How to play Mozart: articulation

How to play Mozart

We know how hard it is to play Mozart. That’s not usually because of technical difficulties, though certain passages can be testing for amateurs, but because the music is so exposed, and seems to demand nothing less than perfection: one false accent and an entire phrase is spoiled. The good news is that there are practical things we can do to improve our Mozart playing in spite of our technical limitations. The secret lies in period (or ‘historically informed’) performance: playing his music in something of the style he had in mind when he wrote it. And there is in fact a lot of evidence on this. The book on violin playing by Mozart’s father was only one of many such treatises and teaching manuals; musicologists who have studied these (and other contemporary sources) give us a remarkably detailed picture of late eighteenth century performance practice.

What emerges is a way of playing that in some respects is very different from the way most of us were taught (and from the performance practice of most current professional players). Fortunately, it isn't too hard to pick up some of the standard 18th century practices - and not nearly as hard as acquiring a perfect spiccato or fingered octaves. And they can make a big difference. Playing the music of Mozart (and of Haydn and early Beethoven) in the style of the late 18^th century - rather than in the style of the late 19^th or late 20^th - can be a revelation. The basic elements of that style are well known to period performance specialists: in this blog I would like to introduce them to everyone who plays Mozart’s music and would like to play it more idiomatically and expressively.

Articulation

In late 18^th century music the norm was non-legato.That means that notes should be played
shorter thanwritten,with ‘separation between them’.

The rule also applies to any note before a rest. (And to slurs as well which will be discussed in the next post.)

(Apologies for this abnormally long measure: I'm still on the learning curve with the music notation program.)

Legato, by contrast, was a special ‘expressive effect’. Notes should be played legato only when they’re slurred.

Legato became more common at the end of the 18th century and wasstandard – though not universal – in the 19th century. When the word ‘legato’ appears in Mozart’s music it was almost certainly put there by some later editor, not by Mozart himself. It reflects musical taste as it developed in the Romantic period and is alien to the music of Mozart’s own time.

Joining non-slurred notes or phrases to form a seamless ‘long line’ is a 19th century mannerism that is completely out of place in themusic of the late 18th century.