De-‘classicizing’ the Canon: Reimagining Mozart’s K488 through Musical Dialogues Across Time

Nevertheless the intelligent interpreter’s individuality will always be able to assert itself, for, above all, the performance must be to a high degree a matter of temperament. The works of such a fiery spirit as Mozart must not be played merely with a certain dignity and moderation, but in the proper place there must be fire and brilliancy; while again in other places care must be taken to impart the tenderest and warmest depth of feeling. But how insufficient language is to convey instruction regarding such things is felt by the musician at every renewed attempt, and one involuntarily thinks of the poet’s words: ‘If ’t is not felt, ’t will not be caught by chasing’.

Carl Reinecke (1824–1910)[1]

Preludium: Entanglements

Carl Reinecke’s outlining, in 1906, of what he considered to be the highest artistic ideals in the rendering of W. A. Mozart’s music (see epigram above) signifies a co-creative ethos in classical music performance during the long nineteenth century, that was swept away by the tide of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.[2] Such an ethos placed the interpreter (performer) on an equal level with the composer and their compositions: its central tenet held that the addition of expression (beyond the score markings) according to the performers’ inspiration was requisite to breathe life into the ‘lifeless note-heads’ of the notation.[3] In the period between Mozart’s birth (1756) and Reinecke’s death (1910), artistic expression drew on a range of practices (not currently fashionable in classical music performance) that evolved in a continuum of practice. My engagement with the aforementioned tenet in reimagining Mozart’s K488 Piano Concerto has led me on a journey of discovery using historically informed performance (HIP) research methods within the framework of artistic research. Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore explain the artistic research framework as meeting the need:

both for a context in which to situate the questions of artists, and for a conceptual space in which they may experiment with how those questions – and their answers – might be communicated, whether through writing, speech and presentation, or through actual compositions and performances themselves.[4]

This approach has enabled me to weave a rich tapestry of entanglements between key musicians, stylistic developments and places across a 250-year period.

Broadly speaking, the project challenges entrenched ideals in classical music performance – only established a half a century ago or so – that relegated the performer to ‘a disappearing transmitter of canonic works and identities’.[5] In turn, it demonstrates how artistic engagement with the musical past can inform new interpretative approaches to canonical works that foster a rebalancing between artistic agency and respect for the composer.

Today, many think of the German musician Carl Reinecke as a composer, pianist and conductor properly belonging to, and embodying aesthetics of the high Romantic era. Yet his age, pedigree and pianistic style (as evidenced on reproducing piano rolls) opens other avenues of thinking and render him especially interesting in developing new approaches to Mozart interpretation. Reinecke was born in 1824 just three decades after Mozart’s death. This is significant because during Reinecke’s early life, knowledge of Mozart’s style of performance remained, at least somewhat, in circulation in German-speaking lands and elsewhere: there were still musicians alive in the early decades of the nineteenth century who had ear-witnessed Mozart’s performances. And they are likely to have transmitted such information to others.[6] By all accounts Reinecke’s early musical training (including first the violin and then piano) was entirely with his father Johann Peter Rudolf Reinecke (1795–1883) – ‘a teacher of music and a writer on musical subjects’.[7] Rudolf Reinecke was sought after as a piano, singing and theory teacher and in 1834, published a pedagogical book that included instruction on learning the fortepiano.[8] It is likely, therefore, that Carl Reinecke’s manner of piano playing, at least in his early career, was reflective of his father’s style stemming from the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not earlier.

In his early twenties Reinecke’s musical prowess was already evident to the extent that in 1847 Hans Christian Anderson produced a touching poem about him.[9] From that point on Reinecke carved out a long and highly successful musical career.[10] He championed Mozart’s music, and was praised for his performances of Mozart’s piano concertos, including K488.[11] By the turn of the twentieth century, he was regarded as ‘a most highly accomplished pianist of the older school’,[12] a school that was by then ‘almost extinct’.[13] Moreover, he was widely considered to be the most important authority on the performance of Mozart’s piano music: ‘thoroughly conversant with the best traditions of playing Mozart’,[14] and ‘the greatest and most conscientious performer of Mozart still alive’.[15] Even Eduard Hanslick (1824–1904), the influential Austrian music critic, noted (at the very end of the nineteenth century) Reinecke’s fame as a Mozart player: ‘In particular, his performance of Mozart’s compositions was considered unsurpassable’.[16]

Hanslick went on to name the pianists Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885) and Julius Epstein (1832–1926) as being with Reinecke in the league of the best of Mozart players, and said that we would lament ‘this art as extinct if Marie Baumayer [1851–1931] had not proved us wrong with her performance of the B flat major concerto [by Mozart]’.[17] Interestingly, Baumayer’s performance of Schumann’s Studie für den Pedal-Flügel in As-Dur op. 56, no. 4 on an acoustic recording (ca. 1910) exhibits many hallmarks of Reinecke’s pianistic style (see below),[18] giving some sense of how her Mozart B flat major concerto is likely to have sounded. Hanslick’s reference to an extinct art strongly suggests that Reinecke, Hiller, Epstein and Baumayer were proponents of an older (nineteenth-century) tradition of playing Mozart. This is quite possibly the same older tradition that apparently characterized the pianism of the Bohemian pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870). He was influenced by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century pedagogues including Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), was much admired by Beethoven, and taught piano alongside Reinecke at the Leipzig Conservatory. William Frederick Pecher – Moscheles’s piano student from 1855–1858 – left a telling reminiscence of Moscheles’s pianism, linking his Mozart performance style to an ‘emotional legacy’ of an old ‘classic school’, the outward characteristics of which point to a starkly different approach to Mozart than was to develop later in the century.

[Moscheles] was a great pianist. His tone was astonishingly round and full, and his power of execution ample for every demand made upon it. The charm of the old classic school, to which Clementi, Hummel, Field and Moscheles belonged, was its songfulness. Moscheles … represented the Leipsic [sic] standard, created and interpreted under the traditions of Italian song. Every effort was bent to interpret melody in such a way as to touch the heart; though in moments demanding it, a fiery bravura has been the property of all the great pianists of the classic period … Besides Bach, Moscheles used to play Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, especially Mozart’s Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor [K475], which he delivered with great breadth and energy. Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor [K511] was one of his favorite pieces. It was electrifying as he played it. The idea that Mozart should be played with colorless limpidity had not dawned upon the players of that decade. The classic Mozart had a great deal of color and fire.[19]

Two things stand out here. Pecher identifies an old ‘classic’ school that was thriving in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Furthermore, he confirms that the neutral (‘colorless limpidity’) style of playing Mozart commonly heard by 1901 (at the dawn of the modernist era) was far removed from the earlier classic school.[20] Indeed, Pecher’s description of Moscheles’s Mozart appears to be in alignment with Reinecke’s 1906 advice about Mozart performance (see epigram above).

Returning to Hanslick, he reported of Reinecke’s performance of Mozart’s Coronation Concerto K537 that:

He brilliantly brought out all of the composition’s charms, as well as all of his playing qualities, whose sparkling fluency, beauty of tone, freshness and grace belied the age of the now 72-year-old artist. The concerto ‘flowed like oil’, as Mozart liked to say, and was a triumph for Reinecke.[21]

And, in 1896, the Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) opined that Reinecke was ‘the only pianist who, equipped with historical knowledge, can reproduce Mozart’s works as they might have sounded 110 or 120 years ago’.[22] Such accolades speak clearly to the reverence for Reinecke’s Mozart performance style beyond simply acknowledging his work in editing the complete Mozart piano concertos for Breitkopf & Härtel in 1879 and 1880,[23] and are all the more significant because Reinecke lived on into the age of reproducing piano roll technology, which captured his piano performances (including of works by Mozart) for posterity. His Mozart piano rolls, in particular, reveal artistically astonishing interpretations: he employed a range of unnotated, improvisationally applied expressive practices that markedly altered the notated rhythms, tempo and texture (note placements and alignment), and even the notes themselves (ornamentation and improvisation).[24] Such practices seemingly stemmed from earlier ones (see below). Many of these practices remain characteristic features of popular music genres, such as jazz, which were developing out of nineteenth-century compositional forms and performance styles in the latter part of Reinecke’s life; but (with a few exceptions) such practices have been conspicuously barely noticeable or missing since ca. 1950 in classical piano playing (including on historical pianos).

If and to what extent Reinecke’s practices are idiomatic of the late nineteenth-century or representative of earlier traditions (even of late Classical style) are important questions in terms of this project. In this respect Dorottya Fabian is of the view that ‘becoming familiar’ with the early recordings and ‘of the playing of musicians of bygone eras … is not only informative regarding earlier styles of playing or singing, but also satisfies curiosity’.[25] On the other hand Georgia Volioti warns of ‘The need to appraise the agency of performers and listeners when delineating histories of performance (from recordings)’.[26] Reinecke’s interpretations of several other works by Mozart,[27] as well as of later composers and of his own,[28] were captured on reproducing piano rolls at the turn of the twentieth century by the Welte and Hupfeld companies in Germany. All these performances exhibit the same types of expressive practices, though, importantly, with variations in quality (effect) and quantity (frequency). In other words, Reinecke’s expressive practices remain broadly the same but he crafted them to suit differing styles and eras of composition.[29] That his palette of practices remained consistent should not come as any surprise; such practices had been in use during the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century despite the evolution in compositional style (see discussion below) and piano manufacturing.[30] In this respect Reinecke’s practices can be taken to be idiomatic of the late Romantic era, idiosyncratic and representative of earlier traditions.

Other evidence also points to Reinecke’s Mozart as linking with earlier performance traditions. His performance of Mozart’s Fantasie K475 bears similarity of approach in terms of asynchrony and arpeggiation with Theodor Leschetizky’s performance of the work on a 1906 Welte piano roll.[31] Significantly, Leschetizky, born only six years after Reinecke, is likely to have learned such practices via a Viennese tradition passed down through his teacher Carl Czerny, himself a pupil of Beethoven.

But how Mozart’s Fantasie K475 might really have sounded in Mozart’s hands is hard to say. It is well-nigh impossible to reconstruct what Mozart’s piano playing sounded like from historical written descriptions. The current notion that his style was neat, clean and tidy seems to have developed through literal-type interpretations of descriptions in sources after Mozart’s lifetime. For example, Carl Czerny reported that Hummel’s ‘performance was a model of cleanness, clarity, and of the most graceful elegance and tenderness; all difficulties were calculated for the greatest and most stunning effect, which he achieved by combining Clementi’s manner of playing, so wisely gauged for the instrument, with that of Mozart’.[32] Even if we assume that Hummel’s ‘cleanness, clarity, elegance, and tenderness’ give some sense of Mozart’s performance style, these words do not reveal the unnotated expressive performing practices he and other musicians of his generation undoubtedly used and cherished.[33] Moreover, these expressions likely had different meanings in the early-nineteenth century than they have come to mean in our modern era.[34]

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has observed that Carl Reinecke’s pianism (as evident on piano rolls) holds significant implications for the performance of ‘late Classical and early Romantic’ piano repertoire.

It’s hard to know which era Reinecke’s pianism represents; but he became a mature artist in the 1840s, and as most players don’t radically change the way they play to follow their younger contemporaries, Reinecke’s playing probably tells us something about pianism around the middle of the 19th century. And so if you want to believe that modern fortepiano playing has accurately recreated Mozartian, Beethovenian or Schubertian playing then you have to argue that there was an undocumented revolution in pianism between the 1820s and the 1840s; a revolution that takes you from nice, neat playing [characteristic of present-day fortepiano playing] to this [Reinecke’s pianism], all in twenty years. I don’t think that’s very likely. What does this imply for the historical playing of late Classical and early Romantic composers? That it was a lot more like Reinecke than we might wish it to be.[35]

With this Leech-Wilkinson exposes the dichotomy that exists between present-day aesthetics in classical music performance and the not-so-distant past (see above). In the same vein, Robert Philip concludes that ‘the whole point about early recordings is that they present us with real history, not history as we would like it to be’.[36] Reinecke’s Mozart piano rolls open a window into a fascinating but forgotten sound world that seems to me to be tangibly connected to the late-Classical era perhaps stretching back to Mozart. Two hundred years after his birth, Reinecke’s ‘beautiful’ Mozart interpretations (see below) could indeed inspire a revolution in classical piano playing. In Part 1 of this article, I delve into performing practice evidence including early sound recordings and documentary sources that together build an objective picture (and knowledge) of the evolution of pianistic practices between Mozart’s era and the end of Reinecke’s life – the long nineteenth century. In Part 2, I systematically document the artistic research processes I have undertaken over an extended period, that have shaped a major performative (creative work) output widely acknowledged as offering a substantially new and different musical interpretation of a canonic work. In music performance, new knowledge is produced in the act of performance itself, because performers respond to new and changed circumstances and stimuli each time they perform, regardless of repertoire. As Chris Stover posits, in artistic research ‘knowledge is produced in doing’.[37] Definitions of artistic research or inquiry have been being developed for only a relatively short period of time,[38] and as Schippers, Draper, and Tomlinson point out, ‘there are increasingly more models and reference points about artistic research, supported by ever-increasing documentation’.[39] And all this is occurring across multiple creative fields. Importantly, many practitioner-researchers ‘understand the nature of artistic research as a way of interrogating and extending their practice’.[40] This has been my experience with this project, which might be seen as the zenith of sustained practical experimentation. The project, to quote Vanessa Tomlinson, ‘represents the culmination of a body of research, incorporating new tools, ways of knowing, technologies, and theories, all contributing to the larger-scale final project … a notable shift in the field, a clear contribution to knowledge, which is the result of many years of investigation.[41] The creation of something new remains at the heart of definitions of artistic research. As Pil Hansen explains: ‘Artistic inquiry tends to be less concerned with the task of mapping and analysing interconnections that already exist and more invested in bringing something new into the world, at times by severing, isolating, reconnecting, or testing the breaking point of such connections … The most stable and predictable element of artistic inquiry and practice as research often derives from the performance and creation approaches that researcher-artists are trained in – approaches which … involve implicit knowledge, skill and habit’.[42] This article articulates a process of severing from my ingrained musical responses, connecting and reconnecting me with historical artefacts and testing processes through my own experimental performance. It outlines my entanglement with Reinecke and Mozart, as well as other musicians past and present, which has unlocked in my piano playing novel improvisational approaches to sounding Mozart’s music.

Part 1: Reinecke – a Tangible Link to Mozart?

I first heard Reinecke playing Mozart at the start of my PhD research at the University of Leeds in the mid 1990s. Searching for early recorded performances of nineteenth-century trained pianists,[43] I stumbled across a CD of performances by Reinecke, Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915) and Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) captured on reproducing piano rolls by Welte in Freiburg, Germany. The CD includes Reinecke’s 1905 piano roll rendition of his own published arrangement of the second movement, Larghetto, from Mozart’s Piano Concerto K537. Hearing it was a thoroughly ear-opening experience. Reinecke’s rendition sounded utterly different to anything I was used to hearing and exceeded generally accepted ways of interpreting Mozart piano music.[44] What is more, his rendition departs, sometimes substantially, from his own notation.[45] In this context Georgia Voliotti has posited that ‘early recordings in particular reveal ways of interpreting scores that are radically different from our modern-day practices, and clearly show us that the performance of Western art music actually adheres much less to composers’ scores than we would like to maintain’.[46] Immediately noticeable is Reinecke’s almost continual arpeggiation of chords in varying speeds – playing one note after the other, usually from lowest to highest – despite there being only sparing indications of arpeggio (signs) in his arrangement, as well as the related technique of manual asynchrony – playing melody notes after (or occasionally before) the accompaniment. These techniques contribute to several key features in the performance, not least a variegated texture (sometimes lush, sometime fiery, sometimes delicate), a special bringing out of melody notes through disentangling them from the vertical texture, and a speech-like unevenness of rhythm and tempo. Reinecke also changed the configuration of chords, sometimes adding notes or else changing note spacings in a seemingly improvisatory fashion, and he also made melodic variations (ornamentation) from time to time. To my ears, this contrasted starkly with the temporally and rhythmically strict and note-aligned style characteristic of performances of piano music by Mozart and indeed by other composers of the Classical and Romantic eras since the middle of the twentieth century.

Reinecke’s highly arpeggiated style piqued my interest. It reminded me of the use of arpeggiation practices on the harpsichord, an instrument I had played for many years. The harpsichord’s plucking mechanism renders it incapable of producing dynamic variety, apart from the addition or subtraction of registers (different sets of strings), in the way that say a lutenist, guitarist or harpist can vary volume by changing the intensity (hardness or softness) of the pluck.[47] Arpeggiation on the harpsichord is considered indispensable for creating varied textures and agogic accents (accent by length). These give the illusion of dynamics.[48] Could Reinecke’s playing somehow be related to this?[49] I feverishly mined documentary sources for answers and discovered that arpeggiation techniques (seemingly similar to those used by Reinecke) were recommended in pedagogical and other sources spanning the long nineteenth century, and traceable back in some cases to the seventeenth century.[50] It dawned on me that Reinecke’s Mozart playing might provide a springboard for artistic experimentation, a starting point that disrupts the aesthetic boundaries of modernist Mozart, the basis for achieving a new and different artistic result. In this respect, Philip ponders the extent to which ‘early-twentieth-century recordings can be used to shed light on nineteenth-century [and I would add eighteenth-century] practice’ positing that ‘we can only begin to get a realistic impression of nineteenth-century style if we start from a knowledge of early twentieth-century recordings and work backwards’.[51] Richard Taruskin was of a similar opinion (see below).

Rethinking Mozart

So, is there a need to reappraise approaches to the performance of music by Mozart (or for that matter other composers within the classical music canon)? Aren’t the current parameters of ‘successful’ classical music performance style – for example, rhythmical precision, temporal stability, correct notes and meticulous realization of composers’ scores – perfectly fine and appropriate?

While pondering these questions, let’s consider another one: What were Mozart’s expectations for the performance of his music? Katalin Komlós states confidently that: ‘Performing instructions are marked carefully in Mozart’s notation, and a wealth of ideas on music and musical performance survive in his voluminous correspondence. All is available: we can be true Mozart pupils today’.[52] But what was the relationship between Mozart’s score indications and what he might have expected to hear in an artistically-inspired (personalized) performance of his music? In respect of such questions, Leech-Wilkinson paints a realistic if bleak picture of the situation for many classically-trained musicians in the present day: ‘that there is broadly one proper performance of any score, the performance its composer imagined; and that it is their job to produce that’. He adds that:

musicians are also encouraged to believe that individuality in a performer is desirable, that they should each have something unique to offer in their reading of a score. But the constraints around that freedom of interpretation are very narrowly drawn. Go far from the norm, even in quite small details of timing (rubato) or emphasis, and you will be criticised … performers have been pushed back at the boundaries of those norms – by teachers, conductors, examiners, adjudicators, critics: the gatekeepers to the profession – all their lives.[53]

Such narrow constraints in classical music performance leading to ‘relatively score-bound’ interpretations and ‘minimal artistic agency and input’ developed rapidly during the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Urtext performance.[54] This was in reaction to, and as a rejection of previously admired improvisationally applied expressive practices that modernists considered excessive and in contravention of composers’ notation, overlooking, ignoring or forgetting that such practices had developed in a continuum of practice stretching back several centuries. This attitude is summed up by Bruce Haynes: ‘Modernists look for discipline and line, while they disparage Romantic performance for its excessive rubato, its bluster, its self indulgent posturing, and its sentimentality’.[55] In the same vein, David Dubal has explained that modernists ‘held the composer’s score sacred’. Noticeable departures from the score came to be viewed as musically abhorrent, and this contributed significantly to a musical sameness across performances of a work – a homogenizing of music interpretation.[56] The work became synonymous with the more or less literal rendition of the score. Here it is important to note, as Fabian has, that ‘Systematic and comprehensive analyses are important – whether dealing with old or recent performances – if we wish to avoid the problems of premature generalizations and misrepresentation of historical-cultural developments’.[57] Nevertheless, Kenneth Hamilton explores ‘why we now play differently from players on early recordings’ and pleads ‘not to sideline completely the performance traditions of great pianists of the past through a too rigorous – and again unhistorical – obsession with urtext editions and urtext playing’.[58] Giving many examples of nineteenth-century composer/pianists who advocated for unnotated changes to their own scores, Hamilton warns that ‘If we therefore adhere strictly to the letter of the score, as usually defined nowadays, we may in fact end up with a performance rather different from any a nineteenth-century composer could have imagined’.[59] In stark contrast, and as Clive Brown contends, performers of the Classical and Romantic eras felt free ‘to impress their own personality on the music, often through minor, and sometimes major modifications of the strict meaning of the notation’.[60] This seems to have been the case with Mozart’s son Franz Xaver Mozart (1791–1844) who after a performance of his father’s C Major Piano Concerto in Leipzig in 1820 was criticized by the reviewer of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for ‘certain peculiarities’ that were felt to be damaging: ‘Mr. M[ozart]. accelerates or delays the tempo in the solos incessantly, and to such an extent that one would not be doing him an injustice if one claimed that not three bars in a row remained completely the same’.[61] While such a statement gives the impression that noticeable or frequent tempo modification was not appropriate to the performance of Mozart’s music, in fact the reviewer may simply have disliked the extent to which it was used on this occasion. One might assume, however, that Mozart’s son had some knowledge of his father’s practices. And in any case, pedagogical advice from Mozart’s era, for example from C.P.E. Bach, confirms that tempo modification was part and parcel of artistic performance, but fails to convey its features.[62]

Postulating a Classical–Romantic continuum

Early sound recordings and reproducing piano rolls of, particularly, musicians trained around the middle of the nineteenth century preserve unnotated expressive practices that appear to correspond with general descriptions in documentary sources across a period of about 200 years. Indeed, Robert Philip alludes to a continuum in stating that:

In the history of performance, the early twentieth century has an importance which has never applied to any period before it, and which will never occur again. It stands at the end of the era, stretching back over the centuries, in which knowledge of performance practice was imperfectly preserved in written documents, and at the beginning of the modern era, in which performance practice is (with minor limitations) preserved on recordings. The recordings of the early twentieth century [i.e. early sound recordings] are the link between these two eras, and they provide a valuable key to understanding both the development of modern performance practice, and the practices of earlier centuries.[63]

In this vein, scholars such as Clive Brown and I have identified a continuum of practice – or more precisely global categories of practices – during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries threading through what is termed in modern musicology as the Classical and Romantic eras.[64]

The Classical–Romantic continuum encapsulated a rich and complex arsenal of practices that can be broadly categorized under timing (rhythm and tempo), dynamics and accentuation, tone and timbre, and ornamentation.[65] This performance modality ‘enabled risk-taking and the possibility of indefinite novelty in the moment, unplanned and left entirely to real-time within-performance decision-making’.[66] While it is improbable that the quality (effect) and quantity (frequency) of these practices remained static during that timeframe, this does not diminish the significance of the assertion that such practices were in some form or other part of musicians’ expressive toolkits across a significant time span and in multiple locations.[67]

First correct, then beautiful performance

Before the rise of twentieth-century modernism, trained musicians employed a plethora of unnotated expressive practices to craft a ‘beautiful’, artistically driven interpretation, vivifying the composition’s underlying narrative and changing moods (whether implicit or explicit). Several nineteenth-century musicians, for example Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), Louis Spohr (1784–1859) and Reinecke, made the distinction between this performance mode and one that was necessary in musicians’ training process, namely the ability to achieve a ‘correct’ performance style that replicated the score as meticulously as possible.[68] Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) insisted that his student Josef Hofman (1870–1956) play the music ‘just as it was written’ while he himself took many liberties in the very same works. Hofman recounts: ‘Once I called his [Rubinstein’s] attention modestly to this seeming paradox, and he answered: “when you are as old as I am now you may do as I do–if you can”’.[69] Indeed, Reinecke took the stance that in certain circumstances a beautiful performance might sound the exact opposite of a correct performance: ‘a beautiful performance may apparently offend against all the rules’.[70]

Since that first encounter with Reinecke, I have come to realize that offending against the rules is the sine qua non in recovering pre-modern expressivity. Reinecke’s ‘beautiful’ Mozart style has remained central to my creative practice. He is an important protaganist in the story that unfolds in this article about my artistic journey in reimagining Mozart’s beloved Piano Concerto K488. The other protagonists are Mozart, his piano student Barbara Ployer (1765–1811), a replica Viennese-action grand fortepiano (ca. 1805), a period-instrument ensemble – Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO), and of course me.

Part 2: Dialogues between Mozart, Reinecke, Ployer and me

If we truly wanted to perform historically, we would begin by imitating early-twentieth century recordings of late-nineteenth- [and eighteenth-] century music and extrapolate back from there.

Richard Taruskin[71]

My journey in reimagining Mozart’s K488 Piano Concerto was spearheaded on hearing Reinecke’s rendition of his arrangement of the Andante second movement,[72] recorded on piano roll in ca. 1905 for the Hupfeld company in Leipzig.[73] As with the Larghetto (see above), Reinecke’s expressive practices are striking to me, because they enhance the underlying emotions implicit in Mozart’s compositional structures. In the opening 12-bar solo piano section, for example, Mozart weaves an impassioned narrative in which melody and accompaniment traverse a wide tessitura encompassing anguished upwards arching and downwards sighing figures, poignant note displacements, and lyrical chromaticism (Figure 1).

Reinecke’s performance – a veritable masterclass in Classical–Romantic continuum performing practices – emphasizes Mozart’s rhythmical and rhetorical gestures with sumptuous arpeggiated textures, expressive delay of melody notes, and alterations of rhythm (including agogic accents – accents by length) and tempo. In bar 1, Reinecke energetically launches the long–short sicilienne rhythmic pattern by interpolating a swiftly arpeggiated six-note chord on the downbeat across left and right hands instead of Mozart’s original three-note texture.[75] This sets the performance up with a forward propulsion that is characteristic of the entire movement. The interpolation of larger arpeggiated chords is also evident in the left hand at bars 7, 9 and 10, amplifying the heft of poignant harmonies. Throughout bars 1–12, Reinecke arpeggiates left-hand chords usually on the main and subsidiary beats, which supports agogic accentuation of the corresponding melody notes. Other arpeggiations include: the final chord in bar 1, which gives special poignancy to the delayed a″ – the top of the upward arching figure in the right hand;[76] the second chord in bar 8 that accompanies the a♯′ in the right hand emphasizing its chromatic inflection; and, all four chords in bar 9 giving a special colour and effect to Mozart’s unexpected chromatic alteration to G♮.[77] In bar 3, Reinecke alters Mozart’s two-note chords on the third and fourth quaver beats in the left hand by resetting the upper notes of each an octave higher, creating an interval of a tenth. His arpeggiation of these chords produces particular colour and textural support for the poignant off-beat f♯″ (heard just before) in the right hand. Reinecke also slightly overdots the dotted quaver in Mozart’s characteristic three-note lilting sicilienne figure in the first half of bars 1, 5, and 9, and he plays the lyrical (sighing) semiquavers in bar 7 with a jazz-like swing (long–short).

Reinecke’s emotionally varied interpretation of the K488 Andante is in stark contrast with performances of the movement since the 1930s, which tend towards a more text-literal, stable and emotionally-controlled style.[78] It challenges modern expectations for the performance of Mozart’s music. But is Reinecke’s style simply a nineteenth-century take on Mozart? Or are there features of his playing that accord with documented evidence of performing practices from Mozart’s era? To answer these questions, I scoured pedagogical sources from the second half of the eighteenth century – Quantz (1752), Leopold Mozart (1756), Türk (1789) and others – for information in relation to key affects, time signatures, tempo indicators and compositional structures. My survey convinced me that Mozart’s choice of key – F-sharp minor,[79] time signature – compound duple, and melodic structures – rising, leaping and falling, were indicators of moods and emotions requiring special treatment in terms of timing, rhythm and dynamics.[80] Reinecke’s way of playing the Andante, at least in respect of timing and rhythm, seemed reflective of these earlier modes of expressive performance. It dawned on me that I could use Reinecke’s interpretation of Mozart’s Andante as a springboard for extrapolating a novel performance style for the K488 Piano Concerto that effected a dialogue across time and place within the paradigm of the Classical-Romantic continuum.

Reigniting artistic practice: Recording emulation

The seed of my Mozart K488 Project, as it has come to be known, was sown in the early stages of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170101974 entitled Deciphering 19th-century Pianism: Invigorating Global Practices on which I was lead chief investigator working with partner investigator Professor Clive Brown.[81] The project, which started in 2017, used innovative methods to investigate nineteenth-century piano playing in two stages: In Stage 1, I engaged in recording emulation, the deliberate close imitation of recordings of, particularly, pianists trained in the first half of the nineteenth century, to embody a nineteenth-century performance aesthetic in my artistic practice.[82] The advantages of this methodology (deliberate imitation) have been explained by Bruno H. Repp as the possibility of developing ‘a larger expressive vocabulary’ from which musicians can freely select whatever is found to be ‘most appealing … the active reproduction and embodiment of expressive patterns may be required for assimilation to occur. Imitative exercises of this sort may develop expressive flexibility which then can be exploited according to situational contexts’.[83]

In Stage 2, I extrapolated earlier nineteenth-century styles through cyclical processes experimentally sounding documentary performing practice evidence.[84] In 2018, I performed emulations of Reinecke’s K488 Andante at the TCHIP conference Perspectives on Historically Informed Practices in Music and at the Correct, But Not Beautiful Performance 1 symposium, which I convened as part of DP170101974 at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. At the latter symposium, my emulation of K488 Andante was accompanied by a small string ensemble. I performed on a replica of an 1868 Viennese-action grand piano by Johann Baptist Streicher (an instrument that Reinecke would almost certainly have used in concerts during his career), built by Paul McNulty. In the performance, I emulated the solo piano sections as played by Reinecke, reverting to a simple improvised basso continuo in the orchestral tutties filling in, for example, missing wind parts. These research meetings provided opportunities to receive expert peer review and led to my 2019 publication on Reinecke’s K488 Andante.[85]

For the Correct, But Not Beautiful Performance 1 symposium, I had used my own heavily marked up transcription of Reinecke’s piano roll, but discovered soon after that Reinecke had, in fact, published his own arrangement (transcription) of the work.[86] Comparing Reinecke’s arrangement with his piano roll rendition revealed, as in the case of the Larghetto, that he did not play his arrangement note for note, but modified it, at times quite substantially. This may be because for the piano roll recording he played from memory and improvised from time to time. But his arrangement was very useful in disentangling what I was hearing on the roll rendition, for example, the distribution of notes between the hands. More importantly, in the arrangement, Reinecke provided expressive indications such as crescendo–diminuendo hairpins (< >), dynamic indications – p, mf, crescendo, f, and Italian mood words – espressivo, con fuoco and dolce over and above anything Mozart had provided (Figure 2). And this gave clues to the important missing piece in Reinecke’s piano roll performance: dynamics and accents. Now it was possible for me to imagine what emotional states he might have had in mind or in fact achieved during the piano roll recording. That is not to say, that he would always have played the arrangement in the same way. And, he would probably have done a great deal more during the recording than is notated in the arrangement. But Reinecke’s expressive indications gave me, at the very least, a basic vocabulary of what he is likely to have considered indispensable in a beautiful rendition of the movement.

Research Translation

Performance Experimentation and Innovation Stage 1

In 2021, I received an invitation to perform Mozart’s K488 Piano Concerto on fortepiano with the period-instrument ensemble Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra (ARCO) in two concerts at the Canberra International Music Festival (CIMF; Figure 3).[88] This festival, under the direction of the then artistic director Roland Peelman, had established a reputation for presenting music (canonic, new and lesser-known) in eclectic performance modes and settings to inspire and challenge audiences.[89] This was a defining moment, an opportunity to develop a novel interpretation of the entire concerto (three movements) based on my previous research on Reinecke and codesigned with ARCO. Indeed, the opportunity offered me an exciting challenge – to extrapolate through artistic experimentation interpretations of the first and third movements of K488 in a Reinecke-esque way.

My preparation involved expanding on the work I had previously undertaken emulating and embodying Reinecke’s practices in the second movement. My methodology was to use Reinecke’s way of playing that movement – which drew on practices from within the continuum of practice going back to Mozart’s era (see above) – as a framework upon which to overlay other Mozartian-era practices elucidated in contemporaneous pedagogical sources, and of which I had prior knowledge and experience through years of practical HIP experimentation in professional concert settings. This process helped me to expand my artistic intuition in relation to Mozart’s music. It afforded me a wider palette of expressive choices in characterizing underlying narratives, themes and emotional states in these outer movements.

The festival opportunity also paved a way for orchestral instrumentalists directed by violinist Rachael Beesley to expand their approaches to sounding Mozart’s music. Amongst the most challenging of expressive practices for orchestral musicians trained to play meticulously in time and with perfect ensemble (togetherness) is to get faster or slower particularly when not indicated in the score, or to alter notated rhythms in solos in the way that one hears in say jazz or other popular music forms. During rehearsals Rachael and I encouraged these practices both by demonstrating them through playing, and also through verbal instruction and encouragement. Some players were very willing to try, but to embed these unfamiliar techniques to the extent that they would feel confident under pressure in a concert setting was going to take more time and planning. This became one of the foci of the next stage of development in the Mozart K488 Project.

Performance Experimentation and Innovation Stage 2

Based on the novel results of our foray into Mozart’s 488 Piano Concerto at the 2021 CIMF, ARCO’s co-artistic Directors, Nicole van Bruggen and Rachael Beesley agreed to a further co-designed collaboration with me, programming the concerto in their 2022 National Touring Season entitled Tempestuous Skies.[90] The tour would extend to six concerts on the eastern seaboard of Australia and culminate in a CD recording. This extension of the project gave me time to experiment further with expressive ideas and the means to achieve these in all three movements, to refine my technical skills, and to think of ways that ARCO’s orchestral players might find a safe space within which to expand expressivity and to engage more freely with unfamiliar performing practices.

A new Viennese-action fortepiano An important consideration in the success of this second stage was access to a Viennese-action fortepiano of the sort that Mozart used in concerto performances. With university funding support, I was able to purchase a replica of a Viennese-action fortepiano, the original by the famous Viennese firm of Walter & Sohn dating ca. 1805 (Mozart owned one from 1782 until his death, made by Anton Walter – who started the firm). The replica was made by Paul McNulty who is known worldwide for high-level craftsmanship (Figure 4). Viennese instruments of this period have a range of just over five octaves and are characterized by: straight (parallel) stringing – the strings run away from the player in a parallel fashion; wooden frames; Viennese-actions (prell mechanik – a single lever action which allows the hammer to fly at high velocity to the string); leather covered hammers which produce clear, articulated sounds; three distinct tonal registers – brassy in the bass, warm in the middle and fluty in the treble; and, a damper lift and a moderator (a piece of cloth that can be engaged between the hammers and strings producing a muted effect), both of these operated by knee levers. These design features give the instrument a light, transparent sound, relatively quick note decay, and varied registral colours, naturally supporting declamatory (spoken) effects in performance. Mozart (and other composers of the era) appreciated these features and exploited them in their compositions.[91] The arrival of this new instrument added a vital dimension in my reimagining of Mozart’s K488.

The ghost of Barabara Ployer. One rather influential piece of evidence was brought to my attention in 2021. This was a set of ornaments for the second movement of K488 preserved in the hand of one of Mozart’s favourite piano and composition students Barbara Ployer (1765–1811) for whom he wrote the K499 and K453 piano concertos. These ornaments – ‘an explosion of unfamiliar extra notes’ – had been brought to the public eye by pianist Robert Levin who ‘suggested the manuscript is a more faithful impression of how Mozart would have performed such pieces … Mozart himself would have improvised the embellishment in performance’.[92]

This evidence piqued my interest. I hunted down a copy of the ornaments and was amazed to see the extent of both virtuosic display and heart-rending passion imbued in Ployer’s ornamental effusions (Figure 5), for a movement that had come to be interpreted in a relatively sombre and spare fashion in more recent times.[93] Indeed, the ornamentation looked and sounded very much like the type of fioriturae (florid embellishment of the melodic line) characteristic in Chopin’s bel-canto style ornaments. Though, of course, these types of extended (complex) ornamental figures were fairly standard in the eighteenth century, particularly in the Italian style. Quantz, amongst others, provided examples of such florid ornamentation in his influential Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752), that was surely a precursor to Ployer’s.

Ployer’s ornaments were tantalizing to me, a veritable gold mine. They spurred the next phase in the development of my interpretation of the second movement: I set about incorporating her ornaments. The first step was learning to play them fluently and then to overlay them onto my emulation of Reinecke (Figure 5). Occasionally, I added ornaments that resembled hers in complexity and effect, in places where she had not. Given the profusion of notes in several of these fioritura, the task was not always easy to manage without either slowing down the overall tempo or else stretching the time in particular places. I practised them into my performance while also trying to preserve Reinecke’s sense of timing within the movement. After some experimentation, I found a way to do this, which in my mind seemed plausible. Soon, the feeling for me was that Reinecke’s sense of push and pull in timing and his expressive arpeggiations provided a space within which Ployer was able to have her wordy say, and that I could also frequently add my own artistic touches, while Mozart’s composition took on an entirely new sensibility: a forgotten story of emotional pathos, charged energy and operatic drama.[95] I had entered into a dialogue with Reinecke, Ployer and Mozart in artistically-driven research, ‘severing, isolating, reconnecting, and testing the breaking point of such connections’.[96]

This practice-led process in preparing the second movement gave me inspiration and confidence to be more experimental with the outer movements than I would previously have been. I started to differentiate the characteristics of Mozart’s melodic themes, harmonic sequences and other compositional structures and annotated words in my score that described and connected me with my imagined scenarios and emotional states, underscoring these through variations in timing (tempo and rhythm), texture (arpeggiations), articulations (legato, non-legato, portato, staccato), dynamics and accents, and ornaments. For example, at the beginning of the first movement I wrote the word ‘angels’. I had conjured up a scene in which angels were communicating with each other in happy, gentle sighs. My imagined narrative was based on several factors. For a start, I was influenced by Ernst Pauer’s (1826–1905) description of the key of A Major as being:

full of confidence and hope, radiant with love, and redolent of simple genuine cheerfulness, it excels all the other keys in portraying sincerity of feeling … Almost every composer of note has breathed his sincerest and sweetest thoughts in that favourite key.[97]

For me, the idea of ‘simple genuine cheerfulness’ connected with Mozart’s frequent use of sighing melodic figures – generally slurred two-note falling figures, but sometimes also rising figures (see bars 1–8, 18–26 and 30–37). Furthermore, I connected these slurred patterns with Leopold Mozart’s advice that ‘The first of two notes coming together in one stroke [of the up or down bow] is accented more strongly and held slightly longer, while the second is slurred on to it quite quietly and rather later’.[98] This type of rhythmic inflection seemed to me to enhance greatly the effect of sighing and could be applied in variable amounts according to melodic, harmonic or other considerations. I practised this in the context of the solo piano entry at bar 67, where I was also able to make agogic accents with special colour by asynchronising melody and accompaniment. I resolved to request these effects from the orchestral players in the opening tutti section of the movement.

In a similar way, I added words to other sections in the first movement and experimented with changes of rhythm and or tempo to enhance characterization (Table 1).

Bar(s)	Annotated Word(s)	Effect(s)
31	Dolce	Slightly slower tempo, lengthening the first note under the slur and emphasizing chromatic notes through rhythmic inflection
92	Emphatic	Accenting and slightly lengthening the first notes on the first and third crotchet beats to emphasize the dissonances.
129–130	Vacillating, questioning and recitative like	A slightly broader tempo to bring out the feeling of indecision inherent in the rising and alternating neighbour note figure, as well as the stasis set up by the held string chords.
131–132	Fantasy, waiting for an answer	Playing out of time (rubato) as if improvising on the spot
133–137	Accelerando, finding the answer	Getting back to tempo incrementally
149–156	Improvised	Meandering through different thoughts and states as if in a day dream.
158–160 162–164	Agitation	Suddenly faster tempo and vehement accentuation
166	Surprise	Coming in earlier than notated off the woodwind chord on the downbeat, and interpolating an ornamental figure
177–185	Increasing emphasis	To emphasize the repeated musical figure: the strings adding appoggiaturas in bars 182–183 to intensify harmonic dissonance and a general increase in dynamic level and forcefulness.
185	Vehement	Accenting the first note of slurred pairs in the right hand
193–198	Luxuriate	Relaxing the tempo and playing in an improvised fashion to herald the return of the angel theme
198	More angels	A reminder to nuance the sighing figures even more strongly
221–222	Doubt	A more hesitant tempo and questioning in feeling
261–266	Tranquillo	Creating an intimate moment, by luxuriating in the harmonic sequence through time taking, poignant arpeggiations and addition of ornamental runs
272–274	Bustling	Playing in a rambunctious fashion to emphasize Mozart’s rising harmonic sequence enhanced by the energetic Alberti pedal effect
276	Evaporating	Slowing down a little through the coquettish downward figure
277	Triumphant	Suddenly a little faster for the D Major arpeggio figure
278	Rapturous	Increasing dynamic and somewhat broader in tempo for the diminished harmony broken chord

Table 1 Showing my annotated words and meanings

The concerto started to feel like it was made up of different scenes in an opera, and this helped me move away from the syndrome that had previously controlled my interpretative responses: the reproduction of the score – correct notes, rhythms, tempi, and dynamics – towards a freer, quasi-improvised style that projected an ever-evolving narrative. I used a similar process for the third movement.

In preparation for the ARCO 2022 Tempestuous Skies season, we had several rehearsals of K488 over three days. I decided to take time at the first rehearsal to play Reinecke’s piano roll of his arrangement of the second movement to the orchestra. I could see amazement on the faces of several players as they took in how free Reinecke was with rhythm, tempo and note placements. There followed open discussion in which players could voice what they felt about this style. I also demonstrated Ployer’s ornaments and how I had superimposed these on my Reinecke emulation. Some players who had previously performed the concerto on many occasions expressed that they had never heard it in this way and were excited to see where our rehearsal process would lead. We played the movement through a few times; everyone was listening intently and reacting to what they were hearing. This paved the way for me to suggest various expressive nuances. For example, I encouraged the wind players who had solo melodies to experiment with flexible note placements to maximize colour and emotion. And I suggested noticeable changes of tempi (especially getting faster) in orchestral tuttis to underscore dramatic content. These types of changes spread to the outer movements. During the three rehearsals days, players became more confident with applying these types of expressive nuances even when they resulted in discrepancies of ensemble (un-togetherness). Some players also began to make spontaneous expressive choices that helped further characterization of thematic material and in extending narrative ideas.

Of course, it is one thing to be courageous in rehearsals, and another to carry that through into public performance. There is a natural tendency (inertia) in our professional music endeavours to stay fixed to what one is used to doing, or what one feels safe doing under pressure. The benefit of having six chances to perform K488 on tour followed by recording sessions in close succession is that there was space and time to embed our newly found ways of expressing Mozart’s music. The concerts took place in a mixture of venues across capital cities, suburbs and regional areas including a local grammar school assembly hall, an early-twentieth-century assembly hall for civic and cultural activities, a purpose-built concert hall, a cathedral, a Victorian city hall and a local community events centre.[99] From my artistic point of view, performing to different audiences in different spaces opened opportunities to experiment with expressive practices in environments that felt safe, where audiences had come to be entertained and to be led on new journeys of musical experience.

During rehearsals before each of the performances, we would single out a section of the concerto for which we were aiming to achieve a particular expressive effect. We encouraged each other to further experimentation. This attitude seemed to allay fears and allow players to step out of their comfort zones. For me there was a palpable sense that each performance could yield new results and that we were being held in a special container that inspired individual and group creative license. The process of recording the work led to further experimentation: we could listen to takes in situ and tweak our interpretation to achieve desired results. Evidence of the artistic impact on ARCO’s orchestral players came in an experience survey at the completion of the project. Tellingly, one player explained:

I find the [recorded] performance absolutely WONDERFUL. I feel very touched (and also proud of us) listening to all the many magnificent details. And I found the freedoms we took make it an extremely compelling ride, that at the same time loses no unity or integrity of musical ideas. I also find the sound of the piano and all sections of the orchestra sounding richly coloured and balanced – really a joy to behold.[100]

Our reimagining of Mozart K488 Piano Concerto has been extolled by esteemed musicians for the newness of interpretation. Australian composer, writer and radio presenter Andrew Ford explained:

I have had my morning derailed by your Mozart A major concerto … I had to stop everything and listen. It’s wonderful playing, so thoughtful and so free; and the preludey transition to the slow movement is breathtaking … I listen to those Mozart concertos more often than any other single body or repertoire … I know this music very well and you just made me hear the A major as though for the first time again.[101]

Andrew Ford’s encouraging comments about our K488 recording released by ARCO on the album Heavenly Mozart is representative of the multitude of positive praise it received in the press, including that it was a triumph of academic and artistic expertise and that it exhibited a jazz sensibility in its improvised elements.[102] For me, this brings up the deep connection that Reinecke, Ployer and Mozart shared in relation to improvised performance practices, and how engagement with their approaches can help to revitalize an improvisational aesthetic within classical music.

Postludium: De-‘classicizing’ the canon

Such reactions to our K488 project affirm that the reimagining of standard works from the classical music canon in terms of their expressive interpretation is both welcome and timely. The fallacious notion which took hold during the upsurge of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century – that music scores preserve ‘more or less’ all essential details needed to resound composer’s expressive expectations authentically – has continued to constrain classical musicians’ artistic agency to the present day. Such restriction has enacted a process of ‘classicisation’ through which interpretations of works in the classical music canon are more or less fixed and homogenous: the range of expressive choices available to performers severely curtailed, and the performer’s themselves forced into a role that is largely subservient to the dictates of the score. But the process outlined in this article offers a means of de-classicising classical music and musicians from such anti-artistic impositions. This type of work is at the forefront of HIP research and contributes to a nascent but growing body of work in the field worldwide. Yet progress is slow and often hampered by the weight of tradition – ironically a tradition less than a century old.

Without audible evidence there is no way of knowing how Mozart’s K488 Piano Concerto sounded in his hands or in those of Ployer. But I can listen to Reinecke’s Mozart playing (K488 and other piano works) as preserved on his piano rolls, which evidences a pre-modern approach and, that at the very least, preserves remnants of practices that would have been recognizable to Mozart. I find this intriguing and tantalizing, and of equal importance to other Mozartian musical artefacts (for example, Mozart’s scores, the fortepiano(s) he favoured, and the houses which he once inhabited). But why should any of these fragments of musical history matter to musicians living in the twentieth-first century? Engaging with the remnants of musical history can be challenging. But the process can also reap rich rewards. Although anchored in the past, historical music records (written or sounded) can, as this article contends, be used to expand the horizons of musical expressivity in the present. Most importantly, such engagement promises to re-establish the breadth of individual artistic practice that was celebrated before the advent of twentieth-century modern style in ways that ultimately revitalize classical music performance and programming today.

Endnotes

[1] Carl Reinecke, ‘A Word Concerning Execution’, in Twenty Piano Compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ed. Carl Reinecke, trans. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1906), xv; ‘Bei alledem wird die Individualität des geistvollen Interpreten immer noch zur Geltung kommen können, den vor allen Dingen muss der Vortrag in hohem Garde temperamentvoll sein. Die Werke eines solchen Feuergeistes, wie Mozart einer war, dürfen nicht mit einer gewissen Würde und Gelassenheit gespielt werden, sondern es muss am rechten Orte sprühen und blitzen, während an anderen Orten für zärteste und wärmste Innigkeit zu sorgen ist. Wie unzureichend aber die Sprache ist um dergleichen zu lehren, fühlt der Musiker bei jedem erneuten Versuche, und unwillkürlich denkt er an des Dichters Wort: “Wenn ihr’s nicht fühlt, ihr werdet’s nicht erjagen”’.

[2] See Clive Brown, ‘Foreword’, in Neal Peres Da Costa, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ix–xii.

[3] The German violinist Joseph Joachim referred to the ‘lifeless note-heads’ (die leblosen Notenköpfe) in relation to the text-literal performance approach of Franco-Belgian violinists. See Andreas Moser, Joseph Joachim: Ein Lebensbild, 2 vols., 2nd edn (Berlin: Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908–1910), 2:292.

[4] Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore, ‘Introduction’, in Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology, eds. Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 10–11.

[5] Anna Scott, ‘Changing Sounds, Changing Meanings: How Artistic Experimentation Opens Up the Field of Brahms Performance Practice, in Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology, eds. Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), 242–43.

[6] For example, in 1820, a Leipzig critic noted in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung that ‘the oldest members of the orchestra [The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra] claimed, the great man himself [Mozart] played here thirty years ago’. See Anon., ‘Nachrichten. Leipzig’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 29 March 1820. This is likely to be a concert at the Gewandhaus on 12 May 1789 at which Mozart performed his two Piano Concertos k456 and k503. See also Claudia Macdonald, ‘Mozart Piano Concertos and the Romantic Generation’, Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, eds. Stephen A. Christ and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004.

[7] Alfred Heinrich Ehrlich, Celebrated Pianists of the Past and Present: A Collection of 116 Biographies, and 114 portraits (London: H. Grevel & Co., ca. 1894), 276.

[8] Rudolf Reinecke, Vorbereitender Unterricht in der Musik überhaupt, und im Fortepiano – Spiel insbesondere; bestehend in Vorubungen zur Bildung des Gehörs, Taktgefühls, so wie der Hand und Finger (Altona: bei Karl Aue, 1834).

[9] See www.carl-reinecke.de/Start/start.html, accessed 12 February 2025.

[10] In 1843, Reinecke’s move to Leipzig brought him under the strong musical influence of no-less-than Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt (see Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 83). His musical career was punctuated by successful concert tours and significant positions including: professor at Cologne Conservatory (1851); director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (1860–1895); and, professor of piano and composition at Leipzig Conservatory from 1860 and its director in 1897.

[11] Neal Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance of his Arrangement of the Second Movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto K488: Some Thoughts on Style and the Hidden Messages in Musical Notation’, in Rund um Beethoven Interpretationsforschung heute, ed. Thomas Gartmann and Daniel Allenbach (Schliengen: Editions Argus, 2019), 135–36; See also Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 162.

[12] John Alexander Fuller Maitland, Masters of German Music (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1894), 206.

[13] [Donald Francis Tovey], ‘Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., ed. Hugh Chisholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 23:56.

[14] [Anon.], Monthly Musical Record (1 July, 1893), 152.

[15] [Anon.], ‘Altmeister Karl Reinecke und das Pianola’, Zeitschrift für Instrumentenbau 24 (1903/04), 1039: ‘Reinecke gilt bekanntlich als der größte und gewissenhafteste Mozartspieler, der jetzt lebt’.

[16] Eduard Hanslick, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts (1895–1899): Musikalische Kritiken und Schilderungen. (Berlin: Allg. Verein für Dt. Litteratur, 1899), 192–93; ‘Namentlich sein Vortrag Mozartscher Kompositionen galt als unübertrefflich’.

[17] Hanslick, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, 192–93 (emphasis added): ‘Reinecke teilte mit Ferdinand Hiller den Ruhm des besten Mozartspielers in Deutschland. Als Dritten in dieser Veteranenreihe nennen wir mit gutem Gewissen unseren Julius Epstein. Unter den Jüngeren würden wir diese Kunst als ausgestorben beklagen, hätte uns nicht Marie Baumayer durch ihren Vortrag des B-dur-Concertes eines Besseren belehrt’.

[18] Listen to Baumayer playing Schumann’s Studie für den Pedal-Flügel in As-Dur op. 56, no. 4 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=blhB0PoMpSw, accessed 19 May 2025.

[19] William Frederick Pecher, ‘The Methods of the Masters of Piano-Teaching in Europe: On the Emotional Legacy of the Classic School – A Reminiscence of Moscheles’s Teaching’, The Century Library of Music, ed. Ignace Paderewski, 20 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1901), 14:474.

[20] For further discussion of Moscheles as a pianist see Mark Kroll, Ignaz Moscheles and the Changing World of Musical Europe (Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), chap. 4.

[21] Hanslick, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts, 192–93: ‘Mit dem Mozartschen Krönungsconcert … trat auch Reinecke in dem letzten Gesellschafts-Concert auf. Alle Reize der Komposition kehrte er glänzend hervor, zugleich alle Vorzüge seines Spieles, dessen perlende Geläufigkeit, Klangschönheit, Frische und Anmut das Alter des jetzt 72jährigen Künstlers Lügen straften. Das Concert ‘floß wie Öl’, wie Mozart zu sagen liebte, und ward für Reinecke zu einem Triumph’.

[22] Heinrich Schenker, ‘Zur Mozartfeier’, Die Zeit, Vienna (25 April, 1896), 60: ‘Wie es scheint, ist er derzeit der einzige Clavierspieler der, mit historischen Kenntnissen ausgerüstet, Mozarts Werke so wiedergeben kann, wie sie vor 110 oder 120 Jahren geklungen haben mochten [sic]’.

[23] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 119.

[24] This he had in common with other pianists captured on rolls, for example Theodor Leschetizky and Camille Saint Saëns.

[25] Dorottya Fabian, A Musicology of Performance: Theory and Method Based on Bach’s Solo for Violin (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 8.

[26] Georgia Volioti, ‘Rethinking Classical Sound Recordings: Creativities Beyond the Score’, in Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook, eds. Ananay Aguliar, Ross Cole, Matthew Prichard, and Eric Clarke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 65.

[27] These include: Sonata K331 (third movement ‘Rondo à la Turque’); Piano Concerto Fantasie K475 (arr. Reinecke); Fantasie K475; and Piano Sonata movements including the entire k332.

[28] These include: Beethoven Ecossaisen WoO 86; Schumann ‘Warum’ op. 12, no. 2, from Fantasiestücke; Reinecke Gondoliera op. 86, no. 3; Reinecke Prelude to Act V of the Opera ‘King Manfred’; Haydn Piano Sonata in E Flat (third movement Presto) Hob. XVI: 52; Beethoven Sonata (second movement Andante) op. 28; Field Nocturne no. 4 H. 36; Schumann Kreisleriana op. 16, no. 6; Reinecke Notturno op. 151, no. 1; and Reinecke Ballade op. 20.

[29] The differences warrant further investigation beyond the scope of this article. See also Miaoyin Qu, Piano Playing in the German Tradition, 1840–1900: Rediscovering the Un-notated Conventions of Performance (PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2015).

[30] See Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 70.

[31] For further discussion see Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 96 and 129–32.

[32] Carl Czerny, ‘Recollections from my Life’, The Musical Quarterly, 42/3 (1956), 309.

[33] One is reminded of C.P.E. Bach’s edict in 1753, only three years before Mozart was born: ‘The constituents of performance are the strength [loudness] and weakness [softness] of the notes, their accentuation, Schnellen, portamento, staccato, vibrato, arpeggiation, sustaining, holding back, pushing forward. Whoever either does not use these things at all or who uses them at the wrong time has a bad performance style’ (‘Die Gegenstände des Votrags sind die Stärcke und Schwäche der Töne, ihr Druck, Schnellen, Ziehen, Stoffen, Beben, Brechen, Halten, Schleppen und Fortgehen. Wer diese Dinge entweder gar nicht oder zur unrechten Zeit gebrauchet, der hat einen schlechten Vortrag’); see Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu Spielen, 2 parts, Part 1 (Berlin, 1753), 117. Bach describes general practices requisite to successful performance, which were upheld by later generations from Mozart to Brahms. Such performance practices existed within different, and even staunchly opposing piano performance styles (for example, Haydn–Mozart versus Beethoven) that emerged in late-eighteenth-century Vienna as discussed for example by Katalin Komlós in ‘After Mozart: The Viennese Piano Scene in the 1790s’, Studia Musicologica, 49/1–2 (2008), 35–48.

[34] See for example discussion of slurred staccato (portato) in Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 111–13.

[35] Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Performance Changes Over Time’, Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them (2020). Available at https://challengingperformance.com/the-book-3/, accessed 12 February 2024. Emphasis is added.

[36] Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.

[37] See Chris Stover, ‘Mapping Jazz’s Affect: Implications for Music Theory and Analysis’, in Artistic Research in Jazz: Positions, Theories, Methods, ed. by Michael Kahr (New York: Routledge, 2022), 42.

[38] See Huib Schippers, Paul Draper, and Vanessa Tomlinson, ‘Two Decades of Artistic Research: The Antipodal Experience’, Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance, ed. Jonathan Impett (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 161–73.

[39] Schippers, Draper, and Tomlinson, ‘Two Decades of Artistic Research’, 167.

[40] Schippers, Draper, and Tomlinson, ‘Two Decades of Artistic Research’, 167.

[41] Vanessa Tomlinson, ‘Artistic Research: A Vibrant and Ever-Changing Field’, Performance Matters, 9/1–2 (2023), 355, https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/article/view/463.

[42] Pil Hansen, ‘Research-Based Practice: Facilitating Transfer Across Artistic, Scholarly, and Scientific Inquiries’, in Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact, ed. Annete Arlander, Bruce Barton, Melanie Dreyer-Lude and Ben Spatz (London: Routledge, 2018), 37–38.

[43] References to early sound recordings include reproducing piano rolls.

[44] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 114–26.

[45] See www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADxuDONsguY to listen to Reinecke’s performance of the Larghetto while following the score.

[46] Volioti, ‘Rethinking Classical Sound Recordings’, 61.

[47] On the harpsichord it is not possible to change the volume of an individual note through variations in finger (touch) pressure.

[48] The French harpsichordist François Couperin (1688–1733) referred to practices including arpeggiation as a means to giving the ‘impression of dynamic shading’. See Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 58–59.

[49] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 149.

[50] See Peres Da Costa, Off the Record, 51–71, 103–129.

[51] Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style, 2.

[52] Katalin Komlós, ‘Mozart the Performer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 226.

[53] Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Performance Changes Over Time’.

[54] See Phillip Early Recordings and Musical Style. See also Neal Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices for Romantic and Modern Repertoire’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Performance, ed. Gary E. McPherson, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 1: 358–60.

[55] Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49.

[56] David Dubal, Evenings with Horowitz (London: Robson, 1992), xix.

[57] Fabian A Musicology of Performance, 9.

[58] Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), viii.

[59] Hamilton, After the Golden Age, 186.

[60] Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.

[61] Anon. ‘Nachrichten. Leipzig’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, (29 March, 1820): ‘Hr. M. nämlich beschleunigt oder verzögert das Tempo in den Solo’s [sic] unaufhörlich, und dermaassen, dass man ihm nicht Unrecht thäte, behauptete man, nicht drey [sic] Takte nach einander blieben sich vollkommen gleich’.

[62] See footnote 33 above.

[63] Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style, 2, emphasis added.

[64] Indeed, the second edition of Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performing Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025) demonstrates the existence of such a continuum. In recent correspondence Brown has conveyed to me that ‘performers used such practices in individual ways, adapting these over time to changing styles of composition. The fundamental principles remained the same, but their application underwent a gradual evolution’. My own monograph, Off the Record takes a similar stance while focusing on piano playing. See also Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices for Romantic and Modern Repertoire’, 1:361–83.

[65] These categories include: rhythmic alteration; tempo modification; keyboard arpeggiation and asynchrony; sliding effects (portamento); tremolo effects (vibrato); vocal colourings (chiaroscuro); register changes (both equalized and non-equalized); articulation (legato, staccato, and portato); dynamics and accentuation; and, ornaments, ornamentation and improvisation. For more discussion of these improvisational practices see the Introduction to this special issue of Music and Practice.

[66] David Dolan, John Sloboda, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, Björn Crüts and Eugene Feygelson, ‘The Improvisatory Approach to Classical Music Performance: An Empirical Investigation into its Characteristics and Impact’, Music Performance Research, 6 (2013), 3.

[67] See Peres Da Costa, Off the Record and Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice.

[68] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Performance Practices for Romantic and Modern Repertoire’, 1:356–57.

[69] Josef Hofman, Piano Playing with Piano Questions Answered (Mineola: Dover, 1976), 59–60. See also Hamilton, After the Golden Age, 201.

[70] W. A. Mozart, Twenty Piano Compositions, ed. Carl Reinecke (Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1906), xiii. Reinecke further elaborates that in Mozart’s works ‘the execution should be distinctively beautiful’. Reinecke explains that in a letter to his father [Leopold Mozart], Mozart is critical of the young pianist Nanette Stein who ‘has accustomed herself never to play in time’. In particular, he points out that Nanette Stein plays recurring passages slower and slower, whereas he always keeps ‘strictly to time’. Reinecke goes on to advise that ‘Arbitrary variations of tempo could not be more explicitly held up to condemnation. And just as little should one attempt to improve on the composer’s shading where, as for example in the A minor Rondo [K511] he has with special solicitude prescribed what it should be’. It would be easy but incorrect to think of Reinecke’s admonition of tempo change or of changes to expression (dynamics accents and so on) as anything other than a warning to students to take care with where and when such practices are used. The examples are specific and isolated and should not be seen as representing his attitude to Mozart’s piano music in a universal way. Quite obviously, he understood the sorts of changes he made to Mozart to be in keeping with a Mozartian conception and not in contradiction of his advice. For further discussion about correct and beautiful performance see Peres Da Costa ‘Performance Practices for Romantic and Modern Repertoire’, 1:356–57.

[71] Richard Taruskin, Text and Act (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 168.

[72] For a discussion of Mozart’s labelling of this movement as both Adagio and Andante see Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 119–20.

[73] This is an 88-note hand played (i.e. played by the artist) Hupfeld roll without expression. The notes and note positions are as Reinecke recorded them, but the roll does not have dynamics or accents encoded on it. Like Reinecke’s arrangement of the k537 Larghetto (see above), the Andante arrangement produces the whole movement including solo piano, piano with orchestra and orchestral tutti sections. A playback of this roll is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ELXJNMIE8, accessed 12 February 2025.

[74] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 K488 (Kassel: Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, 1969), 35.

[75] For discussion of why Reinecke might have modified the opening eight bars see Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 127–28.

[76] Note classifications are given in Helmholz pitch notation.

[77] For an explanation of the chromatic alteration of the chords in bar 9 see Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 116 n8.

[78] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance, 116, 125–26.

[79] The Viennese-trained pianist Ernst Pauer (1826–1905) described the key of F sharp minor as ‘that dark, mysterious, and spectral key, is at the same time full of passion’. See Ernst Pauer, The Elements of the Beautiful in Music (London: Novello & Company, 1876), 25.

[80] See Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 119–25.

[81] See https://dataportal.arc.gov.au/NCGP/Web/Grant/Grant/DP170101976, accessed 12 February 2025.

[82] See Neal Peres Da Costa, ‘Concepts of Beautiful in Nineteenth-Century Musical Performance: Reinvigorating Artistic Personality and Spontaneous Creativity’, in Practice in Context: Historically Informed Practices in Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music, ed. Claire Holden, Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey and Eric Clarke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025).

[83] Bruno H. Repp, ‘Pattern Typicality and Dimensional Interactions in Pianists’ Imitation of Expressive Timing and Dynamics’, Music Perception, 18/2 (2000), 208–9.

[84] Sarah Potter, Changing Vocal Style and Technique in Britain during the Long Nineteenth Century, (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2014), 10. Regarding cyclical processes, see Sarah Potter
etc.

[85] See footnote 11 above.

[86] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Andante aus dem Klavierconcert KV 488, arr. Carl Reinecke (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1896); reissued (Leipzig: Reinecke Musikverlag, 2008).

[87] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Andante aus dem Klavierconcert KV 488, 6.

[88] This was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170101976.

[89] Our CIMF concerts took place in The Fitters’ Workshop, built in 1916–1917 as part of the Kingston Power House historic precinct, and formerly used for maintenance of government plant and equipment and construction work; ee www.arts.act.gov.au/our-arts-facilities/fitters-workshop, accessed 12 February 2025.

[90] See https://www.arco.org.au/tempestuous-skies, accessed 12 February 2025.

[91] See Sandra Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 49–50.

[92] Maev Kennedy, ‘Embellished Mozart Manuscript Uncovered’, The Guardian, London, 1 October, 2011, www.theguardian.com/music/2011/sep/30/embellished-mozart-manuscript-uncovered, accessed 12 February 2025; See also discussion of Ployer’s ornaments in Leonardo Miucci, ‘Mozart after Mozart – Editorial Lessons in the Process of Publishing J. N. Hummel’s Arrangements of Mozart’s Piano Concertos’, Music & Practice, vol. 2, 2015. https://doi.org/10.32063/0202.

[93] See Peres Da Costa ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 116 and 125–26.

[94] Manuscript available digitally at Stadtsbibliothek zur Berlin Mus.ms. 15486/5.

[95] To listen to the recording of this movement while following Mozart’s score see www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9SLNnlTLRA, accessed 12 February 2025.

[96] Hansen, ‘Research-Based Practice’, 38.

[97] Pauer, The Elements of the Beautiful, 24.

[98] Leopold Mozart, Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756), 59, translated by Editha Knocker as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, 2nd ed, London: Oxford University Press, 1951, reprint 1972, 115; ‘Die erste zwoer in einem Striche zusammen kommender Noten wird etwas stärker angegriffen, auch etwas länger angehalten; die zwote aber ganz still und etwas später daran geschliffen’. See also Peres Da Costa, ‘Carl Reinecke’s Performance’, 133–34.

[99] For a list of the Tempestuous Skies venues see www.arco.org.au/tempestuous-skies, accessed 12 February 2025.

[100] ARCO musician experience survey 2022. The results of this survey are not publicly available.

[101] Personal email correspondence. See also https://insidestory.org.au/could-this-be-how-it-sounded-in-mozarts-time/, accessed 12 February 2025.

[102] Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, Heavenly Mozart (2023), ARCOCD-002; See also www.arco.org.au/heavenly-mozart, accessed 12 February 2025). See also Paul Nolan, Sydney Arts Guide, 2023, https://sydneyartsguide.com.au/cd-review-heavenly-mozart-australian-romantic-and-classical-orchestra/; Steve Moffat, ‘Local Band Draws on Past to Give Mozart Works a Fresh Coat of Paint’,: The Daily Telegraph, www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/local-band-draws-on-past-to-give-mozart-works-a-fresh-coat-of-paint/news-story/90303b4ec16644de206bd7c23aa1ea07, accessed 12 February 2025; Jane Downer, CD Review: Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra | Heavenly Mozart, ClassikON, 19 November 2023, www.classikon.com/cd-review-australian-romantic-classical-orchestra-heavenly-mozart/, accessed 12 February 2025; Philip Pogson, Review, Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra | Heavenly Mozart, Loud Mouth, May 5, 2024, https://musictrust.com.au/loudmouth/heavenly-mozart-australian-romantic-classical-orchestra-rachel-beesley-conductor-and-neal-peres-da-costa-fortepiano/, accessed 12 February 2025.