How to play Mozart: Slurs

My apologies for being so late with this. My only excuse is that the music notation program I'm using is tricky, confusing, endlessly user-unfriendly. To compensate, this post is an unusually long one. 

Music really was different in the Classical period – even the way slurs were played. Fortunately for us, the 18^th century way isn’t hard to pick up and put into practice: and it can make a big difference to the musical result.

      A.  There were two (or sometimes three)
golden rules:


   1.)  The first note under a slur should always be played with 
          a slight emphasis or accent. This obviously implies that
          subsequent notes should be de-emphasized.  
                    (Leopold Mozart also recommended lengthening 
                     the first note and shortening the notes
                     that came after it.)   
     2.)  The last note should be played lightly, and in most 
           cases should also be shortened.
     3.)  The result was a diminuendo across the slurred
           phrase as a whole.


B.   These rules apply especially to the two-note slur, the 'sighing' motif so common in music of the period, whether both notes are the same length (typically two eighth notes or quavers, as in the following example), or the first note is longer than the second, as in example 3.


      The expressive effect of these slurs is due as much to the 
           rests as to the notes. No rests - no emotion!  

              Ex. 1

                        Incidentally, this way of playing two-note slurs remained standard practice well into the nineteenth century. Brahms, for example, insisted on it as late as 1870. Nineteenth-century slurring practices - a complicated business - will be discussed in a later post. 


Slurred notes, in late 18th century music, were the only notes that were played legato - all others (as the previous post indicated) were detached. A slur was thus a special effect, an island of smoothness in a choppy sea of non-legato. Which means that if the slurs are to stand out, the non-slurred ones have to be played in the right way - detached, with gaps between them - without any half-suppressed desire for legato!


C.  Long slurs

                       These are unusual in music of the Classical period. The vast majority of Mozart’s slurs are less than a bar (measure) in length; most of them start and finish within the same bar.

                       When a longer slur does appear, it should be played (on stringed instruments) with a single bow stroke and in the standard way, with a slight emphasis on the first note and an easing off or shortening on the last note. 


Ex. 2      Mozart, Divertimento for string trio, K. 563/i

                                           

                       But very long slurs, especially in rapid passages, should be treated with suspicion. In nearly all cases they were added by nineteenth century editors of Mozart's music who didn’t think twice about imposing their own un-Classical stylistic preferences on the works of the Master. The same warning applies to the term ‘legato’, which was much bandied about by later editors but which may never have been used by Mozart himself. If you’re playing from an older edition, it’s a good idea to check it against the standard critical texts in the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, which fortunately is freely accessible online:                 

      http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/nma/start.php?l=2.

          

                       The chamber works are in Series VIII.

D.  Consecutive short slurs         

            In chamber music, at least, these were not very frequent; nor were they often discussed in eighteenth century treatises and teaching manuals. Mozart does use them occasionally in his piano works, where they've set off a lively and most revealing debate as to how they should be played.

                      The ‘traditional’ (in fact, twentieth century) approach was to treat a series of short slurs as a single long slur. Composers, according to this view, actually intended long continuous slurs, but printers for some reason found these technically difficult to produce and used short ones instead.

                       More recently, however, historically informed performers and musicologists have challenged that view, arguing that short slurs should be played as short slurs and not combined or accumulated. The debate over the following example, from one of Mozart’s piano sonatas (K. 332, now dated to the early 1780s), gives an idea of what’s at stake.  (The bass clef is omitted.)        

            Ex. 3      Mozart, Piano sonata in F, K. 332/i  

                            

            Artur Schnabel, by general consent one of the greatest pianists of the first half of the last century, was a leading advocate of the traditional approach. In this passage his advice to his students (as one of them later recalled) was that the right hand should emphasize the third beat of each bar, ‘to keep the long line going and to deliver it gently into the following downbeat with no audible bump’ (quoted by Malcolm Bilson in ‘Execution and expression in the Sonata in E flat, K 282’, Early Music (May 1992), p. 243).

           What’s wrong with that? The answer comes from Bilson himself. (Who has played and recorded Mozart’s piano music on period instruments and is a major figure in the period performance movement.) The Schnabel approach, he points out, is anachronistic and totally at odds with proper Mozartian style. What Mozart would have intended was that the stress in each bar should fall on the first note, and that the second note should be ‘shorter and weaker’, thus giving the passage, and much of the movement as a whole, a ‘strong sense of lilt’. Schnabel's line - or Mozart's lilt? (I know which I prefer.) 

                   Incidentally, Bilson also remarks that that shortest note in bar 4 is the quarter note.   

                    Critics of the traditional approach also point out that there is no support for it in eighteenth century sources – the countless treatises, musical dictionaries and teaching manuals of the time. The reason why composers didn’t write long slurs was simply that they didn’t want them. Classical style was based on small units, detached articulation, and crisp phrasing: if long slurs are inflicted on music of this kind, they flatten it, homogenize it, and spoil its character.              

                     The main conclusion for performers is to play each slur in the proper way, with a slight accent at the beginning and a lightening and shortening at the end - not because this is historically ‘correct’ but because it really does sound better!