work were performed on Mar. 23, 1784. The advertisements of the concert at which the work was played give the impression that this concert was the first public performance of the piece. Stadler set it up and it was a benefit concert for himself. All 7 movements were written by this time, but Stadler decided to do only four. This is the origin of the entirely discredited theory that the work was created in two stages, of four movements originally and then three movements at some later stage.

I pointed out that proposed earlier dates of 1780 and 1781 flew in the fact of the fact that Harmoniemusik (of which K. 361 is the most important work of this type) did not get invented until 1782 when the Emperor, Joseph II installed a private wind octet as part of his musical retinue. This wind octet began the Harmoniemusik movement.

The two papers listed above give additional information that point to a later date and it really needs to be read rather than restate the same arguments here.

Keep in mind that I don't really KNOW that 1784 is the right date. No one knows when the work was completed. But I believe that 1784 is the most rational date for the composition's creation.

If you want to discuss specifics, I'll be happy to try and contribute, but I prefer not to restate some 30 or more pages of allready published information on the subject.

Dan Leeson

P.S. The 1780 and 1781 dates that are used by Tyson and others, are based on a date written on the manuscript. I attached that portion of the the first page of the autograph and ask that you look at it very carefully. The quesiton is this: "What did the date read originally before it was modified."??

Robert Newman · Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:43 pm Post subject:

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