Clarinet Concerto in A major, K.622
Allegro
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro
Mozart wrote his last concerto in the autumn of 1791. It was a commission from his friend Anton Stadler, a fellow-freemason, and a regular source of assistance in Mozart’s chaotic financial affairs. He was also the principal clarinettist in the Court orchestra in Vienna, and seems to have been an artist of remarkable skill and musicianship. After a 1784 performance of one of Mozart’s wind serenades, a critic wrote to him that "Never have I heard such things as you are able to perform on your instrument. I would not have thought that a clarinet could imitate the human voice so deceptively as you imitate it. Your instrument is so soft, so delicate in tone that no-one who has a heart can resist it." Mozart wrote a string of masterpieces for clarinet, all for Stadler. As well as the Concerto, the Clarinet Quintet K.581 and the "Kegelstatt" trio K.498 owe their existence to Mozart’s admiration and friendship for Stadler, and while the clarinettist received a series of personalised masterpieces, Mozart in return discovered the full potential of an instrument that was still very new. Clarinets, and their predecessors, basset horns, give a wonderfully soft, expressive colour to many of Mozart’s most personal later works; the A major Piano Concerto (No.23), the revised Symphony No.40, and of course the dark, deeply emotional Requiem, K.626, which he was writing at the time of his death, just 2 months after he completed the Clarinet Concerto.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why the Clarinet Concerto, Mozart’s last completed
instrumental work, is sometimes described as "autumnal", a "farewell to life". But the idea that Mozart knew his days were numbered while writing the Concerto has to be regarded as another of the many myths surrounding his final months. He first sketched the work as a Concerto in G for basset horn in late 1789, and only returned to it in 1791 when a testimonial concert for Stadler was planned for that October, in Prague. Mozart was extremely busy. He’d written and premiered two operas already that year and had a commission for a Requiem outstanding, but on the day he completed the Clarinet Concerto he wrote to his wife that he’d played two games of billiards, "smoked a marvellous pipe of tobacco", ordered a black coffee and then "orchestrated almost the whole Rondo for Stadler". Not exactly a composer on his deathbed, then. But Mozart had a remarkable ability to keep his day-to-day life separate from his inner world, and in writing this concerto for an instrument he loved so much, Mozart produced a work that embraces both light and shade – music which loves and celebrates life while exploring darkness with profound feeling. Stadler had recently invented an instrument that combined the agility of the early clarinet with the depth of the basset horn, and this "Basset Clarinet" was the instrument for which Mozart wrote his concerto. It allowed him to write brilliant display passages and lyrical melodies in its upper register and to explore the rich expressive sound of its bottom octave with equal ease, and the music exploits the contrast between the two with frequent shifts from major to minor keys. This gives the concerto its searching, bittersweet quality, and Mozart enhances this by giving the clarinet a soft-edged orchestral setting, with two flutes but without oboes or trumpets. The orchestral colours give the concerto as a whole a specially warm, intimate tone, luminous in the Adagio, and make the expressive, gently curving melodies particularly affecting. Mozart may not have meant the Clarinet Concerto to be his swansong, but it has a subtle beauty of sound, a ripe abundance of melody, and a compassionate tenderness of feeling that make it as moving a testimony to his genius as anything he ever wrote.
R.G.Bratby, 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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