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In Reply to: RE: I think I must not have been clear posted by Chris from Lafayette on March 18, 2008 at 15:52:43
"I guess the underlying question is whether improvisation is a necessary skill to have in one's arsenal. It's not as if the non-improvisers have a lock on boring performances. :-)"
Well, I guess I would say that if you want to play Mozart or Beethoven as examples, and you want to be true to the spirit of what they wrote, and they included a provision for the player to improvise their own cadenza at a particular point in the work, you aren't being true to the composer's intentions if you play someone else's cadenza. Obviously the composer recognised that not everyone would improvise candenzas of equal quality, especially of outstanding quality, but they also wanted the performer to "take a stab at it" or they wouldn't have included provision for it.
So the question becomes one of whether having the ability to fulfil the composer's demands for a self-improvised cadenza is an essential requirement for playing a piece with provision for just that, just as having the technical ability to play the notes that the composer did specify is an essential requirement. I'd argue that it is and that the performer isn't playing the piece as the composer wanted it played if they don't do so.
I think composer's who left space for the performer to improvise would be unhappy if the performer didn't do that and, if the composer were listening and hearing the same cadenza transcribed from their own playing or from someone else's played over and over again rather than the performer having a go at providing their own cadenza, even a non-improvised but prepared cadenza of their own—they would respond with a comment like a "Spare me the imitation and give me something of your own, that's what the space is for!"
David Aiken
Follow Ups:
Obviously the composer recognised that not everyone would improvise candenzas of equal quality, especially of outstanding quality, but they also wanted the performer to "take a stab at it" or they wouldn't have included provision for it.
Well if they were so hell bent on getting the performers to "take a stab at it" [improvising their own cadenzas], it makes you wonder why composers didn't ensure this by NOT writing out and/or publishing their own cadenzas. I have yet to read a single composer's statement or letter that cries out for suppression of printed or written-out cadenzas in order to enforce improvisation on the part of performers. (I admit I haven't read everything of course!)
You talk of the composers' "demands for a self-improvised cadenza", but it seems to me that the very fact that we have all these published cadenzas by composers and their contemporaries floating around indicates that those "demands" must not have been taken very seriously - even by the composers themselves. To me, it's not so much a demand as an invitation, if you want to .
Don't get me wrong though - I like hearing unusual cadenzas, such as Smetana's for the Beethoven Third Concerto, or Alkan's gargantuan, unbelieveable effort in that same concerto. Whether it's improvised or not wouldn't make a difference however.
and I don't know the answer so it's not intended as a trick but as a genuine question.
With the scores for cadenzas by the composer, did the composer transcribe their cadenza or did someone else do it, and did the composer authorise its inclusion in the published score or is that something the music publisher did on their own authority?
I suspect that the answers to those questions would not be the same for every piece of music where a cadenza by the composer is available. If the composer did not transcribe their cadenza or authorise it's inclusion in the published score, your points fail. There are all sorts of stories of what publishers did with scores without the composer's approval, especially after the composer's death.
"I like hearing unusual cadenzas, such as Smetana's for the Beethoven Third Concerto, or Alkan's gargantuan, unbelieveable effort in that same concerto. Whether it's improvised or not wouldn't make a difference however."
Well, if performers stop coming up with their own cadenzas, at some point you can get to the stage of having heard all of the ones that performers use and part of the performance tradition then comes to a dead end. I have no problems with a performer preparing their own cadenza beforehand, in fact I suspect a lot of the "improvised" cadenzas around were partially prepared with some space left for on the spot decisions, possibly from a selection of prepared options, so that the performer doesn't play it exactly the same way twice in a row. I do think they should play their own cadenzas, however, whether they be improvised or prepared in advance.
David Aiken
Offhand, I don't know the circumstances which would apply to Mozart's cadenzas, but I was thinking of Beethoven's piano concertos - all of which, of course, have cadenzas by the composer. What's interesting to me is that Beethoven seemed to trust the improvising performers less and less as he grew older. As you know, there's no option to improvise a cadenza in the Emperor Concerto - at the place where the cadenza would normally occur in the first movement (the 6/4 chord with the fermata), Beethoven writes in the score (and I apologize for my fractured Italian translation): "don't make a cadenza here, but play the following section [completely written-out] instead".
As for Beethoven's other piano concertos, I'll leave comment to Hans-Werner Küthen, the editor of the Henle edition of the composer's piano transciption of the Violin Concerto:
The cadenzas to his [Beethoven's] first through fourth piano concertos were all set down ex post facto , apart from the occasional sketched or draft cadenzas used in early performances. . . These later manuscripts [of the cadenzas] remained unpublished during his lifetime.
So this would seem to indicate that his cadenzas were deliberately composed. In the case of the Second Piano Concerto, it's my understanding that the composer's cadenza was actually written a consderable number of years after the concerto itself - stylistically, it's quite a bit different from the rest of the concerto. All these "ex post facto" written out cadenzas could be taken as an indication that, as he grew older, Beethoven began to trust the performers/improvisors less and less. (Other interpretations of these facts are possible of course.) :-)
One final point concerns the already-mentioned Beethoven piano transcription of his Violin Concerto, which he did at Clementi's request. Although there are no Beethoven cadenzas for the violin version, the piano version made for Clementi does include Beethoven's own written-out cadenza - it's famous for including the tympani, rather than just the solo instrument. (I believe that Busoni transcribed this piano cadenza back for the violin, presumably so that violinists would also have an "authentic" Beethoven cadenza to work with.) Again, this inclusion for the piano version is possibly an indication of the same re-thinking on Beethoven's part: as he reconsidered his concertos in later life, he provided cadenzas.
I can't resist mentioning that, in the Triple Concerto (violin/cello/piano), Beethoven left no provision for a cadenza. However, my main teacher, Adolph Baller, performed this work often when he was the pianist of the Alma Trio. Baller actually made an incision into the first movement and inserted a cadenza he had composed for the three solo instruments!
There are an awful lot of composers who left provision for the performer to improvise a cadenza and Beethoven is only one. It's not possible to generalise from a sample of one. Generalisations require a reasonable sampling and one is never that.
You quote Hans-Werner Küthen and then say:
""The cadenzas to his [Beethoven's] first through fourth piano concertos were all set down ex post facto, apart from the occasional sketched or draft cadenzas used in early performances. . . These later manuscripts [of the cadenzas] remained unpublished during his lifetime."
So this would seem to indicate that his cadenzas were deliberately composed. In the case of the Second Piano Concerto, it's my understanding that the composer's cadenza was actually written a consderable number of years after the concerto itself - stylistically, it's quite a bit different from the rest of the concerto."
I disagree that this indicates his cadenzas were deliberately composed. I think the comment that they were all set down ex post facto indicates that they were transcribed from memory after the performance, ie after the event. If they were deliberately composed they would be expected to have been set down before the performance and not ex post facto. The quote gives no evidence either way on that point but composers and others did regularly transcribe impromptu works and improvisations after the event. Many musicians have prodigious ears and memories and the story of Mozart transcribing Allegri's "Miserere" from memory after hearing a performance at the Vatican is well known. Transcribing a cadenza from memory afterwards would be a "mere bagatelle" in comparison (just keeping a bit of Beethovenian theme going there).
You also said "All these "ex post facto" written out cadenzas could be taken as an indication that, as he grew older, Beethoven began to trust the performers/improvisors less and less."
I doubt that the transcribed cadenzaa represent such a shift on Beethoven's part. Transcription from memory was, I think, a lot more common then than now. We tend to rely on recordings for a record of what someone played but that wasn't an option then and transcribing what one had heard was the only way performers or composers had of 'storing' music they had heard and wanted to consider again later. Transcription was a relatively common practice so I don't think too much should be read into that. As far as Beethoven's attitude to complete scoring in later years goes, he was also going deaf and couldn't hear what people were playing. Composers often work with performers in preparing a piece for its initial performance and no doubt would have made comments on cadenzas improvised by the performer if they had been played in rough or even final form at a rehearsal. Beethoven may have chosen to move to complete scoring and forsaken the cadenza simply because of his hearing loss and a desire to ensure that the performer had a clear view of Beethoven's intentions for the performance of the work. As you say, other interpretations of the facts are possible and I've given a second. There are no doubt many more.
Bambi B comments that the cadenza was starting to die out in Beethoven's time and gives a reasons for this including the changing role of the composer. I think that reason has a lot to do with Beethoven's move away from providing space for them in his works. In other words the move from allowing improvised cadenzas has more to do with the composer wanting to stamp their vision on a work more completely than had been done previously and eliminating cadenzas which allowed the performer to make a 'compositional mark' on the work would be a logical outcome of such a shift. That would mean that the elimination of cadenzas wasn't primarily due to Beethoven having less trust in the performer but rather due to a desire to ensure that the piece as performed represented his own efforts and views.
In any event, I don't think one can draw any conclusions about the desirability of performers improvising cadenzas where the score allows it from the fact that the practice of leaving provision in a work for an improvised cadenza fell into disuse. If the demise of a practice was an argument for not employing that practice in works where it was expected, performers should not add ornaments to baroque works where they would have been expected to be added because the practice of adding ornamentation in that way also died out and ornaments are only played in contemporary works where specifically noted in the score. The simple fact is that today's performance conventions aren't always appropriate to works of earlier periods and adherence to the practice of the period when a work was composed tends to produce a better performance in my view. Others of course disagee about the desirability of period practice in performance.
And that's probably where a lot of this argument ends up: a debate about whether it's desirable to employ a particular practice convention of certain periods, ie improvisation by the performer, in a performance of a work of that period though that certainly isn't the only issue.
David Aiken
David Aiken
I couldn't get my head above water at work myself (until now). Well, now the thread is stale - I'm sure we'll have more to discuss on this topic in the future! :-)
I was about to make the same point about authorship of published cadenzas. First of all, most that I am aware of were written by famous soloists, not the composers of the pieces themselves. Several pieces are available in multiple editions with different cadenzas by differnt authors. It's also true that composers historically had very little control over what publishers did with their work, so without additional evidence, I'm skeptical that cadenzas were published at the wish of the composer. It seems far more likely that the publisher would opt to include them for the sake of the legions of amateur musicians--many of whom would be of limited skill--on which their survival depended. The same goes for the published realizations of continuo parts that were originally written in figured bass form--much, if not most of this, was done after the fact of the composers' deaths.
Your points in your other post about the small numbers of soloists trained in this tradition are also spot on. With so few trained in this part of the tradition, it should be no surprise that little of note is coming of it.
dh
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